9
(including Op-Ed pieces and letters to the editor, but excluding all other types of articles). This
generated 816 results for the New York Times and 342 for USA Today. Data was collected on
all of these opinion pieces, but only anonymous editorials were included in the final sample,
resulting in 92 editorials in the New York Times and 56 in USA Today.
The Pakistani, Egyptian and Saudi Arabian editorials were collected using World News
Connection, which incorporates the FBIS database. The same procedure was followed as for
Lexis-Nexus, entering the key terms “Iraq” and “war,” and then limiting the scope to pieces
classified as editorials. Unlike Lexis-Nexus, the data is incomplete, in that not every editorial
appearing in one of these newspapers is included in the FBIS database in the first place. Clearly,
this is a matter of methodological concern; however, I operate on the assumption that the data
collectors for FBIS are intending to create a somewhat representative sample of articles to
translate into English for the purpose of strategic or security-oriented research. In terms of data
quality, the size of the Pakistani data set is such that it seems fairly representative. The Egyptian
data set appears to be of medium quality, and I have reservations about the Saudi Arabian set,
which at this point can only be taken as suggestive.
19
The newspapers from which these
editorials were collected and the number of editorials from each is listed below. Only anonymous
editorials were included in the final sample.
19
The Saudi data set includes two newspapers. The majority of the editorials come from the Jedda Arab News,
which is published online in the Kingdom in English. The other newspaper is the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a Saudi-
owned print newspaper published in Arabic in the UK. It is, however, one of the most widely circulated Arabic
dailies. Because neither of these are “traditional” newspapers, and because their readership is more specialized, the
Saudi data set at this point should merely be taken as suggestive and as a starting point for future research.
Convention