Back in late October, a now famous study of media coverage and the 2008 Presidential campaign came to three important conclusions:
- Five candidates dominated news coverage: Hillary Clinton (17% of all campaign coverage), Barack Obama (14%), Rudy Giuliani (9%), John McCain (7%), and Mitt Romney (5%). Elizabeth Edwards actually came in a distant 6th.
- Barack Obama received significantly more favorable coverage than the other most reported on candidates. While John McCain received negative coverage four times more often (48% of his total coverage) than positive coverage (12% of his total coverage), and while Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani both ran nearly identical favorable / unfavorable coverage ratios of 27% / 38% and 28% / 37%, Barack Obama actually had a 3-1 favorable (47%) / unfavorable (16%) news coverage ratio.
- 63% of all news coverage of the campaign focused on tactics and horserace stories, 17% focused on candidate background, and 15% focused on ideas and policy positions. Only 1% examined past public performance.
To put this more simply, on the Democratic side the national media wants to focus on Clinton vs. Obama, prefers Obama in that matchup, and likes process / horserace stories. Add this all up, and it is hard not to conclude that the national media is somehow, consciously or unconsciously, collectively drooling over the prospect of an "Obama is catching up" narrative. It is possible to see frustrating on this issue leaking through in Peter Daou's diary today on Daily Kos where, after linking to two new polls that are good for Senator Clinton, he notes "[w]e'll see how much attention these polls get…"
Given all of this, I wonder how different the blogosphere's take on the 2008 campaign is from that of the established, national media? Back in 2004, a friend of mine did her master's thesis comparing 2004 blogosphere coverage of the primary campaign to coverage in established media, and found something like a 99% correlation. This time around, Daily Kos, the largest Democratic political blog that sorts articles according to tags, currently lists the most discussed Democratic candidates as follows:
Hillary Clinton: 6,812
Barack Obama: 5,656
John Edwards: 4,958
Dennis Kucinich: 1,088
Bill Richardson: 1,041
No other Democratic candidate is over 1,000. So, with the exception of focusing on John Edwards more than other media outlets, collectively speaking the Daily Kos community has roughly the same Clinton and Obama coverage bias as other media outlets. MyDD has a similar gap between the top three and everyone else (warning: slow loading link).
How about the narrative? For my part, I will note that my Nomination At A Glance piece on Saturday that projected Barack Obama in front for the first time in the campaign received as many comments and incoming links as the previous thirteen nomination at a glance updates combined, dating back to September 19th. Obama catching up and taking the lead, if only briefly, drew a lot more attention than Clinton maintaining a solid lead. That, actually, seems perfectly reasonable: it is more exciting when the lead is changing hands every couple of days, rather than one candidate staying well out in front the entire time.
How about the focus of the coverage? This is one area where I think there is clear separation between the blogosphere and other media. While certainly we all focus on the horserace, issues like residual forces (or, more broadly, military and foreign policy reform), FISA (or, more broadly, restoring Constitutional checks and balances), net neutrality (or, more broadly, media reform), and global warming (or, more broadly, energy independence and renewable energy development) have all received at least as much, if not more coverage than the horserace, in the blogosphere. Certainly, the horserace is covered, but even a horserace obsessive like myself has written significantly more article on Open Left about residual forces (37) than Nomination At A Glance updates (26). Media reform posts are even more common on Open Left, coming in at 64 total posts. Iraq and FISA are even higher than both of those.
From this brief and incomplete survey of the blogosphere, it seems to me there are two key differences between our coverage of the 2008 campaign and coverage provided by other media outlets. First, the blogosphere is focused on a three-way campaign between Clinton, Obama and Edwards, instead of a two-way Clinton vs. Obama duel. Secondly, we actually focus much more on policy and legislation than does other media (even though I still think our horserace analysis is superior to that of the established, national media). Of particularly interest, I think, are the issues we focus on: military and foreign policy, energy and global warming policy, media reform and restoring checks and balances to governmental institutions. All of this is centered around the collapse of elite institutions in the United States, and eliminating all of the underlying causes of the Iraq war: media complicity, unitary executive, privatized military, neo-con foreign policy, and the oil-based economy. The reason I find this fascinating is that Matt and I have often argued that the failure of establishment Democrats and progressives / liberal institutions to prevent catastrophes like the Iraq war is the main cause of the rise of the progressive netroots. This is a position that seems to be justified by our areas of policy focus. We differ from other media in that the primary goal of the blogosphere is to reconstitute and strengthen those institutions that failed to prevent the Iraq war from taking place. In a very real way, it is all about ending the war, and making sure that something like Iraq never happens again. Even when we look at an issue like the 2008 elections, that appears to be the slant we take.
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