Obama Coverage Trending Upward as McCain’s Remains Flat

By Glenn Fannick
Dow Jones Insight Staff

The trend lines of daily headline coverage of the two candidates for September 1 through October 20 show a very clear story – McCain’s gains in September have disappeared and as each day progresses through October Obama widens the gap.

Headline mentions, as we’ve written before, are a telling indicator of what the media and bloggers think the main focus of the events of the day should be.

Overlaying a linear trend line atop these daily counts, as shown here, shows more clearly the direction the volume counts are moving.

The three most recent spikes in coverage, just following September 26, October 7 and October 15, are a result of more coverage in the days after the three presidential debates. After the first debate, McCain picked up many more headline mentions than Obama. But after the other two debates, including the October 15 event, which many say was McCain’s strongest showing, more headlines were written about Obama than McCain. And in the days since, the gap has been growing.

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 Media Giving Equal Coverage – Except in the Headlines

By Glenn Fannick
Dow Jones Insight Staff

For the first time since the 2008 presidential campaign became a two-man race, there is almost exact parity between the individual mentions of Obama and McCain when analyzing coverage in local print and broadcast media in three groups of states -- Red States, Blue States and Swing States.

However, the more interesting numbers are found, as we have reported before, when analyzing only headline mentions. In the seven-day period from September 30 to October 7, Dow Jones Insight identified approximately 22,000 headline-mentions of one or the other candidate.

By this measure, Obama is having more impact in local mainstream press than is McCain. Headlines can be seen as a proxy for what the press thinks is most important and therefore of what consumers of the media will consciously or subconsciously digest most easily. In the current analysis, we see a greater disparity in the Red States (Obama at 56% to McCain at 44%) than we do in the Blue States (Obama leading 53% to 47%). In the Swing States Obama’s lead is 54% to 46%.

Overall, when factoring in blogs, message boards, and national and international English-language media, coverage is leaning slightly toward McCain in the past seven days (51%-49%) but that’s coming mostly from a two-percentage-point difference in social media. With social media removed the breakdown is nearly dead-even.

Internationally, the English-language mainstream media is not evenly split. Obama leads in Europe, Africa and South America, and McCain has a razor-thin lead in the Pacific Rim.

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.

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.

It's all there in black and white -- Clinton Tallies Drop Dramatically

By Glenn Fannick
Dow Jones Insight Staff
A low point in press coverage for Hillary Clinton came on Friday May 16.

That day marked one of the lowest tallies in headline coverage for her in quite a while. Her name only made it to the top of 67 articles found in the more than 6,000 mainstream publications analyzed by Dow Jones Insight. That day’s data also showed that John McCain passed her in headline coverage for the first time in months, with 174 articles mentioning him in the headline.

The gap between Clinton and Obama in headline counts also became dramatic Friday -- Obama had 322 articles with his name in a large font. Not since March 21 (when Obama was getting headlines because of his passport records being breached) was the gap so large between him and Clinton in headline mentions.

And it isn't just headline writers who are focusing less on Clinton as her presidential goal continues to fade. The total number of raw mentions of the three candidates in the mainstream media also shows Clinton slipping out of the picture. During the period of Thursday to Monday, May 15-19, Obama has clearly opened a gap with Clinton in journalist mindshare. Obama had 8,203 mentions in that period to Clinton’s 5,537. During the previous Thursday to Monday, the two were nearly evenly matched in raw mentions.
Methodology: Total media coverage includes analysis of more than 6,000 publications. The concept of “mentions” is a tally of individual occurrences of the candidate’s name within the body of the article.