Supporters of John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have all claimed that their particular candidate of choice is not getting a fair shake in the media. I can’t judge those claims completely, but I can take a look at how often the mainstream news media have been giving coverage to these three candidates over time.
Google Trends is a great tool for doing this, because it provides graphs of news coverage of keywords over time. I decided to take a look this morning at the trends of news coverage for the names of the presidential candidates: “Barack Obama”, “Hillary Clinton”, and “John McCain” through the year 2008 so far.
The resulting chart is rather surprising, if you go by the standard assumption that interest in a presidential election will build throughout the year of the election. That’s clearly not happening in 2008. There was indeed an increase in news articles about the three remaining presidential candidates as the primary season begun back in January. However, at the beginning of February, after Super Tuesday, the number of mainstream news articles about the candidates began to decline. With the exception of a few small blips now and then, attention by the mainstream news media continued to decline ever since, all the way now into April.
This pattern is mirrored in Google Trends’ measurement of searches by individuals using the Google search engine. After Super Tuesday, people have been searching less and less for the three main presidential candidates with every passing week.
One idea some people have been discussing is that the bickering between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is hurting the two Democratic candidates, while helping John McCain, who sails by without many critiques aimed at him. If this were the case, however, wouldn’t we see a difference in the trends of people’s Internet searches? Wouldn’t John McCain’s trajectory look quite different than Obama’s and Clinton’s?
What the trends show is that not just Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are going down in the interest of the mainstream news media and online public, but that John McCain is too. The fighting between those Obama and Clinton does not seem to be the cause of the decline. There’s something going on with the 2008 presidential election in general.
Why is this decline taking place?
The answer may be that the odd rhythm of the presidential primaries is a single, strong external cause on both the number of news articles and the number of searches for McCain, Clinton, and Obama. Perhaps people have been only interested in the primary elections if there is a primary election going on in their state.
It also could be that the trend behind one measurement is affecting another. It could be, for example, that news operations are reporting on the candidates less, and that decline causes fewer people to be provoked to search for more information about the candidates online.
It might be, however, that decreased interest on the part of the American people is somehow being measured by mainstream news operations – through data on viewership of online news articles, for example. The observation among news operations might lead, consciously or unconsciously to a decrease in stories about the presidential candidates.
I can’t say which of these explanations is the right one. I don’t have enough information. I say, however, that the closer we get to the 2008 presidential election, the less journalists and the general public care about it.
