Pope OD
: We’ve long since passed the point of too much with the pope story. The world has not stopped. But media has. Here’s the evidence:
Major news media around the world devoted 10 times as many stories to Pope John Paul II’s death as they did to the re-election of President Bush, according to an analysis released Monday.
The Global Language Monitor, which scans the Internet for the use of specific words or phrases using Roman characters, found 35,000 new stories on the pope in the 24 hours after his death Saturday.
That compares with about 3,500 new stories on Bush within a day of his re-election and 1,000 new stories on former President Reagan within a day of his death last year.
More from their site:
Preliminary numbers from the Global Language Monitor’s daily Internet and media analysis suggest that in the 24 hours since the pontiff’s death, there have been some 35,000 major news stories, and more than 3.5 million internet citations. In comparison, for the entire preceding year there were only 28.000 major new stories and 1.5 million Internet citations about John Paul II.
According to Paul JJ Payack, President of The Global Language Monitor, “The word historic is associated with the pontiff over 1,000,000 times, while conservative is associated some 300,000 times, and loved or beloved about a quarter million times in the first 24 hours since John Paul’s passing.”
