Clinton Still Leads in Pennsylvania Newspaper Coverage

Pati Carson
Dow Jones Insight Staff

In Pennsylvania, the press continued to show a tendency to talk about Clinton more than the other two candidates. By looking at the total number of excerpts (each mention of a candidate's name), we see that since our last count there were 1,530 mentions of "Hillary Clinton," compared with 1,455 mentions of "Barack Obama" and 766 for "John McCain."

Despite a decreasing percentage of positive coverage for all candidates, Clinton has gained an advantage as the percentage of documents rated as positive fell dramatically for Obama, from 10% on March 18, from 27% on March 12. Positives slipped to 17% from 21% for Clinton, and 20% from 31% for McCain.



March 7-12, 2008

March 13 - 18, 2008

Press Analysis Methodology: Total media coverage includes analysis of more than 6,000 publications. Pennsylvania publications analyzed includes 146 print and Web sites of mainstream media (excluding blogs). Articles were found in the following: Print and Web versions of: Centre Daily Times, Herald Standard, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Reading Eagle and The Philadelphia Inquirer; print versions of: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and The Morning Call; and Web sites of: ABC 4, CBS3 Philadelphia, FlipSide, NBC 10, NewsMax.com, Observer-Reporter, Our Town, Phillyburbs.com (Philadelphia), Pittsburgh Channel, Public Opinion (Chambersburg, Pa.), Ridgway Record, The Allentown Morning Call, The Citizen's Voice, The Daily Review & Sunday Review, The Philadelphia Daily News, The Times Leader, The Times-Tribune, WJAC TV, York Daily Record, York Sunday News Online and York Weekly Record.

Automated Favorability Methodology: This analysis is of English-language documents only and was generated by software-based analysis which has been shown to be 80% accurate in similar corpora. Favorable and unfavorable ratings are assigned based on the words found in close proximity to a candidate's name. All neutral documents were excluded.