Guardian obsessed with Israel
You all knew that London's al-Guardian is obsessed with Israel (the headline is from May 24, 2010), but now it's been proven empirically.A Guardian blogger has compiled a ranking of countries based on the tags appended to the bottom of each post.
Of the 40,000 or so pieces of content we published this year tagged with one (and in 3,500 cases both) of these tags, 22,500 or so were tagged UK news and 21,000 World news.Actually, by his own admission, a quarter of the pieces being comment pieces would be disproportionately high.
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We very definitely have a tag for the USA, and the table below tells us that it's the foreign sovereign state we care about most in the world (6,314 pieces of content tagged US news). Just under a quarter of this (1,465 pieces of content) was tagged US politics, most of which (1,182 pieces of content) was also tagged Barack Obama.
With more than 5,000 articles about subjects other than politics, our US coverage ranges from the sub-prime to the ridiculous.
Our diverse interest in the US is followed by more uniform coverage of Afghanistan (1,765 content items) and Iraq (1,248). Those totals are bolstered by the War logs (389 on Afghanistan, 292 on Iraq) and UK involvement in both countries (Afghanistan+UK news 563, Iraq+UK news 447).
If we were to subtract UK-related coverage from our totals for Afghanistan and Iraq, China would sneak into third place (1243, with only 83 tagged China+UK). Not surprising given its size and economic muscle.
Fourth place goes to the far smaller Israel (1,008 content items, with 101 also tagged UK news).
In case you were wondering, a little over a quarter (258) of our pieces on Israel were comment, which isn't out of step with the general ratio of World news (21,000) to World news comment (3740).
So we're obsessed with our home country, captivated by the US and disproportionately preoccupied with Israel? Maybe. We also produced 604 pieces of content about Apple (349 about the iPhone, 331 about the iPad).
Yaacov Lozowick adds:
Israel.They are truly obsessed with Israel. We are also ahead of Pakistan, Russia and Iran.
Ahead of all the rest of the world. Ahead of next door Ireland, the country with the frightening banking crises. Ahead of South Africa with the World Cup. Way ahead of Haiti, where nothing ever happens, not to mention Sri Lanka with its wars, rigged elections and large refugee camps. Congo (remember? The country with millions of casualties in the world's bloodiest war since 1945?) - Congo gets mentioned about one ninth as often as Israel.
Belarus, the last Soviet dictatorship in Europe, with a stolen election and no human rights to speak of, is hardly on the list at all.
Labels: al-Guardian, anti-Israel obsession
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:27 AM
1 Comments:
Yup. Its demented and bears no resemblance to reality.
But try telling to the al-Guardian editors there is something exaggerated about their coverage of Israel. They'll get around to admitting there is a problem - on a cold day in hell.
What could wrong indeed
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