Dumbest Statement of the Decade:
If all the stories about what Kerry did in Vietnam are not balanced by serious scrutiny of Bush in the Vietnam years, the media will be capitulating to a right-wing smear campaign. Surely our nation’s editors and producers don’t want to send a signal that all you have to do to set the media’s agenda is spend a half-million bucks on television ads. -E.J. Dionne
Hilarity ensues.
Google:
Bush+National+Guard: Results 1 – 10 of about 703,000
Bush + National + Guard + Records: Results 1 – 10 of about 278,000
Bush + AWOL: Results 1 – 10 of about 101,000
Bush + Deserter: Results 1 – 10 of about 38,100
I tried to get Lexis-Nexis results, but it keeps freezing because there are too many documents to retrieve.
*** Update ***
Donald Sensing and the Instapundit have more.
*** Update ***
More here.
*** Update ***
To the carping posters who want to claim that I should be comparing the coverage of ‘Bush Awol’ prior to the 2000 election and the ‘Kerry Swfit Vets’ prior to the 2004 election, I say nonsense.
At issue is the 2004 election, not the 200 election, because the 2000 election is OVER. Therefore, the comparison of stories about Bush Awol and saturation of the body politic with the Swift Vets is an apt comparison.
I might add another key distinction- the Bush AWOL stories are a media-generated phenomenon for the most part, while the Kerry stories are from an independent group who has a beef with Kerry. The media reaction to the latter has been, until recently taking up Kerry’s defense, to ignore the claims.
triticale
Uh, with all due respect, a Google search of the whole Web tells us nothing about the media. Google News produces far smaller numbers, even with the fact that DU, Progress Trail, World Socialist, and even the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal are included on first pages for these searches.
Tom (American Voter)
If you limit the search to Google News it is a slightly different picture, but to suggest the media didn’t investigate Bush’s National Guard record is just silly.
Bush+National+Guard
Results 1 – 10 of
about 10,200 for Bush National Guard
kerry + “swift boat veterans for truth”
Results 1 – 10 of about 5,150 for kerry swift-boat-veterans-for-truth
Jay Steef
Google News only searches recent articles … so the 2-to-1 ratio would be much higher if you could search archives of Google News going back a year or so.
Oliver
Nevermind that your Google search is dumb, why don’t we look into how much Bush’s National Guard status was investigated BEFORE he became president?
rosignol
It’d be interesting to compare the date on the first Bush NG story with the most recent one, and compare that to the first Kerry Cambodia story… ah, who am I kidding. We all know the mainstream media is blatantly on Kerry’s side on this. Why should we expect integrity and objectivity from people who have repeatedly proven they have none?
capt joe
Wrong Ollie baby. His service was attacked by Richardson when he was running for governor of texas. It was also attacked by Gore in 2000.
Oh I forgot, you were in grade school at the time whent he rest of us were either serving our country or working for a living.
Shorter Ollie: google is dumb because it doesn’t support my Soros funded McJob.
RW
Oliver,
It *was* investigated. I recall it well. And, as you know to your own detriment (as does your boy Duncan), my memory is quite good at times.
Colin Clark
I live in D.C. and have often read Dionne in the Post and wondered how anyone so well-educated could be such a total moron.
GoldKryptonite
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=George_W._Bush's_military_service/External_Links_1999-2003
Happy reading, Oliver.
GK
ps. in case you’re wondering, 1999 is before the election.
PJS
Oliver Willis: Like kryptonite to civil.
Terry
The data that you and others have posted reinforce the conclusions noted in Jacoby’s recent piece in the Boston Globe. The data clearly show, for example, the intense media interest in George W. Bush’s National Guard records last February wasn’t matched by an equally intense interest in John Kerry’s Navy history in May, when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth first went public with their criticisms. Far from leaping on the charges that Kerry’s Vietnam heroism had been greatly exaggerated, the mainstream media’s initial reaction was to largely ignore them. And while the press saw no reason to question the credibility of Bush’s accusers or to demand that Kerry repudiate them, their attitude toward the Swift Boat vets has been much more hostile.
As Jacoby concluded, “None of this should come as a surprise. The nation’s newsrooms are Democratic strongholds, and that cannot help but affect their coverage of the news.”
Oliver
I didn’t say it wasn’t covered, I said how much coverage it received, in comparison to the slanders vs. Gore. But then again, I’m talking to people like Ricky who think that Bill Clinton was a serial rapist, so that’s a hell of a waste of a time.
Dean
Nice slur, Oliver.
I can’t speak for Ricky’s beliefs, but I *do* know you’re also talking to people like me, who neither believed Clinton was a serial rapist, nor that he and/or his wife killed (had killed) Vince Foster, or even particularly hated him (disliked him, disagreed w/ him, but that *is* allowed, isn’t it?).
And when you consistently ignore and dismiss *all* those who disagree w/ you, well, “that’s a hell of a waste of time.”
Eric Rasmusen
I did a Lexis Nexis search, since it is newspapers we’re interested in, not websites. I searched on August 25 on:
Previous year, full text, General News, Major Papers in Lexis-Nexis:
kerry + “swift boat veterans for truth” 11
kerry + “John O’Neill” 2
Kerry + Thurlow 6
Bush+National+Guard 205
Bush + National + Guard + Records 41
Bush + AWOL 83
Bush + Deserter 1
Of the 11 hits on
kerry + “swift boat veterans for truth”,
6 don’t relate any specific charges. They just say the vets are critical, or are charged with violating campaign finance laws,
3 do lay ou at least one specific charge (i.e., that the First Purple Heart was for a band-aid sort of injury),
2 are just letters to the editor.
“Major Papers” includes papers such as the Los Angeles Times, Newsday Daily News (New York), The San Francisco Chronicle, USA TODAY, The Oregonian, The Seattle Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Washington Post, LA Times.
This methodology does not catch all relevant stories (e.g., The Washington Post’s important August 22 story showed up in Kerry + Thurlow but not in kerry + “swift boat veterans for truth”, but what is most important is the comparison between the numbers of Bush and Kerry Vietnam stories.
I’ll post this on my own website too.
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/c/archives/000122.html
SyncBoy
My vote for Dumbest Blog Statement of the Year: Your lame googling. Let’s assume that you can merely count the number of stories to make some sort of determination about media coverage–your assumption, not mine.
OK, so now let’s compare apples to apples. An apple being the first 8 months of a presidential year, right? So we should be comparing Bush’s news coverage from Jan. 1, 2000, to August 25, 2000, to Kerry’s news coverage from Jan. 1, 2004, to August 25, 2004, right?
OK, so let’s see what Lexis had to say about this:
Bush & AWOL – 201 stories
Bush & deserter – 47 stories
Bush & “national guard” within a paragraph of “record” – 180 stories
COMPARE TO:
Kerry & “swift boat” & truth – 2543 stories
Yup, looks like that liberal media strikes again!
Slartibartfast
I think it’d be much more meaningful to place the interval around the breaking of the story, rather than some other event designed to skew the result in the direction you want it to go. The AWOL story had long since been broken; hence comparatively few mentions in the press.
SyncBoy
It may have broke in the local media in Texas when Bush was running for gov, but it certainly didn’t hit the national media until 2000. However, I will re-run with dates you or anyone else provides if you think it’ll be a fairer comparison. I thought that 2000 to 2004 was apples to apples but if you have a better time period, let me know.
Slartibartfast
My mistake. I thought you’d run the exact same time interval for both. My comment was inaccurate, and I retract.
Eric Rasmusen
I don’t understand Syncboy’s point. Counting Bush AWOL stories in 2004, as I did, ought to *understate* the number, not overstate, s he implies. I’d like to see his search done on Bush for the first 8 months of 2004 too. The Democrats have been making a big deal of it this year.
Also: he doesn’t tell us what his Lexis search covers. Mine was “General News– Major Papers”. I’m curious which Lexis sources he checked– if he’d given them, I and others could check them and done the 1st 8 months of 2004 search ourselves.
Eric Rasmusen
Ah– I just noticed another thing about the Syncboy Kerry search. It was for
Kerry & “swift boat” & truth
How many of those stories are about the Swiftvets? It seems like that would pick up mostly pro-Kerry puff pieces talking about his swift boat service and how he believes in values such as truth. Notice that Syncboy did *not* simply repeat the search of the post and previous comments. It sure looks like he searched till he found search words that would give him the result he wanted.
SyncBoy
My point is: this entire “analysis” is pointless because you can’t just count stories mentioning certain keywords and pretend to conclude anything at all from them. Maybe all of those Kerry stories were refuting the Swifties or maybe they were supporting them–we don’t know.
This type of drive-by “research” is, alas, all too common both online and in the major media.
But since we’re already up the creek on this, I do think it’s a fair comparison between Bush in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. Since we’re talking about the media’s coverage of a story for someone seeking to be president. We don’t care if the Democrat are “pushing” it–they pushed it in 2000 and the media yawned. (Likewise, the Republicans and Bush say they are not behind the Swift Boat story, so we have to belive them, right? So it’s not important to be examining whether someone is pushing it or not; what matters is the coverage).
In 2000, the “liberal” media only saw fit to cover this b.s. National Guard issue a few hundred times. (And yes, although I’m a progressive, I don’t care what happened 30 years ago when someone was in college.)
Flash forward to 2004 and the “liberal” media thinks this Swiftie b.s. story is REALLY important even though it’s based on evidence even flimsier than what was used for the AWOL Bush story.
SyncBoy
Kerry & “swift boat veterans for truth” – 2093 hits from 1/1/04 to today in News-All.
Rasmusen, please don’t assume the results are skewed one way or the other because you don’t like the outcome or to say that I cooked the results by fiddling around with the search terms. In days of old, sir, I would challenge you to a duel.
Eric Rasmusen
Yes, in the old days we might have had a duel, and I’d have killed you, but nowadays we ask you to answer my questions about what search you performed.
I’ve suggested you’re a scoundrel. If you can show me you’re not, or even place it in doubt, I’ll cheerfully retract.
SyncBoy
Eric- Your reading skills are apparently as sloppy as your critical thinking skills. I’ve already posted the exact searches I performed and in what databases.
So please, go ahead and verify my numbers if you like.
Awaiting your retraction…
Syncboy
And my typing skills are apparently as sloppy too. It was not in “News-All” as I posted earlier, it was in “News-Combined Sources”. My bad.
RW
Oliver,
I know you work for David Brock and expectations should be set at an expected level, but I’m getting sick and tired of you perpetually lying about me. I have never claimed that Clinton was a rapist in any manner, yet here you are pulling your latest Guy Cabot/JadeGold impersonation and smearing me via falsehoods. There is no explaination other than it being an intentional attempt by yourself to discredit me via lies since you cannot do it substantively.
I asked you in the past to please stop, yet you perpetuate it by going even further with yet another smear.
I’m not going to bring John’s comments section down to the level seen at your shithole of a site by going off on a tangent and personally attacking you, since anyone can do that from the comfort of their PC and away from a face-to-face confrontation (as illustrated by mediamatters), but so I will only say that a while back I decided that you’ve gone from someone that I once had an amiable relationship with & considered somewhat a cyber-friend to someone that in no way deserves my respect in any form……and today, you’ve reminded me that my decision was spot on.
I ask you once again in a public forum to cease lying about me in an attempt to demean my character. It is beneath the dignity of anyone presenting themselves as an acceptable interlocutor.
The left has already endured one Mac Diva…..it doesn’t need another. Please, at least pretend to meet the minimum standards of decency.
Eric Rasmusen
Syncboy, you’re right– you did give your exact search (even if wrong by mistake) in your second post. I focussed on the abuse and skipped over your substance there– a good reason to avoid abuse.
So I do retract my saying you are a scoundrel. I’m sorry.
We still need to do the Bush comparison , though.
Eric Rasmusen
Here’s my latest search. I have access to two version of Lexis, and neither has SYNCBOY’s “News-All” or “News-Combined Sources”. I’m using the academic and the telnet versions, so maybe he has the law web-based. Anyway, I tried running the searches yet again. The first number is from the
CURNWS database (past two years) and the second is from ALLNWS (all news files):
Kerry + “swift boat veterans for truth” 37 (37)
Kerry + thurlow 28
Kerry + John O’Neill 10 (10)
Bush + AWOL – 323 stories (376)
Bush + deserter – 4 stories (4)
Bush + “national guard” within a paragraph of “record” – xxx stories I didn’t do that one because I don’t know the paragraph command
Bush + “national guard” + “record” 143 (153)
It’s interesting that so many of the stories are in the last two years as opposed to all years. That might be due to some peculiarity of Lexis coverage.
I don’t know why Syncboy gets such drastically different results.
Syncboy
Eric, these results seem too low, don’t you agree? We know the media has mentioned the “Swift Boats” more than 37 times. And the Bush story was surely covered more than 153 times.
In any event, I have the web-based legal Lexis so perhaps that’s why the databases have different names. But there shouldn’t be different results.
RW
Got a little too hot for you, didn’t it Ollie?
Go ahead…run and hide.