Bloggasm

It is not uncommon for pundits to try and develop scientific ways of measuring bias in the media. These methods, of course, are usually rife with logical leaps and aren’t really scientific at all.

But today I stumbled upon an article published in a mainstream news source that used a particularly stupid methodology of detecting a media slant. John R. Lott, Jr, writing at FOXNews.com, offered this as proof that the media only reported on bad economic news when there was a Republican president in office:

A Google search on news stories during the three-month period from July 2000 through September 2000 using the keywords “economy recession US” produces 1,610. By contrast, the same search over just the last month finds 50,763. Or, even more telling, take the three months from July through September last year, when the GDP was growing at a phenomenal 4.9 percent. The same type of Google search shows 7,310 news stories.

Now Lott gives us very little information on how these Google searches were conducted (the few links he provides to the supposed searches are complete gibberish), but anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the internet can immediately spot the inanity of such figures.

I mean, c’mon. He counted the number of news sources in 2000 and compared them to 2007? Do you have any idea how many blogs and websites are currently indexed in Google News?? Of course there are 50 times the number of “news stories” that use those keywords today; it’s because there are thousands more websites that exist today (it’s not very difficult to get a blog listed in Google News) that were non-existent in 2000.

Unless there is some way that he conducted his Google search that only examined the exact same news sources, FOXNews.com should publish a correction with that story, since it is using incredibly bogus numbers to prove a point.

UPDATE: I figured out exactly how his bogus Google searches were done because I was able to reproduce the figures above perfectly. Basically he ran those search terms through Google News and clicked on “past month” for one of the searches and then on the second search clicked on “other dates” and typed in 7/2000 and 9/2000. This means that the numbers he used are complete and utter BS. Fox News needs to run a correction.