CLIMATEGATE — The Tiger Woods Index for NZ

by Whaleoil on December 6, 2009 · 12 comments

Why is the media focus­ing on Tiger Woods and his root­ing when the gen­eral pub­lic is want­ing focus on Climategate?

There is now an index for you to work out just how hyp­o­crit­i­cal the media has become and how they fil­ter our news. It is called the Tiger Woods Index.

Thus, as an exper­i­ment, I started trawl­ing around, tak­ing the stats on other issues in the news. To make the fig­ures com­pa­ra­ble, I then worked out the ratios of web pages to news pages reported.

On that basis, Tiger Woods deliv­ered 22,500,000 web and 46,025 news pages, giv­ing ratio of 489. That is the “Tiger Woods Index” (TWI) against which I chose to mea­sure a raft of other issues.

“Cli­mate­gate” was the next obvi­ous choice and that pro­duced 28,400,000 on the web page search, com­pared with 2,930 news items, deliv­er­ing a ratio of 9,693. Using the TWI as a com­para­tor, the pub­lic in gen­eral are more inter­ested in “Cli­mate­gate” than Tiger Woods, by a fac­tor of nearly 20 times.

Apply­ing the “ratio analy­sis” (doesn’t that sound grand!) to ten cur­rent issues, includ­ing the two already men­tioned, an arbi­trary list emerged, ranked by impor­tance to the gen­eral pub­lic, against media inter­est. This is as follows:

1. Cli­mate­gate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
5. Gor­don Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
6. Cli­mate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
9. Mered­ith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

Let’s look at some Kiwi exam­ples, again ranked by impor­tance to the gen­eral pub­lic, against media inter­est. The NZ Media are worse even than the US.

  1. Cli­mate­gate: 31,100,000 – 74 = 420,720
  2. Lisa Lewis: 116000 – 87 = 1333
  3. Phil Goff: 157000 – 292 = 537
  4. Tony Veitch: 90,600 – 364 = 248
  5. John Key: 196000 – 1327 = 147
  6. Hone Harawira: 169000 – 1320 = 128
  7. Mil­lie Holmes: 7600 – 71 = 107
  8. Susan Boyle: 410000 -  8778 = 46
  9. Taito Phillip Field: 21500 –1150 = 18
  10. Mark Hotchin: 41700 – 343 = 13
  11. MPs Expenses: 18600 – 1454 = 12

Pop­u­lar­ity: 6% [?]

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{ 11 comments }

Lucy December 6, 2009 at 9:35 pm

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chrissy Posted at 6:47 AM Decem­ber 06, 2009
Mal­colm Turn­ball posted a News Let­ter in the Daily tele­graph lash­ing out at Tony Abbot and sup­port­ing the Offi­cial Aus­tralian view on cli­mate change I think John Key should take note of the com­ments made (go to andrew bolt to read the whole thing) All of the com­ment where like these

“Mr Turn­bull we don’t need 2 Labor par­ties thanks. You didn’t lis­ten to the peo­ple, Mr Abbott did. Even Mr Obama is only spend­ing the last day at Copen­hagen to lobby for some sports agenda.Copenhagen has become an expen­sive joke now.Mr Rudd is tak­ing 200 peo­ple along with him???? How long do we have to

throw mil­lions at this farce? Stop the bit­ter­ness Mr Turn­bull, sup­port your party or leave.”

Com­ment 7 of 36

matt Posted at 7:29 AM Decem­ber 06, 2009
Poor Mr Turn­bull, still try­ing to be pop­u­lar with the peo­ple. Do us all a favour and just go away.

Com­ment 8 of 36

John Ansell December 6, 2009 at 8:37 am

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Seems to me the big story here is the con­trast between Cli­mate­gate and Cli­mate Change.

The pub­lic are more inter­ested in Cli­mate­gate, but the media are over 20 times more inter­ested in report­ing Cli­mate Change.

Or is that just a fac­tor of Cli­mate Change hav­ing been around a lot longer?

Whaleoil December 6, 2009 at 8:48 am

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I think the pub­lic are sick of the lies, they know in their hearts some­thing isn’t right and so are search­ing for it because the media has failed. New Media is hand­ing them the ass and they aren’t lik­ing it.

billhicks December 6, 2009 at 9:56 am

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Whale google have have brought car­bon cred­its just like most media and big company’s.. http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/googl... OR THIS ONE http://green.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/goo... OR THIS http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10235936–54.htm... many more company’s have there fin­ger in the pie lets start with new zealand http://www.nzbcsd.org.nz/newsletter/newsletter.as... UMMM…..

Pita December 6, 2009 at 8:45 pm

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Makes a mok­ery of an open inde­pen­dent free press!

corruptionfordummies December 6, 2009 at 6:14 pm

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it is amus­ing (sickly) that they say report cli­mate change (with no evi­dence) on the news….then just moments later they announce cooler tem­per­a­tures, no sea rise warn­ings on the weather segment.

The_Grizz December 6, 2009 at 10:33 am

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I have been doing some research on Methane gas emis­sions and per­form­ing some back of the enve­lope cal­cu­la­tions on methane gas emis­sions in New Zealand. We are being told about our dairy indus­try increas­ing methane gas emis­sions and under kyoto we need to reduce this to 1990 lev­els (I know other sources of methane need to be included as well). Given our sheep num­bers have been falling I always viewed the hys­te­ria with scep­ti­cism. How­ever, fol­low­ing a back of the enve­lope cal­cu­la­tion, I can now say that agri­cul­tural methane emis­sions in 2007 were less than in 1982! Thats right, agri­cul­ture has already achieved objec­tives on kyoto in terms of methane emis­sions. Here is my assumptions:

Sheep pop­u­la­tion 1982: 70.2 Mil­lion
Cat­tle Pop­u­la­tion 1982: 7.87 Million

Sheep pop­u­la­tion 2007 38.5 Mil­lion
Cat­tle pop­u­la­tion 2007 9.65 Million

Methane emissions/cow 80Kg/year. Methane emissions/ sheep 8kg/year

Total Agri­cul­ture methane emis­sions 1982 1192 Mil­lion Kg
Total Agri­cul­ture methane emis­sions 2007 1080 Mil­lion Kg

I have been ultra con­ser­v­a­tive on my sheep emis­sions as quan­ti­ties were all over the place. I took a lower fig­ure so that a higher fig­ure would have shown a greater absolute reduction.

Curiously,under Mul­doon and is silli­ness to sub­sidise agri­cul­ture, more land was cleared for live­stock graz­ing. Remov­ing sub­si­dies encour­aged sheep num­bers to drop and diver­si­fi­ca­tion of land use. Go to Marl­bor­ough and wit­ness land once used for graz­ing planted out in grapes and fruit trees. The spin off here is that reduc­ing sub­si­dies reduced methane gas emissions.

That said, I remain scep­ti­cal that agri­cul­ture is caus­ing a build up in green­house gases. Rumi­nants, wet­lands, forests have been pump­ing out methane gas for mil­lions of years. Human agri­cul­ture over the last 100 years would make SFA dif­fer­ence to atmos­pheric methane.

Aye Aye December 6, 2009 at 6:18 pm

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This looks like these are the per­fect sub­jects to feed into http://www.google.com/insights/search

Lucy December 6, 2009 at 7:46 pm

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And the UN will ‘inves­ti­gate’ the leaked emails as “they dont look good”. Any­body want to take a bet that they will find noth­ing wrong and it is BAU?

Theresaj December 6, 2009 at 8:08 pm

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It is just like when the Mt Hood ter­ror­ist mas­sacre happened..there was hardly any cov­er­age just end­less rav­ing about Hone Harawira..But then it seems to be offi­cial pol­icy to keep New Zealan­ders in the dark about the bound­less ambi­tions of islam.

Lucy December 6, 2009 at 9:26 pm

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Yep!

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