Frequency of Political Messages in Right and Left-leaning comic strips: A websperiment

A few weeks ago, controversy erupted around the comicnetoverse when an installment of the right-leaning political comic Day by Day depicted Hillary Clinton in blackface. That’s not what I want to talk about. Shaenon Garrity responded by declaring (as she sometimes does) Day by Day to be The Worst Damn Comic in the World based not only on the offending strip by by the comic’s general quality of writing, art, and other elements. This lead to a debate with Dirk Deppey at Journalista. In the ensuing conversation Doonesbury came up several times as a counter-example, from people on both sides. This got me thinking. I think of Doonesbury as something very different than comics like Day by Day, Prickly City, Mallard Filmore, and even the left wing comics of people like Ted Rall . I think of Doonesbury as basically a story comic that occasionally makes political jokes as well, while I think of those comics as more or less just strip versions of political cartoons, with no story other than political propaganda.

But I realized that this could easily be my own bias. Political points I disagree with are perhaps marked more than those I agree with and I could easily be fooled into believing that comics I agree with are “less political” than those I disagree with. So I decided to do a little semi-scientific experiment:

I picked 90 random dates between May 22, 2006 and May 21, 2007 for Doonesbury and 90 random dates for Day by Day. I focused on the past year for both because this is how far back Doonesbury’s free online archive goes, and I didn’t want to bias the study by using a different period of time for the two comics. I then viewed the comics for these dates and recorded whether each comic made a political point or not. I then figured out, with 95% confidence intervals, the percentage of comics that are political is for both strips. I also figured out, with the same 95% confidence interval, what the difference in proportion of political strips to total strips is between the two comics.

My results: Doonesbury was “less political” by the narrow definition of what percentage of strips make a political point, at least over the past year. But not by as much as I would have thought. With 95% confidence, I can say that Doonesbury strips in the past year made political points between 44.16 and 64.73 percent of the time. Day by Day made political points between 65.43 and 83.46 percent of the time. I can also say with 95% confidence that Day by Day is between 6.32 and 33.68 percent more political than Doonesbury for the past year. But I expected virtually no non-political comics in Day by Day, and in fact found more non-political strips in my 90-day sample of Day by Day than I would have expected to find in a year. The confidence interval up there still would suggest that Day by Day has at least one non-political comic every week, on average.

I was also a little suprised by how high the proportion was for Doonesbury strips. Before doing this, I always thought it was a little bit lame that a lot of newspapers now print Doonesbury on the editorial page rather than the normal comic strip page. Now I’m not so sure. Even on the low end of the margin of error, Doonesbury was political over 40% of the time in the past year and it’s more likely than not that it was over 50% political.

Because of the relatively small sample sizes, it is hard to say how big the difference between the two strips is. And it would be interesting to see if these proportions vary if we go back further in time. If anyone would like to help expand our knowledge of the subject, a complete study of the past year or a sample going back further in time by a subscriber to the full Doonesbury archives would be very helpful.

Finally, some warnings. My statistics knowledge comes from an AP Stats class I took in high school and a hurried read through of some relevant portions of my lovely girlfriend’s college stats book. If I did anything wrong with the numbers, I hope someone will correct me (the complete data is available below the cut). Also, the judgment of which comics are “political” is somewhat subjective. Sometimes it’s easy (is it a Bush or Pelosi joke made by a talking building? it’s political). Other times it’s not (A personality joke set in Iraq? A strip about B.D.’s combat trauma support group?). Also beneath the cut I have a complete list of the comics I used and my judgements, with links, so that anyone can go through and dispute my characterizations. Finally, the question of what percentage of strips makes a political point is in some ways a poor substitute for the question of which strip is more political as opposed to story-based. Some strips make a political point while advancing the characters’ story, while others are simply jokes at a politician’s expense. This study does not measure this factor at all.

Read on beyond the cut for the full gory details.

First one more caveat that I thought was to minor to mention above the cut. The way I selected random dates was by first getting random integers between 1 and 12 from www.random.org, then getting random integers between 1 and 31 and placing them side-by-side. I then picked a new random date for any dates that were nonexistant or repeats. However, I didn’t think to redraw these ENTIRE dates, month included. Because of this, any given date in a shorter month was slightly more likely to be picked than any given date in a longer month. I decided that since this problem was the same for both samples and there was no reason to think that the percentage of political comics was linked to number of days in a month, it wasn’t worth redoing the randomization to make it a true simple random sample.

Ok, here’s the raw numbers: For Doonesbury, of the 90 comics surveyed 49 were judged political. For Day by Day, 67 of 90 comics were judged political. This resulted in a sample proportion p of .5444 for Doonesbury and . 7444 for Day by Day, rounded to 4 significant digits. By taking the square root of p(1-p)/n where p=sample proportion and n=sample size (in this case 90), I got the standard error for both comics. For Doonesbury, the standard error came out to ~0.0525, for Day by Day it was ~.0460. I then multipled this by the z* for a 95% confidence interval, 1.960, in order to produce a margin of error. For Doonsebury, this margin of error came out to plus or minus .1029 and for Day by Day it came to .0901. By adding/subtracting these numbers to the sample proportions p, I came up with the 95% confidence intervals mentioned above. Rounding to 4 significant digits, these proportions come out to .4416-.6473 for Doonesbury and .6543-.8346 for Day by Day.

Then I analyized the difference d between the two sample proportions in order to make inferences about the difference between the true proportions. By subtracting the proportion for Day by Day from the proportion for Doonesbury, I came up with a the sample difference d of .2000. By taking the square root of p(1-p)/n+q(1-q)/o, where p=the sample proportion for Doonesbury, n=the sample size for Doonesbury, q=sample proportion for Day by Day and o=the sample size for Day by Day, I came up with a standard error for d. This came to .0698. By once again multiplying this by the z* of 1.960, I came up with a margin of error of plus or minus .1368. By adding and then subtracting this to the sample difference of .1889, I came up with the interval of .0632-.3368. Because both ends of this range had Day by Day more political than Doonesbury, I rejected the null hypothesis that Doonesbury and Day by Day are equally political.

Ok, so that’s the math. Who wants to check my judgement?

The following Doonesbury comics were judged to be “Not Political,” in chronological order:

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http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060614.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060615.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060618.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060622.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060706.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060801.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060807.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060812.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060816.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060818.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060821.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060825.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060910.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060911.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060913.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db060923.gif

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http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db061023.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db061025.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db061028.gif

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http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db061114.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db061116.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2006/db061209.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070104.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070109.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070111.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070129.gif

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http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070515.gif

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070517.gif

And the following were judged “Political”:

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Ok, we’re halfway through. Now for Day by Day. First the “Non-Political”:

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/05/30

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/02

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/05

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/19

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/21

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/07/01

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/07/02

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/26

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/10/26

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/10/30

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/11/02

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/11/25

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/12/27

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/02/05

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/02/21

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/02/26

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/02/28

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/03/01

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/03/05

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/03/13

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/05/09

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/05/21

Ok, that was the smallest of the four groups. Now I’m going to end with the largest of them: Day by Day strips judged “political.”

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/05/23

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/05/24

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/05/26

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/11
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/12

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/13

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/20

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/24

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/25

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/06/29

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/07/05

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/07/09

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/07/11

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/07/17

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/07/27

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/08/02

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/08/11

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/08/12

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/08/17

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/08/20

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/01

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/07

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/10

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/11

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/17

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/18

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/21

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/22

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/28

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/09/30

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/10/06

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/10/14

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/10/17

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/10/18

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/10/22

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/10/29

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/11/04

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/11/05

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/11/11

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/11/12

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/11/14

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/11/16

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/11/27

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/12/05

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/12/10

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/12/13

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/12/16

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/12/30

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/01/21

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/01/22

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/01/27

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/01/29

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/01/31

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/02/06

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/02/16

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/02/18

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/02/22

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/02/25

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/04/06

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/04/10

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/04/11

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/04/17

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/04/18

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/04/21

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/04/23

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/05/10

Phew. That should total up to 180. If any of those URLs don’t work, lemme know–I threw that part together pretty fast, as you can imagine. And, um, sorry these aren’t links. I guess WordPress doesn’t automatically turn URLs into links, and fuck if I’m going to go back and type all of those a second time. If anyone knows how to get wordpress to make them into links, please let me know.

If you read this far, congratulations. You, too, may be a mad comics scientist. It’s a noble profession

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