Some of Nothing

Who is More Concerned About What's on Your Lapel: Neocon Blogs or the Establishment Press?
Friday, May 9, 2008

Simon Owens at Bloggasm recently analyzed four prominent neocon blogs to determine how much of their coverage of Barack Obama focused on policy issues vs. how much focused on non-issues. Not surprisingly:

The four blogs published a total of 311 posts in April prominently featuring Obama. Of those, 71 posts (23%) focused on policy issues. The remaining 240 posts (77%) focused on non-policy issues.

While the fact that neocons obsess over non-issues isn't much of a surprise, the fact that they may do it more than the establishment press does is a pleasant surprise:

A report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy found that during the early months of the 2008 presidential campaign, 63 percent of the campaign stories focused on political strategy while only 15 percent discussed the candidates’ ideas and proposals. [emphasis mine]

Glenn Greenwald often mentions the ways in which the right-wing blogs and the establishment press dovetail beautifully in their coverage of non-issues. But it's nice to think that the establishment press might be a marginal improvement over Michelle Malkin on this score. Of course, the differing timeframes and methodologies of these studies may end up playing a role in how each group fared. So, I'm still willing to entertain the notion that the establishment press could, in fact, be as bad as Malkin after all. I mean, Brian Williams does hold up Peggy Noonan as being a paragon of political commentary. Talk about worshiping false idols.

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Nothing New byslag at 6:52 PM