The Numbers Speak Volumes

I've often been skeptical recently about how Google News comes up with their headline stories. Back in the week or so leading up to the Libby indictment announcement on Friday (God blast his lying soul), for example, often the first or second main story in the US section was on some ultra-irrelevancy--like a surfer getting bitten by a shark in NJ--while the day's news about Treasongate would be shunted down to the bottom among the "More Top Stories."

I've puzzled and puzzled over this apparent discrepancy in newsworthiness. And thinking that Google was automatically generated, I've tried to figure out the rationale. One bit of information they provide is how many related news stories are currently available on the web. So perhaps, I've thought, it goes by how many news outlets are picking up and running with the story. This would make good sense. But alas, just as often stories of very low occurrence--like the shark-bit surfer--would trump stories of much higher occurrence--like politically motivated treason at the heart of the US government.

So occurrence doesn't seem to be the key to the Google News equation. Perhaps audience popularity of the stories factors in? Perhaps, but Google doesn't give us any info on that. Yet over at Yahoo News (which I am beginning to trust more and more, at least compared to Google News), where they do show a list of "most popular" stories, the Plamegate stories of the day were consistently in the lineup, usually number one or two. So unless the Google News users are just more interested in idiot trivia like the bitten surfer, popularity doesn't seem to account for the curious criteria for newsworthiness of Google News either.

But ever since the indictment on Friday, Libby's slow legal simmering has been up-front and center at the very top of Google News. Moreover, it has consistently had related stories in the high 3000s or, as now (Sunday morning) over 4300 related stories. Here's a story "with legs" as they say.

What is funny to watch is what has been going on in the US top stories section. After the shamefaced Miers withdrawal the White House has been reeling to pick back up the pieces and put a good show on the Supreme Court pick situation. Indeed, it seems that they have been trying to play the new pick story off of the Libby indictment, trying to deflect attention. They haven't done bad, I must confess. All weekend it has been almost--not quite--neck and neck between the stories on Libby at the top and the stories on the Miers fallout and the possible new candidate at the top of the US list. After yesterday's closest point when the Libby stories were in the 4000s and the Supreme Court stories were in the 3000s, the latter has slipped somewhat and now has only some 2700 stories.

Of course not all those stories are positive for Bush. So this is only a good news story by the maxim of "no press is bad press."

Many of these stories are positively brutal. Like the backhanded Boston Globe article that, yes, currently tops the list of Miers stories, "Grand Old Crackup?"--a long story reading the tea leaves of conservative movement dislocation as of late.

Finally, both fueling my suspicions about how Google News picks its stories, and proving the point that the Bush spin machine is suffering immensely in the wake of the Libby deepfry, Bush's specifically spindoctor message for the day, about "staying the course" to Iraq victory, has slipped just now from the number 2 US stories spot to number 3 (now it is falling behind the Arnold Schwarzenegger story of the day (how the Terminator's popularity is getting terminated).

Arnold's story du jour has been picked up and varied by around 375 media outlets.

Poor old W's radio address story has only got 73 paltry stories to cover it.

Even this 73 has a great deal of negative in it. Several of these stories are about the 2,000 dead in Iraq. Many of them are letters to the editor sharply criticizing BushCo's war of disastrous adventure.

But spinning out the ultra-stale rhetoric of "more resolve" and "honoring the commitment" and "staying the course to victory" is not even playing well in the heartland anymore.

The Herald News Daily of North Dakota, for example, ran an AP writeup on the radio address under the headline "Bush says progress is being made in Iraq" (how many times have we heard that lie?)

But the story is brutal and scathing. It begins with the mountain of American corpses that Bush is trying to scream over the top of:

"With the American death toll above 2,000, President Bush said Saturday that the war in Iraq has required "great sacrifice," but that progress is being made and the United States must remain steadfast...."

Then it bookends one more short line from the radio address with another sinkhole fact: the poll numbers.

"Public support for Bush‘s handling of Iraq is at its lowest point, 37 percent, roughly where it has been since early August, according to AP-Ipsos polling."

Then the story moves to, of course, Libby and the indictment, and ties it and him to the war (right where it belongs):

"Libby was a driving force behind the administration‘s march to war against Iraq and helped assemble evidence — later proven false — asserting that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which became the rationale for the U.S.-led invasion. "

Then it reminds us that the White House's "comfort" that Rove escaped indictment is only temporary and that he "remains under investigation."

It then veers back to the radio address--the putative focus of the story--to quote empty Bush platitudes about Iraqi's expressing their freedom in elections, etc.

Finally, in a complete non sequitur, the story closes out of the blue with a single sentences on Miers' withdrawal:

"In accepting her withdrawal, Bush said Miers would resume her duties helping to review candidates for judicial openings."

So there you go. There is currently no way for Bush to escape media focus on the stewed ducks in his administration. Try as he might, even the feeble attempts at positive propaganda, like his radio address, cannot evade the dying elephant in the room, or more importantly, the graveyard of fallen sons and daughters.