Alas, the demands of a job 70 miles from home intruded on SC's ability to sit on a couch and stare at a TV for 3 hours. Such backwards priorities.
However, your host has been busy collecting articles from four major newspapers: the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Also two newswires, Reuters and the AP. Some slight amount of editorial judgment is going into the construction of a corpus; no effort has been made to save editorials, copies of speech transcripts (or excerpts thereof), web-only articles, or anything judged to be "content-free" (TV listings and such). That's not to say that some columns might not be less suitable for study than others. It's not at all clear that Howard Kurtz's media criticism column in the Post (for example, it's nothing against Kurtz) counts as theoretically objective journalism, so columns like that might end up being culled out.
But it's still early to talk about a study where the data is barely available for collecting as yet, never mind anything like a methodology firmly settled on. A few interesting tidbits stood out, nevertheless.
From the New York Times: "Mr. Gore's experience may have given him latitude denied to others: while Kerry advisers vetted all speeches for egregious Bush-bashing, they did not change a word of his."
From MSNBC: "That could already be affecting tonight's headliners: last night, Al Gore's speech was basically torn up, according to two sources, and is now being rewritten, presumably to fit more closely with the party line."
So what happened? Did Al Gore's speech get rewritten or not? It's not clear that this exemplifies any sort of bias -- would it be positive or negative spin to maintain that the speech was rewritten, and from whose perspective? -- but somebody has their facts wrong. Or maybe the anonymous sources behind both versions were just having fun with the media.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to note early on is the disparity in the depth of coverage. The Wall Street Journal had only 10 articles even touching on the convention enough to pass the screening criteria, and some of them were "roundup"-type articles. The Washington Post had something like 30 articles on their website, but no more than half of them appeared in the actual newspaper, and some of those that did failed the criteria above; the rest were online chats or snippets from blogs. Your host pulled 15 articles from the L.A. Times, and 20 articles from the New York Times. It's not surprising to see that the Wall Street Journal's coverage is shallower than other national papers, given their primarily economic focus; otherwise, the coverage was fairly comparable.
The one thing your host did make sure to watch was a replay of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore's catfight interview. SC can't remember seeing any talk show host ever grant an interview with the explicit condition that the guest gets to ask questions back. That alone made it mildly interesting, but neither of them said anything you wouldn't guess from seeing them elsewhere.
Perhaps SC picked a good day not to telecommute after all. Dan Rather obviously would rather have taken the night off, a point he's making to anyone who asks. One of the stories of the conventions this year is the decision of the major networks to cut coverage to one hour a night at both events; in Rather's words "if we were on for three hours a night, in a lot of places a test pattern would get better ratings". That's not entirely fair to test patterns; your host owns 2 DVDs full of them, and watches them with disturbing regularity. In all seriousness, though, Rather may be onto something; if the media has decided that the conventions are basically a waste of good advertising time, does it really matter what they say about them?
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