In this paper, some electronically gathered data arepresented and analyzed about the presence of the pastin newspaper texts. In ten large text corpora of sixdifferent languages, all dates in the form of yearsbetween 1930 and 1990 were counted. For six of thesecorpora this was done for all the years between 1200and 1993. Depicting these frequencies on the timeline,we find an underlying regularly declining curve,deviations at regular places and culturally determinedpeaks at irregular points. These three phenomena areanalyzed.