Good morning, Phil--

I think that there is a racist bias in the leftist press.

An unscientific poll by this correspondent discovered that a search of foxnews.com using the word "sudan" yielded 230 hits, of which the first four pages had to do with fingerprinting foreign nationals and other US policy issues. Only one article on those first four pages, hit #9 (June 5, 2002), dealt with Sudan and the slave trade. It concerned US policy on trafficking in human beings, and listed the Sudan near the end of the US State Department's "Tier 1" group of nations most involved in the slave trade, a kind of slavers' Who's Who. No religious persecution or civil war was mentioned.

A search of the same site using "sudan slavery" yielded 17 hits. The most recent articles dealing with the slave trade in Sudan and its religious overtones are 11 months old and on page 3. This is one of them.

A search of cbsnews.com using "sudan" yielded 210 hits. The very first is linked to an article, dated June 21, 2001, dealing with the civil war, its sectarian nature, and the brutal effects on the people of Sudan. The link is awkward, but there's a byline with the title of the article on page one to lead the searcher.

And, just for fun, since public broadcasting has been a topic of discussion lately:

At npr.org, a search using "sudan" yielded 92 hits. #1 is an interview with a veteran journalist who trains other journalists in the region. #2 covers the fingerprinting issue that dominates Fox's first set of hits. #3 (May 2002) talks about slavery. #4 (Jan. 2002) is a report covering the civil war and its religious overtones in some detail.

At pbs.org, a search using "sudan" yielded 1058 hits. The first one dealing with the civil war and slavery issue weighs in at #17, 11 months old. Due to website layout, it's immediately visible on the first page of hits, making it more accessible than the Fox article from the "sudan slavery" search of similar age, for purely cosmetic reasons. As a left-wing source, it mentions the contributions of well-known leftist Ken Starr to the defense of anti-slavery activists in the first paragraph.

I used the "three clicks" rule to determine accessibility to news, a librarians' rule of thumb: if an average searcher is looking for information (not surfing), he will not go more than three clicks into a source if he has not found something to pursue. (By this rule, the fourth page of the first Fox search is farther than the average person would have gone.) I also used the most basic search term or terms, because an unguided searcher is likely to search this way.

By the standards of currency and accessibility, on this topic at least, Fox offers the least meaningful coverage of this issue. Now, what does this mean? Is Fox leftist? Is Fox racially biased? Or is Fox just bad at reporting humanitarian issues that don't get the bigger ratings share?

Regards--
Mary Anne