Obama Maintains Clear Lead over McCain in Media Mentions

By Glenn Fannick
Dow Jones Insight Staff

Barack Obama continues to be the candidate to beat as he goes week after week with more coverage than John McCain.

Not surprisingly, for much of the primary season, McCain took a back seat to the excitement of the race between Obama and his then rival Hillary Clinton. When Clinton stepped out of the spotlight, we started looking closely at the Obama-McCain tallies, expecting the numbers would get closer during the dog days of summer campaigning. And the numbers have tightened; but in most cases only modestly.

Over the past month, McCain has closed the gap, but he’s still maintaining his self-proclaimed “underdog” status when it comes to his count of individual mentions in the mainstream press and across social media, according to analysis conducted using Dow Jones Insight.

The basic measure of this is through total media mentions. In the seven-day period ending July 7, Dow Jones Insight tallied 90,882 mentions of either candidate across all media types. Obama racked up 56% of those mentions to McCain’s 44%.

Looking at a subset of the U.S. media – just newspapers and broadcast outlets in the Red States, Blue States and Swing States – we see a closer race. The analysis shows 54% for Obama and 46% for McCain in each of these three groups. In the past these numbers have always been close, but this is the first time we've noticed they are in lock-step, demonstrating to us that the media are on the whole not being swayed by the the voting tendancies of their audience.



When one considers just message boards and blogs, the numbers typically lean more toward Obama, though this week McCain cut three percentage points off Obama’s lead, making the social media breakdown 57% for Obama and 43% for McCain.



Methodology: Mainstream press sources include more than 6,000 newspapers, wires, magazines, radio and TV transcripts and more than 13,000 current-awareness news Web sites. Social media sources include 2 million of the most influential blogs and more than 60,000 message boards.

Local Press Continue to Show only Slightest Tendency to Reflect their Readers' Voting Records

By Glenn Fannick
Dow Jones Insight Staff

The Obama camp has been in general-election campaign mode for some time, seeing Clinton as no longer a threat some weeks ago. Therefore that's where our media analysis is focused.

When looking at how much media attention has been given to Obama versus McCain over the past few weeks, it really has been no contest. While McCain has been slowly gaining in press mentions each week at Clinton's expense, Obama continues to garner nearly two-thirds of mentions in the head-to-head comparison.

That doesn't change when dividing the country along the now-quite-familiar Red-Blue battle lines. The recent presidential voting records of the states continue to show only the slightest correlation with the volume of local press coverage a candidate receives.

When comparing John McCain's and Barack Obama's media mentions over the period of May 28 to June 4, we see McCain received about 40% of press mentions in Red States -- those which have voted Republican in the past four presidential elections -- and 39% in Blue States -- those with the opposite recent historical record.

Red State/Blue State Issues Coverage Similar But Shows Some Key Differences

By Dow Jones Insight Staff

With all the talk in the 2004 election about the differing concerns and electorates of Red States vs. Blue States, or those considered to be solidly democratic or republican states, Dow Jones Insight took a look at how the coverage by mainstream media in those states differed on some of the more controversial domestic “wedge” issues. (“Wedge” issues being social or political issues, often of a divisive or otherwise controversial nature, that split apart, or create a "wedge," in the support base of a political group.) While the results showed that the coverage had more in common than was different – on the issue of faith in particular – there were a few key areas where coverage levels between the two groups varied, in expected ways.

Blue States had more coverage about the environment (20% of total coverage for all candidates on the five wedge issues vs 18% in the Red States press) and on same-sex marriage (3% of total coverage on the issues vs 2% in the Red States press). Red States, meanwhile, had higher coverage on immigration (13% of all wedge issue coverage in Red vs 11% in Blue) and abortion (6% vs 5%). Faith was virtually equal, with Red States at 61% and Blue States at 60% on high volumes relative to the other issues.

The most noticeable differences overall involved McCain, who had higher coverage on immigration in the Red States press (20% of his total coverage on the five issues in Red States) than in Blue States (18% of his issues-related coverage), and higher coverage on same-sex marriage in Blue States (4% of all McCain coverage on the five issues) than in Red (3%), a small percentage overall but representing a disparity of 33%.

* Blue States are defined as those that were carried by the Democrats in all four of the most recent presidential elections: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin. Red States are defined as those that were carried by the GOP in all four of the most recent presidential elections: Alaska, Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming.

Methodology: Figures in Chart 3 reflect mentions of the three candidates in close proximity (about 50 words) to terms related to the five tracked issues occurring in newspapers, Web sites, and television and radio broadcasts originating in the states listed for each group. Note that not all 50 U.S. states are included in the two groups.