Where Do You Get Your Campaign News?
Of course, like all truly-refined political junkies, I’m sure that The Moderate Voice is your one-stop-shopping choice for the best news and opinions. But looking beyond that, a new study out from the Pew Research Center examines where voters are getting their political and campaign news this year as compared to times past. Some of the results will likely come as no surprise to internet-savvy voters, but some of the items may come as a shock. Check out the results in the table below.
Television may have slipped 4%, but it is still the undisputed giant in the field. How TV news reports the campaign continues to shape the views of the vast majority of voters. The second category, though, brings us the largest shift. The internet has vaulted ahead of newspapers as a primary source of election news, registering a 23% jump over the last four years. For better or worse, more and more people (roughly 1/3 of Americans) are relying on the instant access, constantly updated news sites and thousands of blogs such as this one. Talk radio also showed a solid increase of 6%, though that’s likely to be found mostly in conservative circles.
The one number which may come as a real surprise is newspapers. They continue to suffer from a decline in circulation with reports of layoffs and papers going out of business greeting us each week. And yet, the number of people who indicate that they get their campaign information from newspapers actually crept up by one percent. I’m not sure if more people are actually reading the dead tree press or if their answers included reading the web sites of newspapers, but obviously the influence of newspapers has not yet ridden into the sunset.
It will be interesting to see how this study pans out in 2012 or 2016. With the ever-expanding availability of broadband and mobile devices connected to the web at high-speed, that 33% number may well shoot over 50 as the tech-savvy youngsters continue to age and the next, even more internet-based generation rises up and into the voting ranks.
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3 Responses to “Where Do You Get Your Campaign News?”
For me, I get different kinds of news from different media sources; for example, I rely on newspapers for local news, but almost never for national coverage. For radio, I use it for opinion and commentary, but rarely hard factual news.
One of the interesting discussions that has been going around the internet this political season is 'Do newspaper endorsements matter any more? – considering where everyone gets their information these days. Personally, I don't necessarily see newspapers as a *leader* and *molder* of opinions, but rather more as a *barometer* of the public mood and opinions. It's not so much that newspapers will sway anyone's opinions; instead they are a reflection of the community's ideas.
Currently, Obama leads McCain in the newspaper endorsement race 424 to 130, circulations of 38 million to 9 million. Among college newspapers, Obama leads McCain 63 to 1, and among alternative weeklies, 57 to 0 (not too surprising, except at how monolithic those numbers are). For newspapers that have changed their opinions between 2004 and 2008, Obama leads McCain 61 to 6, with several more papers that endorsed Bush in 2004 choosing no endorsement this year.
I've been updating all the newspaper endorsement info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsem… — most of the entries have links directly to the actual endorsements on the newspapers' websites. One thing I've noticed while adding entries to the list earlier today – for most of the past few weeks the endorsements have been running 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 in the tallies, but for late-breaking papers (i.e. this weekend), it's running closer to 1-to-1 with several larger-circulation papers making their decision for McCain late – and many of those editorials are parroting the 'socialist' argument or something like it. I got a feeling that the socialist thing may be striking a bit of a chord among voters, and McCain has been closing the gap slightly. Far, far too late to catch up, but the election on Tuesday may end up a bit closer than many people expect (especially as the Tuesday voters are tallied).
Hmmmm…. radio….. up 6% to 21%. If you listen to a streaming radio program on your computer, for the purposes of this survey, is that considered an increase in radio or a increase in internet? Or does it go under both buckets?
I think that it is awesome that someone like you is using Wikipedia as a media resource. You may also be interested in checking out http://www.sniki.org It is a wiki all about social media, online campaigns, and tracking tools.
Keep up the great posts.
Desarae