Wednesday, August 10, 2005

"There were no matches for your search"


Picture credit: New York Times
Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueThis morning, a quick search of the New York Times' web-site reveals the following number of articles for the accompanying topics:

 124 Texas Air National Guard
  33 John Roberts confirmation
  31 Al Qaqaa
  16 John Bolton confirmation
   0 Air America funding scandal


To net it all out, these much-publicized non-scandals -- including the Air National Guard stories and the Al Qaqaa weapons dump -- were mentioned a grand total of 204 times. While the scandal surrounding "Air America" and "Gloria Wise" still rates exactly 0 mentions:

  There were no matches for your search +"air america" +"gloria wise" / since 1996 .

I think we can state it this way:

  The Texas Air National Guard and Al Qaqaa: still not scandals.
  Air Enron: a stinking, rising scandal

From all appearances, this catastrophically unsuccessful liberal talk-radio venture, reportedly funding itself at the expense of Alzheimer patients and inner-city youth, doesn't jibe with the editorial world-view of the Times.

But "dumpster-diving" to dig up John Roberts' adoption records is fair game for the geniuses at the times.

Do the math. The Times can't just be called biased anymore. Try biased and completely irrelevant. But here's something you can do. You can send a message to the Times' editors by clicking this link - repeatedly:

Search the Times for the Air Scamerica scandal

As the Times' webmasters analyze their logs, they'll get a sense of what most visitors are doing. And it won't be reading the Times' content.

Then again, nobody's saying the Times is relevant these days.

Oh, and as an aside, Air Scamerica has reportedly been late with its payroll checks. But, no, that hasn't rated a mention in the Times either.

The Times is about as relevant as a 1930's Almanac. It meant something long ago - but it won't help you navigate the world in this day and age.

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