The AP: Going Rogue

[osprey4]

Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
• ObamaCare bills: 2
• Palin book: 11

Number of pages in document being covered:
• ObamaCare bills: 4,064
• Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter:
• ObamaCare bill: 2,032
• Palin book: 39.3

No wonder we spend more time debating Sarah Palin than the largest government expansion in history.

Tip o' the hat to James Taranto.

[MTAtech]

The same can be said about balloon boy or Anna Nicole Smith's death, which both received far more national attention than more important issues.

However, don't blame the media for Palin who is the mistress of self-promotion. She's encouraging the attention she is getting.

If you are saying that we and the media should be ignoring Palin in favor of more important news of the day, I agree with you.

[KarmaKiller]

I found it funny..

[Gomer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by osprey4

Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
• ObamaCare bills: 2
• Palin book: 11

I've seen this 11 reporters number thrown out there a bit (here only really), but I haven't seen any source for it. Is it real? And what of the supposed 2 reporters that are covering health care?

The whole thing seems really contrived to me.

Quote:

Number of pages in document being covered:
• ObamaCare bills: 4,064
• Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter:
• ObamaCare bill: 2,032
• Palin book: 39.3

[The Real Bingo]

It is a sad state of affairs when the mainstream news media chooses to cover, with more zeal, a book written by a private citizen than a health care bill that will fundamentally change our nation as we have known it. And you wonder why Fox News and talk radio have such high ratings.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gomer

Provided the reporting numbers are accurate (which I doubt), to do that sort of analysis, one must look at the numbers of words per page of each document for a true assessment. Have you ever looked at the bill yourself?

I'd say that the ratio of words on a hardcover page to a page of the bill is easily on the order 10:1. So really, the 2 documents are comparable in size. I find it really disingenuous when people start wailing and gnashing their teeth because a bill has xxx number of pages in it, when a page isn't a standard unit of measurement. I could make this post a 25 page document if I wanted to. OMG!

I'd suggest that it is a sadder state of affairs that millions of idiots are paying $15 to read Palin's tripe while complaining about the number of people that aren't reading a comparable sized document for them so they don't have to.

Have you ever looked at the language of a bill? It takes me at least three readings to comprehend what the hell it says. It's not written in clear language, it contains many run-on sentences, and it just plain makes no sense. 10 government words = 300 regular words.

[osprey4]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gomer

I've seen this 11 reporters number thrown out there a bit (here only really), but I haven't seen any source for it.

Gomer, do you actually try to look anything up yourself?

At the bottom of the AP "fact check" article, it reads, "AP writers Matt Apuzzo, Sharon Theimer, Tom Raum, Rita Beamish, Beth Fouhy, H. Josef Hebert, Justin D. Pritchard, Garance Burke, Dan Joling and Lewis Shaine contributed to this report." That's in addition to Calvin Woodward.

[tony_j15]

Quote:

I'd say that the ratio of words on a hardcover page to a page of the bill is easily on the order 10:1. So really, the 2 documents are comparable in size.

Not so. An 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper holds, on average, 500 words when using a 12 point font. Palin's book is undersized with dimensions of 8.7 x 6.3 inches. Even if we assume standard word count, at 432 pages we end up with a rough figure of 216,000 words. The House version of the bill that I downloaded and fed into Microsoft Word returned a word count of 422,278. This makes the bill double the size of Palin's book. Also consider that there are two versions of the bill, and the Senate version is of comparable size. To fully understand the true scope of what our government is proposing, one must read both bills, meaning there are upwards of a million words floating out there. So, Palin's book at 432 pages and a mere two hundred thousand words is child's play, a weekend book.

Your initial thought regarding word ratio is correct, but you failed to account for the size completely. I also agree that the book is complete tripe, so comparisons are irrelevant. In any case, please turn in your Fact Checker title for the remainder of the week.

[Gomer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by osprey4

Gomer, do you actually try to look anything up yourself?

At the bottom of the AP "fact check" article, it reads, "AP writers Matt Apuzzo, Sharon Theimer, Tom Raum, Rita Beamish, Beth Fouhy, H. Josef Hebert, Justin D. Pritchard, Garance Burke, Dan Joling and Lewis Shaine contributed to this report." That's in addition to Calvin Woodward.

I look things up all the time (sometimes it gets tiring). But I don't have a problem asking people when they don't cite something in their posts either. I had seen that number thrown around a lot here, but nowhere else.

I think that the suggestion that the AP only has 2 reporters covering health care based on the byline of one article is misleading.

I think that the alternative is that the AP get criticized for one person reading and fact checking the book so quickly.

I think it's nonsense that they bothered at all. But when you have news media that's primary purpose is to drive advertising sales to people that already have too much stuff, they're going to cover what sells the most advertising. Right?

[Gomer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tony_j15

Not so. An 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper holds, on average, 500 words when using a 12 point font. Palin's book is undersized with dimensions of 8.7 x 6.3 inches. Even if we assume standard word count, at 432 pages we end up with a rough figure of 216,000 words. The House version of the bill that I downloaded and fed into Microsoft Word returned a word count of 422,278. This makes the bill double the size of Palin's book. Also consider that there are two versions of the bill, and the Senate version is of comparable size. To fully understand the true scope of what our government is proposing, one must read both bills, meaning there are upwards of a million words floating out there. So, Palin's book at 432 pages and a mere two hundred thousand words is child's play, a weekend book.

Your initial thought regarding word ratio is correct, but you failed to account for the size completely. I also agree that the book is complete tripe, so comparisons are irrelevant. In any case, please turn in your Fact Checker title for the remainder of the week.

Your failure was in relying on Word for your analysis.

Word counts all sorts of things as "words". For instance:
1
2
3
4
5
...
Counts as 6 words. With each line in the page numbered, and 25 lines per page, that adds up to an extra 50,000 words. The same can be said for paragraph and section identifiers such as (iii), (3), (A), etc. (that's 3 more words right there). All of the paragraph (xxx), section (xxx) subsection (xxx) adds up to a few thousand "words" at least.

A previous analysis I did of a 3 pages of the older bill showed that actual words wound up to be about 140 per page. At 2,000 pages that works out to roughly 300,000. This site:
Text of H.R.3962 as Placed on Calendar Senate: Affordable Health Care for America Act - U.S. Congress - OpenCongress
lists it at 350,000. A lot of it is boilerplate legalese.

I'm curious to see how many words are in going rouge. If she stuck to her folksy vocabulary I bet she really packed them in =)

[MegalosSkylaki]

MTAtech is advertising her new book.

The AP: Going Rogue