(Please note the forum. We’ve had the corresponding debate any number of times, I’m looking for something factual).
A couple weeks ago, I read an amusing little piece on the number of times anchors, pundits, and other Fox News network personalities had used the words “socialism” or “socialist” incorrectly on air to describe a person or policy over the last year. I don’t remember the exact number (thousands, I think) and can’t find the article now. Anybody have a link?
ETA: Title may have had something in it about “buying a dictionary.”
Are you seriously suggesting that someone has gone to the trouble of actually counting how many times this word has been used on this TV channel? (Ever? In some particular period?) They certainly must have had a lot of time on their hands. I blame socialism.
Yes - Media Matters pays dozens of Liberal Arts Majors to do this on a daily basis to feed the insatiable hunger of leftists to have quotable links to use in their Internet Warrior daily battles.
Oh, and the answer is “More than enough to fuel my blinding rage against anyone who isn’t totally behind the Administration’s agenda.”
While the topic may inspire rants against Fox News or the current administration, keep in mind that this is in GQ and political comments are not permitted here. There is a factual question stated in the OP, so let’s focus on that please, and leave the other types of comments for the other forums where they belong.
I’m guessing that you should really be blaming closed captioning, since I suspect the original source was some sort of transcript service, rather than watching 172 hours of television a week. But who knows?
None of those are the article I was looking for, but thanks. The one I want has a much more humorous tone; I’m starting to wonder if maybe it wasn’t on the web. In any event, thanks for the try, everybody.
This was my though - either an automated voice recgnition, or a typist/transcription service provides the closed caption input. Based on the type of mistakes I see, I assume it’s a form of voice recognition.
I recall a website long ago where this sort of stuff was available online (by now I’m sure the copyright National Socialists have closed it down).
Counting occurences in a text file is incredibly simple, although there is margin of error and it may not catch text titles on the screen.
[QUOTE=Salon.com]
A search of transcripts available on Lexis-Nexis — a limited sample, unfortunately — for Fox’s programming from Tuesday shows that in the span of just six hours, the network managed to squeeze in five segments devoted to a discussion of impending socialism; the words “socialism,” “socialist” and “social democracy” were used a total of 37 times. “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” “The O’Reilly Factor” and “On the Record with Greta” all managed to stay socialism free, but “Special Report” and “Hannity” each had two segments about it, and “Glenn Beck” had one. No transcript for “FOX Report” was available, but I happened to see the show repeat one of the segments from “Special Report,” for a total of six time slots on the subject between 4 p.m. ET and 11 p.m.
Admittedly, the channel wasn’t nearly as socialism-heavy before Tuesday. A search of transcripts available for the weekday programming from last week, as well as this Monday, revealed only one additional segment, from “Hannity.” There were 58 additional uses of the words “socialism,” “socialist” and “social democracy,” however. (It’s also worth noting that none of these counts include the network’s in-house advertising, which, from anecdotal observation Tuesday, seemed to be pushing Beck and Hannity’s discussion of the issue pretty hard.)
[/QUOTE]
A few years back, during Obama’s first term, I got really tired of hearing the epithet of “socialist” being thrown around like a beach ball at an outdoor concert, so I decided to do a bit of searching to see how back the tradition of calling liberal Presidents by that word went.
I got back about seventy years, through google, and in that span, *every *liberal President was called a socialist. It’s like the conservatives’ favorite word, or something.
I don’t want to derail this thread, but since this is a more general topic than helping me find a missing article (it’s not the Salon one, sadly)–sure, go ahead.
Let’s start with: Can you point to a single instance of a “real” news service (CNN, MSNBC, <station> news, AP, that sort of thing, not a college newspaper, pundit, or John Stewart) *ever *calling conservatives Nazi’s or facists? It might be confirmation bias, but I’ve never seen it, whereas I have seen news anchors on Fox (not the pundits–actual anchors) repeatedly use “socialist” in its new meaning of “anything the government pays for using tax dollars.”
In both cases, we need to ignore cases where the words are used correctly. If there’s a GOP member who was an actual member of the Nazi party, for example, calling him on it doesn’t count, nor do legitimate stories referring to socialist countries as being socialist.
I think we also need to admit that this raises the risk of this going to GD, but let’s try to keep it civil for now.
With a good search engine and database a la Factiva I think you could do this nearly instantaneously.
You may not be able to bet your life you have every time it’s ever been mentioned in the nearly 20 year history of the broadcast, but you could get a ballpark figure anyway.
You’d have to be a bit careful drawing too many conclusions though unless you manually sort out the hits for context. If it’s “and on this date in history, in 192x the National Socialism party, known forever as the Nazis, held its first official meeting…”, that’s certainly something different…
Thanks. It’s not looking good (I expected it either virtually instantly or not at all), but I’m satisfied with the more generally useful “how would I determine a number like this?” thread it’s become.