Rasmusen's Politics Weblog

Lexis Count on Bush and Kerry Vietnam Stories

Update: I forgot to include an intro to this. Here it is. That Liberal Media started a thread on Searches for how the media covered the charges against Bush on his National Guard service (pretty much just innuendo, by the way-- asking for positive evidence rather than giving any negative evidence about his service) versus how reporters are now trying to say that the Kerry Vietnam Fraud story which they tried to ignore has been running too long. I highly approve of quantitative measures of such things, and so offered my improvement on the Google Searches that were offered. 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 out 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.