Mainstream media coverage of political candidates has long been rich soil for comment, in the blogosphere and in the mainstream media. Issues of bias (conscious or un) are flogged because everyone thinks their side is not represented fairly.

One such issue is that while the newsworthiness of a candidate determines the coverage, the level of coverage determines the newsworthiness. The more famous you make someone, the more you need to cover them. Those of us playing the game from home have a tough time deciding how much we have been influenced.

Coverage starts then with the judgement within the organization of the newsworthiness of a candidate (the name Dennis Kucinich comes readily to mind, although it did not come so readily it seems to the minds of assignment editors and their publishers).

Knowing that the Washington Post would provide continuous coverage of the primaries, and that a group of experienced reporters would be providing the coverage, we thought it would be useful (and perhaps entertaining) to see just what the differences in the coverage of the major candidates would be throughout the presidential primary season.

In the interest of containing the scope of work involved, we examined each Sunday edition as well as each edition on the day following a primary election - 21 newspaper editions in all, over a period of nearly four months. We specifically chose to review the print edition each time, as the online versions may be changed over a period of days following the initial posting.

Say my name, say my name

Trying for a method that would be relatively objective, we simply counted each time the name of the candidate appeared, in a range of forms. Thus, 'Senator Clinton,' 'Clinton' [Hillary, not Bill], 'Hillary.' But not 'she,' 'the candidate,' 'the senator.' Of course, some of the references were pejorative, as when Senator McCain was covered disparaging Senator Obama's stand on, say, immigration. If he was quoted as saying 'Senator Obama,' that counts as an Obama mention. We did not factor in the sense in which a name was used.

When we started, the field had been reduced to four major candidates, although some other people were still on the ballot. Within a very short while, Governor Huckabee was clearly fading - in press mentions, and in the primary results - so we dropped him from the game.

We included all mentions, including headlines, photo captions, banners as well as any articles regardless of their focus. Here's the result:

When the number of mentions of each candidate are tallied through the period, you get a clearer idea of the level of coverage.

That is, Clinton and Obama were dead even until early April, at which point the Obama mentions in each edition exceed those for Clinton by about 30% each time. By the end of the series, Senator Obama had been mentioned by name 1,261 times while Senator Clinton got named 1,071 times, and Senator McCain 418.

This despite the fact that in the period from April through early June, Senator Clinton won many major primaries and got more votes than Senator Obama. She was, throughout this period, said to be increasingly unlikely to be the nominee. That may have driven the coverage. And complaints from her supporters.

McCain may fairly be said to have been less newsworthy since he was not involved in the competitive campaign that was raging within the Democratic Party, but the Post has far fewer mentions of McCain from the outset.

Featured players

Much of the coverage that provided the data above was not specifically focused on one or another player. We kept track of the focus, and pulled out the following information about articles that were clearly about one or another of them.

When the numbers are accumulated, we find that in fact there were just about the same number of articles about Clinton as about Obama, and that in the end, Clinton slightly exceeded - 20 articles to 19, with McCain having had 10. We kept track of the bylines - there were at least 19 different reporters covering the primaries for the Post - and find no correlation between byline and mentions. Shailagh Murray (Obama), Alec MacGillis (Obama) and Anne E. Kornblut (Clinton) provided the bulk of the articles featuring one candidate or another.

So ....

What are we to make of this? Roughly equal numbers of articles, while Obama is increasingly mentioned more within them? Media covering the newsworthy, or media making news?

(Dave Sagarin, June 19, 2008)