Coverage Pendulum Back To Obama

The latest from the Dow Jones Insight-2008 Presidential Election Media Pulse:

According to results from the Dow Jones Insight—2008 Presidential Election Media Pulse, the coverage pendulum has swung back toward Barack Obama on the key tracked issues associated with the election – where it had been for much of the campaign season prior to the Palin and convention bump in September.

In the nearly 20,000 mainstream media and 2 million social media sources analyzed, the candidates’ names occurred in conjunction with one or more of the 26 tracked issues 1,395,917 times in the past 30 days, up slightly from 1,394,277 in the previous 30-day period.

Read the rest after the jump…and see the Pew Center’s latest media study here.

The latest analysis (September 12 through October 12) shows that Obama drew higher coverage on 10 issues to McCain’s 9, gaining the lead in six categories (bailout, faith, abortion, immigration and same-sex marriage, all formerly too close to call, plus NAFTA, which McCain had led in coverage in the last analysis). McCain stayed at nine, losing NAFTA but adding Iran, which was formerly a tie.

In our previous analysis covering the period September 8 through October 8, half of the 26 major issues tracked by Dow Jones Insight had become too close to call, and of the other half, McCain had outpaced Obama by 9 to 4 in terms of share of coverage on each issue. However, in our most recent analysis, the two candidates essentially split ownership of the issues, with Obama grabbing a one-issue lead, and the number of issues that were once too close to call shifted from 13 to seven.

In this analysis, only a few of the issues themselves saw significant increases in overall coverage, relative to the other issues (this is defined as moving up or down the list by more than one spot). Those included taxes, which advanced two spots from last time, and Iran, which climbed three. Education and abortion each fell two places. Of the issues-related mentions:

• 47% were related to the economic crisis (up 3 percentage points)
  
• 22% were related to the candidates themselves (down 1 percentage point)
  
• 17% were related to non-economic domestic issues (down 1 percentage point)
  
• 14% were related to the wars and the Middle East (unchanged)

  *Note that figures in the previous period don’t total 100% due to rounding.

  Coverage of the Economy Outpaces All Other Issues Since Super Tuesday

  Analysis of 20,000 mainstream media sources tracked by Dow Jones Insight reveals that the economy has always been the top election issue since Super Tuesday, rarely falling behind other issues.

  Dow Jones Insight tracked mainstream media coverage for the eight months beginning on Super Tuesday, February 5, and found that:
  

• The economy and/or taxes drew the highest coverage in every week except in mid- to late-May, when McCain and Obama stepped up their dispute over whether or not to talk with Iran, and in late July, when Obama made his trip to the Middle East.
  
• The economy drew 109,356 mentions in mainstream press sources for the entire eight-month period, compared with 100,943 combined mentions of the four tracked issues related to the Middle East that drew the most coverage – Iraq (23,677), Iran (20,044), Afghanistan (21,279) and terrorism (35,943); meanwhile, the second most frequently occurring economic issue, taxes, generated 67,387 total mentions in the tracked timeframe.
  
• Breaking it down by month, the issue of the economy alone exceeded the total combined mentions of the four Middle East issues in five of the eight months analyzed. When the economy is combined with taxes, the two issues exceeded the four foreign-policy topics in six of the eight months, with May and July again being the exceptions.

  Newly Discovered Phrases Confirm Campaigns’ Past Shift Toward the Personal

  Over the past seven days, the majority of terms newly discovered by Dow Jones Insight appearing in relation to Obama largely reflect coverage of the McCain campaign’s efforts to tie Obama to former Weather Underground member William Ayers (with a total of 14,199 mentions). Additionally, the Obama team has made subsequent efforts to remind voters of McCain’s history with the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s and early 1990s (with a total of 5,454 mentions).

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