Perhaps Headlines Tell the True Story

By Glenn Fannick
Dow Jones Insight Staff

Our favorite media metric for measuring election coverage comes from counting headlines. This seems to be a good yardstick by which we can measure what the media considers to be the most important parts of the election story each day and what the blogging community is countering with. We see this as a measure of what’s top-of-mind for the editors and bloggers. This week when counting all headline mentions of either candidate, we found 31,193 across all media. A decisive 63% of those were Obama mentions to 37% McCain mentions. (Headlines mentioning both men were essentially counted twice, once for each of them.)

Bloggers are very much still focused on Obama with the split there this week at 66% to 34%.The mainstream press is slightly more even-handed with a 61% to 39% breakdown, again favoring Obama.