Theme Counts

I tallied up some basic themes in my fifty day overview (2/14-5/6) of WaPo presidential race editorials. The first trope I charted was the “not getting enough scrutiny” topic. Allow me to explain. This is the somewhat common theme of stating that a candidate is getting a “free pass” from the media on a certain issue. What I love about this theme is the sadly predictable lack of pundit corroboration that comes with it. This claim is lazily thrown out there without even the easiest of Lexis Nexis searches to back it up. Anyway, here are the numbers for this theme, by month. Oh, and keep in mind that all the listed editorials have the same message of “X candidate is getting a free pass.”

February

Obama: 2/7 David Ignatius

March

Clinton: 3/8 Colbert I. King

McCain: 3/6 Harold Meyerson, 3/11 E.J. Dionne Jr

Obama: 3/3 Bob Novak

April

Clinton: 4/26 Colbert I. King Jr.

McCain: 4/1 Eugene Robinson, 4/22 Eugene Robinson

Obama: 4/4 Charles Krauthammer, 4/25 Geoff Garin

May

McCain: E.J. Dionne Jr.

So the counts are as follows: Clinton got two such themes, Obama got four, and McCain led with  five. Here’s the interesting wrinkle, though. Every column that posited a lack of McCain scrutiny did so with a specific attribution: The Democratic dogfight was to blame. In my next post, I’m tallying up how many WaPo columns were specifically dedicated to hand wringing over the Democratic nomination battle.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.