Study Shows 'Center-Right Nation' Narrative Spiked Immediately After Election Day

Posted by David Sirota, Blog for Our Future at 9:19 AM on November 22, 2008.

When I wrote my first column about the "center-right nation" and subsequently launched the "Center-Right Nation Watch" series on this blog I predicted that the news media would actually increase its usage of this term after Obama won. I did a Lexis-Nexis search of the term, and was the first to note the trend and make the prediction that "if Obama wins, expect more frantic talk from the fringe about how electing a black man billed as an Islamic Karl Marx obviously means our country is more conservative than ever."

Feeling like I was out on a limb (and remember, this was almost 2 weeks before a group of major progressive pundits belatedly started writing about the trend), I asked a friend out here in Denver who works with a company called Trendrr to officially track whether my prediction was right - and you can see from the results above, they were.

As the graph shows, the use of the exact term "center-right nation" spiked immediately after election day (point "0" is the day my column published, point "1" is election day). When the column was first written, the term was popping up about 20 times a day on Google News. Now it's about 240 times a day.

So we're not talking about theory anymore - we're talking about empirical fact. The media has exponentially increased the amount of times it claims that this country is a "center-right nation" - at the very same time public opinion data shows the country is a decidedly center-left nation. In short, we have the two hard data points proving that as the country has become more progressive and validated its progressivism on election day, the media has increased its claims that the nation is conservative.

Tagged as: mainstream media suck, center-left nation, center-right nation