I've been tracking the number of hits I get on Google News for a number of different search terms (here, here, and here), and then graphing the result, in order to get a sense of what the trajectory of the coverage of the Bush/AWOL story is. Up until a few days ago, everything was going along fine, but lately the number of added stories had begun to fall, and the curves were all flattening out. My interpretation of this was the the story was dying and needed to be resuscitated by another hard-hitting outburst by a high-ranking Democrat.
That may still be true, the story may still need to be goosed to move it along, but I've found out now that things aren't nearly as flat as I thought they were. It seems that I may have missed out on an obvious search term, and it is that term which is now driving the coverage.
To recap: At the beginning the story was being driven by "deserter" as a result of Moore's charge and Peter Jennings referring to it in a debate. Soon after, though, Max Cleland and Terry McAuliffe and others started to push the "AWOL" aspect of it, and it was this that began to drive the story, accounting for most of the hits, while "deserter" basically fell to nothing. When recently the number of "AWOL" adds starting dropping, the totals started to drop as well, and thus there was the flattening out of the curve we saw.
I was also monitoring "service record" as a way to check out more neutral terms than "deserter" and "AWOL", but the hits for this never amounted to much. It seems now that this was the case because I chose the wrong neutral term to search on. When you look for unique hits for "National Guard" ("unique" meaning that the stories returned do not contain any of the other search terms) an entirely different story emerges.
"National Guard" started off with no hits around the middle of January, but gradually grew to 20-60 hits a day by the end of the month and into the beginning of February. On February 8th, though, it jumped up a tremendous amount, to 577 hits, then went to 329, then 725 and then started falling off a little, still staying fairly high. (The latest count was 165. In a sense, then, the White House press corps' grilling of the press guy about the economic report is a result of a new attitude created, in part, by the reporting of the AWOL story.)
So, overall, the coverage is falling off, as it appeared to be from the old data, but it's not going away nearly as fast as it seemed. That's the good news -- the bad news is that the emphasis in the media is clearly on an "objective" and neutral description, rather than on the charge that Bush was AWOL. But the good news outweighs the bad, because if interest in the story is still relatively high in the media, it can still be goosed up with the right kind of intervention. It just doesn't have to happen as quickly as I thought it did to prevent the story from dying. The story isn't dying, it's slacking off, and needs to be re-spun to move it in the right direction.
Once again, the graphs are here, and now reflect the data for "National Guard". Counts of stories are on the top graph and daily adds on the bottom. Once again, I'll use the space below this for daily updates.
Updates
2/28: Flatlined.
2/26: Status quo.
2/25: Flat, flat, flat -- AWOL, RIP.
2/24: I've corrected the "National Guard" adds for the governors story. Everything else is pretty much status quo: declining adds & flattening counts.
2/23: An upward blip, but I don't think it will hold up. Also "National Guard" adds are being contaminated by a story about state governors being concerned about the overuse of their states' National Guard units.
2/22: Nothing much to report, except that the spike in "AWOL" adds on the 19th that I reported yesterday seems to have been an anomaly caused by the Google News search engine. It has been corrected away, and the Total Adds curve now declines more gracefully. (At time, Google News will return variant numbers to the same search inquiry, and these numbers will sometimes return upon multiple inquiries. I wonder if this might be caused by being linked to one particular Google computer? In any event, when it happens, I do the same search multiple times and take the values which comes up most oftern.)
2/21: So I'm ready to throw in the towel and say that we're seeing the death-throes of the coverage of this story. On the 19th, "National Guard" adds fell from 233 to 72, the lowest amount since the 7th (on the 8th the "NG" adds went from 23 to 593). This precipitous dip was masked a little by a small surge in "AWOL" adds on the 19th (they went from 34 to 132, their highest since Friday 13th), but there's no hiding the fact that, baring something to kick up the amount of coverage once more, all the count lines are flattenting out and the adds lines trending towards zero.
I very much hope that the fact that there's been nothing from the Democrats on this for over a week now is an indication of a positive strategy on their part (i.e. that they feel they need to wait a bit and not appear over-eager to smear Bush, or something like that) and not simply due to the fact that they aren't paying any attention to nurturing this story along. As I wrote yesterday, perhaps they think they've gotten out of it everything they could, but the White House document dump doesn't answer all the outstanding questions, and indeed raises some new ones (check Calpundit), so it would be a shame to allow them to get away with quelling the public interest in this issue by simply throwing paper at it. No trial attorney worth his salt would allow an adversary to do that, and the Democrats needs to be the advocate for this story, pushing it forward until it is resolved one way or the other. That seems, now, unlikely to happen unless something new breaks and the opportunity to comment again appears unbidden.
I think that not being pro-active about this is a big mistake, but what do I know?
2/20: Flattening out continues. If the Democrats have any intention of really capitalizing in this (which appears not to be the case), they're running out of time. (Of course, one can argue that the damage has been done, that the point was never to "prove" that Bush was technically AWOL, but to put some more chinks into Bush's credibility which will make it easier for people to believe the truth about the other, more important, things that Bush and his administration have lied about.)
2/19: No change in the trends. "Deserter" is all but dead, with adds in the single digits, and "AWOL" hangs on by a thread with adds in the 50s fading down to the 20s. "National guard" continues strong, with adds on the 13th being adjusted upward from the 200s to the 400s as Google News completes its catalog. I'd expect the "National Guard" numbers on the 14th and 15th to go up as well in the next two days. This level of activity is still far lower than just a week ago, but the story's not dead yet.
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Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
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Elliott Abrams
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by Joel Pelletier
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"2001: A Space Odyssey"
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Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
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the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
