To measure positive news coverage, I quickly put ten research assistants to work on a Nexis search, which is a computerized search of newspaper stories across the country. They looked at the coverage received by the 36 quarterbacks who played during the first four weeks of this season. (The articles were from the day of their first game to the day after their last game during the period.) To try to make the categorization of news stories objective, 23 phrases were picked to identify positive descriptions of a quarterback and 23 phrases for negative ones. Positive phrases included words such as "brilliant," "agile," "good," "great," "tough," "accurate," "leader," "intelligent," or "strong arm." Negative phrases included "overrated," "erratic," "struggling," "bad," "weak arm," or "mistakes." Obviously the media involves more than newspapers, but this is measurable and it is not clear why newspapers would be so different from the rest of the media.
We then identified news stories where these phrases appeared within 50 words of a quarterback's name. Each story was read to check that the phrases were indeed used to describe the "quarterback" and to make sure that the word "not" did not appear before the different phrases. Depending on whether positive or negative words were used to describe the quarterback, stories were classified as positive, negative, or falling into both categories.
The evidence suggests that Rush is right, though the simplest measures indicate that the difference is not huge. Looking at just the averages, without trying to account for anything else, reveals a ten-percent difference in coverage (with 67 percent of stories on blacks being positive, 61 percent for whites).