We’re not the only ones who have bemoaned the fact that the press has spent too much of its time the last few months covering the past and not the present — but thus far no one has fact-checked the complaint.
Until now. In order to see if the conventional wisdom stands up to scrutiny, we used TVEyes, a nifty searchable database of television news, to find out exactly what the cable networks — particularly CNN and Fox News — have been talking about for the past month.
Let’s start with CNN. Since August 16, according to TVEyes, the word “Iraq” has been uttered 2,270 times on CNN, while the word “Vietnam” has come up 778 times. That means for every three mentions of Iraq, there has been a mention of Vietnam — a jarring statistic, particularly considering the fact that there’s actual news coming out of the war in Iraq, whereas references to Vietnam are almost exclusively a product of partisan politicking. CNN’s backwards gaze, it’s worth noting, has focused more on young John Kerry than young George Bush: The words “Bush National Guard” return 131 hits over the past month, while “Kerry Vietnam” return 372. The pendulum is starting to swing to the other side, however; in the past week, CNN has mentioned Bush and the National Guard 120 times, while only alluding to Kerry and Vietnam 48 times.
Fox, meanwhile, is even more obsessed with Vietnam than CNN. The channel has mentioned Iraq 2708 times in the past month, and Vietnam 1486 times — that’s fewer than two Iraq mentions for every one mention of Vietnam. (The word “Afghanistan” has only been uttered 486 times on Fox News during the same time period, and “bin Laden” only 332 times — proof that international terrorists and unstable countries largely reduced to rubble can fall in and out of fashion faster than trucker hats.)
Fox has mentioned Bush’s National Guard duty 307 times in the past month — more than CNN — but has also brought up Kerry and Vietnam a whopping 771 times.
The numbers speak for themselves. If a hermit were to emerge after ten years of isolation and wander by one of those retail displays of dozens upon dozens of TV monitors tuned to our leading cable news channels, he could be forgiven for wondering just which country it is in which the U.S. is presently investing so much blood and money.
