Culture

Year in Review: What Made the News in America in 2024

Published

3 weeks ago

December 30, 2024

Pallavi Rao

Graphics/Design:

Miranda Smith

See this visualization first on the Voronoi app.

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Year in Review: What Made the News in America in 2024

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

This chart lists the top nine U.S. news stories of 2024, according to Google’s Year in Search. In addition, we’ve visualized the popularity of one developing news story.

ℹ️ Google looks at news searches between December 31st 2023–December 8th, 2024 when defining this list. Popularity peaks in this chart are not normalized across news stories.

In case this year has felt particularly long, we also did one for 2023. It’s a useful refresher of what had everyone talking exactly 12 months ago.

Politics and Crime Kept Americans Googling

Unsurprisingly in an election year three of the top stories for America centered around politics.

Search Term	Peak Popularity Date
Trump Shot	July 14th
Election	November 3rd
Project 2025	July 7th
Copa America	June 30th
Olympics	July 28th
Paralympics	September 1st
Hurricane Milton	October 6th
Hurricane Helene	September 29th
Heat Advsiory	June 16th
Health CEO	December 12th

The first of course: an assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in July. The second: the big election in November.

Another story that had Americans googling for context: Project 2025. This conservative plan released by the Heritage Foundation for the next Republican administration went largely unnoticed until Democrats began talking about it.

It broadly defined four policy aims. One in particular which raised alarm, wanted to place the federal bureaucracy under direct Presidential control. It also proposed withdrawing a popular abortion pill from the market and to enforce a law that stops the drug from crossing state borders.

But perhaps the biggest news story of all hit in the last week of Google’s Year in Search analysis, when a gunman shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

A 25-year-old, Luigi Mangione, has been arrested in relation to the assassination.

More importantly, the assassination and the subsequent arrest has spurred conversation around America’s healthcare industry. The data behind denied claims (one-in-five) as well as large medical costs (the leading cause of bankruptcy) has added to the conversation.