Googling the controversies
John Cole Googles search returns for the accusations earlier this year that President Bush did not satisfactorily complete his Air National Guard service.

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.

John didn't do equivalent-type searches, so I did:

Results 1 - 10 of about 127,000 for kerry swift boat veterans truth.

Results 1 - 10 of about 7,730 for kerry bronze star controversy

Results 1 - 10 of about 12,600 for kerry cambodia controversy

Results 1 - 10 of about 84,600 for kerry "unfit for command".

You can do the math, but the comparitive coverage didn't stop the Washington Post's E.J. Dione from claiming that coverage of Kerry's controversies need to be "balanced by serious scrutiny of Bush in the Vietnam years." And other journalists are saying that it's already time for the Kerry story to just go away.

Update: Several readers have emailed or commented that a fairer comparison would be between the numbers of news articles about the Bush and Kerry service issues, rather than overall web entries.

I see the point but don't fully agree. The issue behind John Cole's post and my addendum to it is the column by the WaPo's E.J. Dionne in which he says,

Suddenly, questions about Kerry's service that were asked and answered months ago become big news again. ...

First, these questions were not "asked and answered" to anyone's satisfaction except those who already supported Kerry. Second, the MSM ignored Kerry's decades-long lies about having sailed his boat on multiple, covert missions into Cambodia, a story that the Post itself showed was fiction.

Further, Dionne wrote,

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.

Balance? On the internet there are literally hundreds of thousands more links about Bush's Guard service than there are about Kerry's naval service. A similar imbalance is found in Googling only news stories. Yet Dionne says that more coverage of Bush's presumed irregularities is needed to make it fair.

Finally, news stories are certainly not the only source of news anymore. Exposure is exposure. And while comparing numbers of news stories alone is useful, it is incomplete. Millions of Americans get news and information from the internet, and that includes sites not belonging to oldline media.

by Donald Sensing, 8/24/2004 10:01:24 PM. Permalink |