Draw Breath

There was a bizarre feature in yesterday's Guardian on political advertising in Iowa. Nothing particularly controversial about the content, but I was struck by the strange scientific claim behind the piece. The thrust was: Iowans are subject to lots of ads from caucus candidates. No shit. But wait: apparently the Guardian knows this because they "commissioned a survey of a local TV station and found that in one half-hour period eight political ads were aired."

Is it just me but doesn't that read a little bit like: "watched television for half an hour"?

It gets better though. There's a comment on the survey method at the bottom of (the online version of) the article: "Dean Treftz, a reporter with the Daily Iowan, campus paper at the University of Iowa, listed the advertisements broadcast over a 30-minute period on his local TV station." So the first passage, strictly speaking, out to read: "The Guardian got a student to watch TV for half an hour and he wrote down stuff that happened."

Also, the half hour coincided with the early evening news.

High level content analysis indeed.