28 October 2008

Bush Still Gets Some Press in this Election Frenzy

By Glenn Fannick
Dow Jones Insight Staff

The curse of the lame duck president – one who will be losing his power shortly – is well known. But how does that end-point impact the president’s coverage in the media?

The loss of attention for President Bush is starker in the social media landscape than in the traditional media. Dow Jones Insight found that Bush had an 11% share of voice, compared to Obama’s 49% and McCain’s 40%, when counting headline mentions from September 27 to October 26 in approximately 20,000 mainstream news publications and media Web sites. But in blogs, Bush hardly ever made it into the headlines, getting just 2% of all headline mentions of the three. Perhaps not a surprise, but even those sparse mentions are dismal, including such posts as “Sarah Palin Blames George Bush for Problems facing the Republican Campaign” and “Is Palin the new Bush?”

When the president has gotten mentioned in the mainstream media of late, it’s generally been in reference to the economy or the financial sector bailout. For the economy, from September 27 to October 26, Bush received a headline mention a bit less than one-third as often as either McCain or Obama, with 11,762 Bush mentions compared to 31,116 for McCain and 31,106 for Obama. For the bailout, the president saw much more comparable volumes, netting 11,310 headline mentions to McCain’s 15,138 and Obama’s 14,300. But for virtually all other issues, he wasn’t the focus at all.

Methodology: The data come from approximately 20,000 English-language mainstream media print and Web sources, more than 60,000 English-language message boards and 2 million blogs.




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

While Bush is leaving, somewhat quietly in the airwaves, there's an interesting article about a passing of the baton on foreign policy at
www.usmondaymorningnews.tk