Nobody who uses TypePad, at least at the most basic level of service, is ever going to be accused of breaking any new ground in the technical implementation of blogs. No subscriptions to just one category of posts, no user logins for comments (yet), nothing fancy. Like Porsche drivers, another class of individuals attempting to cover for a particular inadequacy, SC thus feels compelled to occasionally try to break new ground in content. One case where your host feels like he succeeded at least a little was in doing a series on bilingual issues, including a book review, a writing form which doesn't seem to have caught on among linguistics blogs.
However, thanks to the glories of wireless networking, office productivity software, and raw self-promotional behavior, we're going to try another innovation around here. As anyone with even the most fleetingly passing of interests in politics knows, the Democratic National Convention is this week, and the Republican convention follows a month later. Admittedly, the actual news value of both conventions will be low, but for committed junkies, watching the rhetoric and spluttering at the TV is nevertheless fun.
So what's the linguistic spin on this? Well, Geoff Nunberg has written some highly critical commentary on the notion of media bias. Much of said commentary focuses on the questionable statistical methods used to back up these assertions. Since the topic nevertheless remains an interesting one for linguists to focus on, and since the conventions present a temporally circumscribed pair of more-or-less identical events, it might be quite interesting to address the question of bias by examining the coverage.
Thus, your host is going to try his hand at running live commentary on the (prime-time) convention coverage. In addition, we're going to be collecting the transcripts from CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC as available for all four days, and the major networks for the parts that they ultimately carry (since they won't be doing as much). I can't post commentary quite in real time, but we'll be putting up notes on the events -- and on the coverage -- as they occur, along with daily post-mortems of the coverage. With a little more time, we'll solicit community feedback for marking up the transcripts and related news stories, to allow for some more objective computational analysis. All files that come out of this project will be made freely available.
Right now, SC is watching Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews on MSNBC. Given Russert and Matthews' employment history as press secretaries for Democratic officials, does it count as media bias for them to be talking about what the Democrats need to do to win? That's a tough question that doesn't really get answered by counting up tokens of "liberal" or "conservative" in transcripts, and so we're going to spend some time working through answers to that over the next few days.
Sounds like a great idea! You can count me in for help with mark-up and such.
Posted by: Ryan Gabbard | July 26, 2004 at 06:19 PM