Its practically a guarantee that you'll get this story in an email from your right wing friends. So I thought I'd post this response.
In a column today Ollie North accuses the "media elites" of ignoring the story of a heroic Marine who died in Iraq in favor of the story of a sailor who refused to deploy.
Most readers of this column probably haven't heard about Rafael Peralta. With the exception of the Los Angeles Times, most of our mainstream media haven't bothered to write about him. The next time you log onto the Internet, do a Google search on Rafael Peralta. As of this writing, the Internet's most used search engine will provide you with only 26 citations from news sources that have bothered to write about this heroic young man. Then, just for giggles, do a Google search on Pablo Paredes. Hundreds of media outlets have written about him. The wire services have blasted his story to thousands of newspapers. Television and radio debate programs gladly provide the public with talking heads that can speak eloquently on the actions of Pablo Paredes.
So I took up Ollie on his challenge. As of this writing. Google News lists 118 stories about the Marine and 92 about the sailor. The only way I can close to Ollies "only 26" stories about the Marine
is if I exclude similar stories in Google. I get 29. But then I do the same for stories on the sailor and I get 18, nowhere near the "hundreds" that Ollie claims. The only way I can get "hundreds" of stories about the sailor is if I search Google web (6680, a lot of these a right wing blogs criticizing the sailors' actions, not exactly "media outlets" in favor of the sailor). So I guess Ollie searched Google/News and excluded similar stories for one of his numbers and searched Google/Web for the other number and wound up with a 29/6680 story ratio.
Can anyone figure out where he got his numbers? Or did Ollie gin up the numbers and use this young man's tragedy to attack the "media elite".