Companies in North America and Europe get on average 33 news articles a day, twice as much coverage as those based in Asia or the Middle East.

Giant companies get almost six times as much coverage on average as merely large companies and 13 times the amount for mid-cap or small firms.

Companies with the four highest credit ratings are likely to garner significantly more media attention, as are firms in the communications, consumer discretionary, technology and financial sectors.

The insights above were gleaned from data on Bloomberg in an application built by my colleague Jonathan Greenberg. In this case, I analyzed news coverage for the 1,638 companies in the MSCI World Index.

Averages can be misleading, of course. The numbers for the consumer discretionary stocks are inflated by an extraordinary amount of coverage for Tesla, Amazon and Volkswagen, while the technology sector is skewed by Alphabet and Facebook.

But they do reveal some important realities, underscoring the wide discrepancy between the amount of reporting done on American and European companies, compared with firms in Asia or the Middle East.

And the law of averages for such a big data set drives home the point that investors can’t rely on the media to be generating much information about small, low-rated companies outside the U.S. or Europe.

And that could present an opportunity or a risk.