Doing a little math on the NY Times Military Analyst Story

Instapundit and Mickey Kaus lead to a piece in the Huffington Post that had me scratching my head a little bit.

Rachel Sklar in an effort to defend military analysts who had "correct thought" brought up the fact that Media Matters had identified 4500 radio and TV appearances by military analysts between January 2002 and April 20, 2008.

Now that sounds like quite a few right but lets look at some numbers.

First we are dealing with 20 separate analysts so 4500/20 = (on average) 225 appearances apiece over a period of more than 6 years or about 37.8 appearance per year. Less than one a week.

This being real life everything didn't work out that way. If this was truly a full court press of a Pentagon propaganda operation you would expect the analysts to have a higher percentage of appearances on outlets where the most audience would see or hear them instead a full 1/5 of the appearances were by one analyst on CNN (David L. Grange 921 appearances) the next other two CNN analysts account for another 21% of the appearances. NBC/MSNBC/CNBC account for another 32% of the appearances. (Freedom's arch-enemy Fox News with 45% of the correspondents mentioned in the NY Times article accounts for 18% of the appearances.)

So what does this tell us?

The same thing the Media Matters report tells us. Not a frickin' thing.

How many of those appearances occurred in March and April of 2003 during the actual invasion of Iraq? How many in Feb. 2006 when the Golden Dome in Samara was attacked?

Who knows? I don't have hours of footage to pour through to count.

The other question is what was actually said. I know the NY Times claims the reports were unfailingly positive and that's Media Matters assumption, but were they?

Without context the sheer number of appearances is meaningless.