US Election 2008 Campaign Draws to an End – What Can We Learn from Online Media?

[1](Vienna, 4 November 2008). The latest analyses of the US Election 2008 Web Monitor shed light on fundamental differences in the online media coverage about the Democratic and Republican candidates. In the home stretch of the campaign, Barack Obama manages to defend his lead by capturing 42% of media attention (John McCain: 35%). The nominations of Sarah Palin and Joe Biden as running mates have clearly intensified the race. While Senator Biden's activities resulted in comparably few (5%) but consistently favorable articles, Sarah Palin managed to attract remarkable 18% of news media attention by the end of October. Various reports about her family, alleged abuse of authority and several controversial interviews explain not only the high attention values, but also the deteriorating media sentiment.

[2]"Our recent media statistics underline the dominance of the major parties", explains Prof. Arno Scharl from the Department of New Media Technology at MODUL University Vienna. "Neither the official Anglo‐American news media nor political bloggers, Fortune 1000 companies or environmental activist organizations devote significant attention to smaller political groups. The Green Party's McKinney/Clemente ticket, for example, is virtually non‐existent on the Web sites of the mentioned stakeholder groups. In the rare cases that they are indeed mentioned, however, it is usually in a positive context."

[3]The recent trends can be tracked via the US Election 2008 Web Monitor, a Web portal available at www.ecoresearch.net/election2008 [1] that has recently been awarded the First Prize in the category “Online Communities, Web 2.0 and Social Networks” of the Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-Business. The project, which processes more than 800,000 documents per week, is funded by FIT‐IT Semantic Systems and operated by MODUL University Vienna, the Vienna University of Economics & Business Administration, and Graz University of Technology.

Online Resources
US Election 2008 Web Monitor | www.ecoresearch.net/election2008 [1]

Contact
Prof. Arno Scharl, MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology, Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Vienna, Austria
scharl@modul.ac.at [6] | www.modul.ac.at/nmt [7]