McCain Pushes Palin on Home Page
Project for Excellence in Journalism's Pew Research Center studies presidential nominees' Web sites.
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/15/2008 9:02:00 AM MT
Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) is featuring his vice-president pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, prominently on his Web site, while generally downplaying links to mainstream media coverage over its own press releases.
That's in contrast to Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's (Ill.) Web site, according to a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism's Pew Research Center.
But while Obama continues to lead in the online campaign department -- Obama has six times as many MySpace friends, for example, and five times as many Facebook pals as McCain -- McCain, who has gotten the label of somewhat Internet-challenged, is closing the digital divide with his opponent, according to PEJ.
While Obama has had a well-organized and multifaceted online strategy from the get-go -- including for fund-raising, organizing and keeping supporters in the loop, the PEJ said -- the McCain campaign has been taking strides to catch up, including adding content and functions, such as social-networking tools, since the Republican convention two weeks ago.
The PEJ pointed out that while Obama's VP pick of veteran politician Sen. Joe Biden (Del.) gets only brief highlights on his site, McCain's high-profile pick of relative unknown Palin "heavily" promotes her.
It also found that while the Obama campaign site "often" links to mainstream media stories, the McCain site "links instead to campaign-generated press releases."
A quick check of McCain's site did find that Palin was featured more prominently in the “Photos of the Week” section than McCain, figuring in all but one that was not a crowd shot and getting two photos without McCain in them, while McCain only had one without Palin in the frame. But the latest news section had five news stories and five press releases, for a 50/50 balance, while Obama’s "In the News" site had five news stories and seven press releases.
But the PEJ was looking beyond those "news" sections to how the sites presented the news in general.
It concluded, based on an August analysis, that the McCain site was "far more likely than the Obama site to use its own press releases for news posts rather than media reports," finding that "about 40% of the news posts on the McCain site were their own press releases versus just 12% on the Obama news page."
It also found that the McCain home page links to campaign-produced media like the aforementioned Photos of the Week, which it said are primarily taken by campaign staffers.
"In contrast," the PEJ said, "the Obama home-page news section (Obama News) usually links directly to mainstream media news excerpts from the home page."
But the blog on the home page is given prominence over the news section, comprising two-thirds of the content on the page and with a daily “Morning News” post with excerpted articles from the mainstream press.
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John McCain, who would not sell his soul to win his party's nomination, is ready to sell every...
politicjock - 2008-15-9 13:33:00
