December 5, 2006
War Of Words, D-Day Almost Here
Good Richard has been busy behind the scenes. Here's a preview of what I'm working on.
I've been noticing interesting trends in the way words have been used in news reports. Understanding that news agencies can skew news reports to a certain political persuasion by choosing certain words, I set out to see if I could measure trends in the way those words are chosen.
The War of Words is the result of that effort.
These previews were generated with an early version of the tool. It's not open to the public, yet. Once I'm satisfied with fit-and-finish in the next day or two, I'll release it for public use. Until then, take a look at these...
What you're looking at is the number of times each news outlet has used the words CAIR and "terrorist organization" on a page versus the number of times they've used CAIR and "civil rights group."
In my opinion, this set of words was too limiting. As you can see, the highest number of occurrences is 27. That's a very low number. With so few occurrences, it's very hard to make any reasonable inferences from the data. Let's look at another example:
What you see here are the number of times major news outlets have used the words "pro life" versus the number of times they've used "anti abortion." The first thing to note is that the sum of occurrences is quite high, nearly 33,000 for the NY Times. That tells us we can be more confident in the trend.
Do we see a trend? Of course we do!
Are you shocked that the NY Times uses the word "anti abortion" at a demonstrably higher rate than "pro life?" Almost two to one, in fact. ABC uses "anti abortion" at a dramatically higher rate. I wonder how the NY Times and ABC might justify these obvious trends.
A logical extension to this investigation would be to compare "pro abortion" with "pro choice." Or perhaps "pro choice" with "anti life." Anyone willing to place bets as to how those trends look?
Stay tuned...soon you'll be able to do the investigation yourself!
Posted by Richard at December 5, 2006 11:49 PM
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Comments
Can't wait to see (and use) the tool.
Great work man.
Posted by: Lord Nazh at December 6, 2006 2:11 AM
Excellent tool --- a quantitative way to measure what we all already know about MSM bias.
I'll be more than happy to be a Beta tester when you make it public.
Posted by: Robbie at December 6, 2006 7:38 AM