McCain Coverage Flat Lines

By Glenn Fannick
Dow Jones Insight Staff

McCain's strategists, frustrated with the extreme media attention on the Democratic race, said in early April they would push hard for the entire month to get the candidate back on the front page. Their four-week road show seems to have accomplished little, as Dow Jones Insight's analysis shows the raw number of mentions of McCain in all media virtually flat since mid-March. It shows an average of 27,000 mentions of his name each week (out of about 5 million documents analyzed per week in the mainstream and social media.) That flat line is not much different when splitting out social media from mainstream media.

Note: Sources in this analysis include more than 6,000 newspapers, wires, magazines, radio and TV transcripts; more than 13,000 current awareness news Web sites; 2 million of the most influential bloggers; and more than 6,000 message boards.