I saw this amusing exchange on Twitter some days ago:
I don’t think Matthew had investigated this claim, it was maybe revealed to him in a dream. But was it true? It could be, so I tried to find out.
Google allows one to search for pages on a particular domain, which sort of allows us to count articles mentioning anything. So let’s first start with Emmett Till:
About 670 results. It is curious that it’s an approximate number. I tried to get a final number by clicking through the pages of results. However, every time you click a new page of results, you get slightly different numbers. Apparently, Google doesn’t know how many there are. It may have something to do with the complexity of their database query. Let us use the 670 then as an approximate value. What about Rotherham? Here it gets more difficult:
Alas, there is a football team polluting the results. It’s not so easy to avoid it. If one excludes “football” one gets 6 results, 4 in Spanish, and 2 in Chinese (weird!). More accurate is to include “rape”, which gives us 10 results:
Of these, however, 4 are from this week, so 6 hits. If one tries “grooming” instead, there are 14 results (the results bar initially claims 56, but there’s only 2 pages, and 4 on the second). Of these, 2 are in Spanish, 1 in Chinese, and 1 is about football. Of the genuine 10 hits, 4 are from this week, leaving 6. Of the remaining 5 are about the rapes themselves.
Alternatively, one can use NYT’s own search engine. By my count, there are 11 results for “rotherham” + “grooming”, and 739 for “Emmett Till”. The results are the same after subtracting the articles from last week or other topics (5 articles).
So there we have it. 5 writings about systemic rape of British girls from before this week, and 600+ about Emmett Till, an African American boy who was killed 25,337 days (69 years) ago. Depending on interpretation, then, it seems Matthew was just about right about what the focus of New York Times has been. Granted, of course, that Emmett Till was an American, and Rotherham is in the United Kingdom.
You can decide for yourself how these numbers reflect upon Matthew Yglesias’ claim.
