Tracking the ongoing media mania over alleged parallels to The Great Depression

I am endeavoring to track the current media mania of attempting to draw parallels between the current economic situation and The Great Depression. I am doing this by using Google News to count the total number of "news" references to the phrase "The Great Depression" in the previous 24 hours.

• 1/10/2009: 411 hits
• 1/30/2009: 319 hits
• 2/6/2009: 308 hits
• 2/25/2009: 389 hits
• 3/10/2009: 306 hits
• 3/24/2009: 285 hits
• 4/9/2009: 93 hits
• 4/28/2009: 184 hits
• 4/30/2009: 195 hits
• 5/7/2009: 184 hits
• 5/21/2009: 167 hits

It does appear that the media mania has peaked, but we are still quite a ways from being able to say that the mania is "over." The good news is that the media mania has not worsened.

I do wonder whether the recent Swine Flu mania may have taken a little bit of the wind out of the sails of the depression mania. We'll see what happens in a week.

-- Jack Krupansky