Between September 1 and the afternoon of September 18, 2006 more than 30,000 stories on Google News contained the word “Taliban,” according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. That’s more than a 1,000% increase over the number of stories (1,410) that featured that term in the first 18 days of August 2006. The number of stories mentioning “Afghanistan” jumped from 4,710 to more than 75,000. And the story is not just that the Taliban are back in the news. It’s that their forces are fighting with new ferocity. The phrase “resurgent Taliban” yielded 1,680 stories on Google News September 1-18 compared with only 6 stories for the same period last month. Read More
Russell Heimlich is a former web developer at Pew Research Center.
