I KNOW THIS IS SILLY, BUT. . .

I've been trying to get my head around the problem of empirical verification of media bias in coverage. One of the most annoying claims made by contemporary politicos is that the media is bashing Bush by over-covering certain issues. This usually takes the form of the claim that the media is paying more attention to Bush with respect to X than Clinton with respect to X'. It's an argumentative distraction, partly because it's a pain to try and figure out whether or not such a claim is actually true.

So here's what I did, on Lexis.

First I did a full text search for the following terms: Clinton, w/s draft, w/p Vietnam, for the period 1991-1992. For Northeast Regional News Sources, I got 266 hits.

Then I did a full text search for the following terms: Bush, w/s national guard, w/p Vietnam, for the period 1999-2000. For Northeast Regional News Sources, I got 156 hits.

Then I did the Bush search for two time periods: 1/1/2003-1/1/2004 (41 hits), 1/1/2003-4/1/2004 (310) hits.

So in the northeastern print media, Clinton's draft service gets more hits than Bush's national guard service during their respective election periods, but Bush's guard service has gotten about the same number of hits in the first part of 2004 as Clinton got for the whole period 1991-1992.

With news transcripts the story appears similar (and this would be important on the assumption that more people pay attention to TV than to the newspapers; I didn't try to disaggregate TV and radio transcripts for the purposes of this search, though). For Clinton, between 1991-1992, the same search got for news transcripts garnered 112 hits, and a search for Bush in the period in 2003-2004 garnered 215 hits. So you might conclude that the news media has been "overcovering" Bush, compared to its coverage of Clinton.

But with the news transcripts, there's a hitch. I also did a few full text searches of news transcripts for common words, in the periods 1991-1992 and 2003-2004, and here are the results, listed with the number of hits for the earlier search first:

Lake Tahoe: 42 - 646

Oswego: 8 - 259

house majority leader: 264 - 922

pug: 6 - 275

detriot tigers: 108 - 741

islamic fundamentalism: 171 - 175

real estate investment trusts: 21 - 863

Conclusion? For news transcripts, the broader coverage, the explosion of media, and perhaps the different aggregating and archiving practices all result in a larger number of hits for common terms, "islamic fundamentalism" excepted. Not sure why that would be the case. But at any rate, compared to the forty-fold increase in coverage of REITs, the larger number of news transcript mentions of Bush compared to comparable mentions of Clinton seems paltry.

PS: Thanks to James at Outside the Beltway for merging me into the Beltway Traffic Jam. . .