Bush Military Record

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

“A few months after the 2000 election, former Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala said he’d done a Nexis search and found 13,641 stories about Clinton’s alleged draft dodging versus 49 about George W. Bush’s military record. Why the disparity?”

Could be who was doing the checking. No offense, but relying on Paul Begala’s word on this matter is pretty sloppy journalism. I don’t have access to Lexis/Nexis, but I did do google searches for ‘Bill Clinton draft dodging’, and ‘George W. Bush military record’. The former came up with 4,490 hits, the latter 206,000 hits!

2

Maybe he doesn’t know how to do a search on Nexis?

In any case, it’s difficult to compare because both men used different methods to avoid the straight-up draft.

3

A) Googling and Nexising aren’t comparable. Lexis can search specifically on newspaper articles for example. Google pulls up every damned thing ever typed on the internet by anyone. The quote said “stories”, which presumably meant “newspaper or magazine articles”, but Google doesn’t let you get so fined-grained.

B) Your search terms probably provide quite a few bad hits, esp the ones for GWB. For example, I see that “George Bush AWOL” pulls up 8720 hits on Google.

C) The article specifically said “a few months after the 2000 election”. Presumably quite a bit more has been written about GWB during the intervening 2 years.

4

All the above having been said, trying to prove a point, any point, by comparing search hit counts on Google is a silly idea.

5

How about the fact that trying to prove a point, any point, about George W. Bush by listening to what Paul Begala tells you, is a silly idea?

6

Obviously a former Clinton advisor is not an unbiased source on media coverage of the campaign.

But neither is Brain Death’s search, which shows how easy it is to bias a comparison like this.
He compared Google hits for “Bill Clinton draft dodging” and "George Bush military record’, and found many, many more hits for the latter term.
Well, ‘military record’ is a very broad term, and could include all kinds of stories about foreign policy or what have you, as opposed to ‘draft dodging’ which is very specific and in fact language that wouldn’t usually appear in a newspaper article.

Just changing the first search to “Bill Clinton military record” results in 196,000 hits, more or less what he found for George Bush.

Now, all the points are good about how what’s on the web right now doesn’t reflect what was in the media during the campaign.

So just to avoid the web bias, I did a couple searches myself on Nexis: for stories in the news archive between 1/1/1998 and 1/1/2001. This will be biased slightly for more Clinton stories because as the sitting President, he’s likely to be mentioned in non-campaign stories. I chose “Vietnam” as a search term to exclude any stories about current military/foreign policy issues.

Searching for “Bush” and “military record” and “Vietnam” resulted in 462 stories, while “Clinton” and “military record” and “Vietnam” found 374. Since these were fairly low numbers, I decided to find a more inclusive term, and used draft instead of military record.
“Bush” and “draft” and “Vietnam” found 2,456 stories, while
“Clinton” and “draft” and “Vietnam” found 4, 876.

It appears there may be a slight bias towards more stories on Clinton’s activities during the vietnam draft era, but hardly a factor of hundreds as many. But this is a very quick look.
A real research project would involve defining some stricter parameters ahead of time (so you can’t just change your search terms until you get the result you want, as the ‘draft dodging’ search shows), and also trying to more accurately pick out stories about avoiding military service as opposed to random articles that happen to have those words.

7

Good job. The only possible bias in your search is that perhaps you should have done Clinton’s search from about 1991-1993, since there was much more coverage of the draft-dodging issue then than there would have been by 1998, when presumably it was something of a non-issue.

8

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Did George W. Bush go AWOL during his time in the National Guard? (11-Apr-2003 )

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