Since I'm having a little fun talking about media mis-reporting and bias this week, I think I should probably include this one as well.

In Mobile, AL, a 26 year old woman helped out a a 13 year old girl who was being chased by a 'pit bull' in the neighborhood. The woman put herself in between the girl and the dog and ended up getting bitten by the dog.

I would be remiss if I didn't note the desperate need for teaching our children how to act around dogs (ie -- don't run from them because you can't outrun them and it only brings out their prey drive) -- and noting that the owner of this dog is grossly neglegent in a lot of cases and has four tickets to show for it.

But I thought it was interesting that the TV station used this as an opportunity to note that of the 80 dog bites in Mobile this year, 22 were by Labrador Retrievers, 18 were by 'pit bulls', 13 by mixed breeds, 9 by Chow Chows, 4 by Golden Retrievers, 3 by Boxers, 2 by Blue Heelers, and 1 by a Poodle (and yes, I realize that doesn't count up to 80, I have no explanation).

So out of curiosity, I decided to check to see how many of these dog bites were covered by WKRG TV -- the news station that covered this particular bite incident.

So using their handy little search feature, I searched generic terms like "dog bite, dog attack, dog maul" and then also searched under each of the individual breed names.

The results?

Six stories about dog bites so far this year by WKRG -- 5 of the six were "pit bull" bites, and the other incident has no breed of dog mentioned at all.

So while "pit bulls" make up aobut 22% of the total bites in Mobile (Labs make up 28%), they happen to make up 100% of the stories where the breed of dog was mentioned in the article and 83% of the total stories covered.

Still think the 'pit bull' problem isn't something largely created by the media and how and when the media decides to report on dog bites? Still think any study on overall dog bites that relies solely on media reports is going to be in any way accurate?