The Family Loftus

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 News​busters​.org.)

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