Is it just because of Christmas alone? Or is it an even more sinister, anti-Christian bias?
Regardless, Newsbusters’ Tom Blumer has done some (unscientific) analysis regarding the news media and the term christmas.
The gist of his results? Check out his graph:
Over the past 3–4 years, Tom has been doing a very basic tally of hits using Google’s news searches. What this means is, whatever shows up on Google searches is what journalists are writing about.
Tom compared the terms christmas and holiday. He wanted to see if, in fact, people are taking christmas out of the season as many conservatives proclaim but don’t have empirical evidence for.
His results? When positive news stories are written about during the christmas season, writers use the term holiday. When a negative story is written, it is called christmas.
Good News
Over this time span, 90% of the articles detailing a positive subject such as shopping were prefaced with holiday whereas only 10% of the articles call it christmas shopping.
Bad News
But, this preference for holiday isn’t just some innocent effort to use appropriate language. If it was, these percentages would hold true regardless of the topic. When a negative topic (such as people losing their jobs) is written about, news writers attach it to christmas much more (37%) than they do to a positive topic (10%).
Granted, while this survey is not scientific, it does begin the process and certainly makes us wonder.
(Via Newsbusters.org.)
Popularity: 1% [?]