It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
 | Tracking 2008: Mainstream Media Articles on Candidates 9-14 to 9-20 2007 |
We’ve been tracking trends in Election 2008 button, bumper sticker and t-shirt sales for almost three years to see how the Democrats fare against one another. On Monday we started looking at official campaign website traffic ratings for Democratic, Republican, Green and Independent candidates for president, and on Tuesday we began tracking these candidates’ MySpace friends. Starting today, we’ll keep track of the number of news reports regarding each candidate appearing in the mainstream news, as catalogued by the Google News database (it’s particularly helpful that Google News has recently done away with duplicate appearances of wire service articles). Does the mainstream news media cover the presidential campaign with a different set of priorities than are reflected in the online popularity of candidates? Here’s a way to find out. These are the number of news articles found in the Google News database for candidates of each party (and no party) during the one-week period of September 14-20, 2007:
Joseph Biden : 5,952
Hillary Clinton : 15,921
Christopher Dodd : 8,164
John Edwards : 15,015
Mike Gravel : 376
Dennis Kucinich : 1,793
Barack Obama : 20,900
Bill Richardson : 5,597
Sam Brownback : 2,613
Rudolph Giuliani : 16,505
Mike Huckabee : 4,478
Duncan Hunter : 2,057
Alan Keyes : 240
John McCain : 14,243
Ron Paul : 2,702
Mitt Romney : 14,428
Tom Tancredo : 615
Fred Thompson : 11,177
Orion Karl Daley : 0
Kelcey Wilson : 0
Jared Ball : 2
Jerry Kann : 0
Kent Mesplay : 0
Joe Schriner : 0
kat swift : 0
Among the Democrats, the order of excitement regarding candidates online roughly matches the attention provided to candidates in mainstream media news articles, with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards on top. Among Republicans, however, Ron Paul seems to be getting relatively short shrift when one compares online popularity with newsprint mentions. He has the most MySpace friends of all Republican candidates, and his website’s popularity is the highest among all candidates regardless of political party. It’s a cliche, but there is a difference between the online and offline worlds.
Should we pity Mike Gravel and Alan Keyes for garnering so few press mentions in the past week, even though this was the very week that Alan Keyes jumped into the race? Well, perhaps a bit of pity is called for — Mike Gravel’s been banned (along with Dennis Kucinich) from tonight’s AARP Debate (PBS, 8 PM EST). But before we shed too many tears, consider the level of coverage of Green Party and independent presidential candidates. With the exception of Jared Ball, these alternative candidates have earned nothing but goose eggs in the past week.
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