None of what goes on in the evening has anything to do with government. The president and the Congress are discussed as omnipresent villains in a fairytale that begins with a happy kingdom of worthies, introduces an ogre, a witch, and a curse, and then interviews champions to come forward to rescue the frightened children and save the USA. All the while, Ming the Merciless, aka Rupert Murdoch, rakes up the ratings and the bucks.

The worst mistake Axelrod and Emanuel are making by confusing Fox News with the Republican Party is that they are confusing campaigning with entertaining and then letting this mistake blind them to the fact that the White House is for governing, not just staging.

Fox News is not in the news business; it’s in show business. The Republican Party, like its blood kin the Democratic Party, is in the campaign business. The White House is in the government business, though, from the evidence so far, it doesn’t know how to break out of the campaign business.

It all sounds rather logical to me. I’ve never been thought “taking on the media” was a particularly good idea. The winner in this struggle is surely Rupert Murdoch, who gets richer by the hour.

I’ve never really had a player well suited to listening to podcasts before, but over the last two days I’ve been trying it out. And I was excited to find out how wonderful a tool this can be for those of us that have a somewhat more than average interest in political science. Now I can have political science lectures in debates in my ears all the time rather than just getting it in snippets on BBC or Norwegian broadcasting whenever they send something interesting. Now I can really cater to my nerdiness and be a political scientist even when out walking or skiing!

Henceforth, I will try to spread the gospel of political science podcasts through reviewing and recommending good podcast sources for political scientists from time to time. I’m currently trying out the podcasts from LSE, which show some real promise. A review will follow after I’ve listened through a couple of broadcasts and made up an opinion.

I agree with Andrew Gelman who comments that this surprises him. I would expect their coverage of the polls to show some bias, but had expected the polls themselves to be done in a professional way eliminating personal biases. This apparently goes to show that being completely neutral is difficult if not impossible, even in quantitative analysis.

Yes, say Norwegian newspapers. The reason they all agree is of course because they all quote their favourite expert, professor Ole O. Moen from the University of Oslo. To Dagsavisen, for example, he says he thinks it will now take a real or imagined terror threat for Obama to lose. He doesn’t think Obama is going to make any big enough mistakes.  But with a single expert being quoted across the board I thought I’d look around a bit.

I assumed I could rely on Fox News to bring me predictions that didn’t favour that black yuppie, but their website did little more than confuse me. They were more interested in telling me that the great-great-great-granddaughter of a slave on McCain’s ancestor’s farm is now a psychology professor.

The Washington Post seems to think Obama will win. Among other things, they can tell us how McCain’s got trouble with media as Obama gets all the endorsements and the great maverick himself is starting a fight with the NYT. Just in case the unthinkable should happen and McCain wins, the Post has posted (ha-ha) some emergency help to journalists to help explain it. At least they list possible reasons why things might take an unexpected turn.

Time Magazine highlights an alternative strategy that might help McCain: redefining the states. If you exclude the parts of a state that doesn’t like you, then you’re actually winning. Unfortunately it’s tougher than you’d think to take away the voting rights of half a state (unless they’re Florida of course). Time’s Karen Tumulty takes a look at what McCain’s followers are doing, which seems to be mostly trying to discredit people that don’t agree with them. A sign that they think they’re losing she claims. This still doesn’t seem to get very exciting.

CNN highlights “the Bradley effect” aka. “the Wilder effect” that’s been discussed a lot. They think we might have to take about 6 points off Obama’s total because of the color of his skin. That’ll surely make the race closer. Independent expert Michelle Obama did however tell Larry King that she thinks things have changed since Bradley lost his election.

What about the professor bloggers out there? Larry M. Bartels shows us that we have to account for some fairly large errors in the poll predictions. Perhaps things might get exciting still? But alas, it seems that most of these effects seem to point to the fact that Obama has actually got a bigger lead than it seems…

Another political scientist looking to history for help is John Cohen. Reagan was hopelessly behind Carter on the polls in late October when he became president, but he won by 10 points. Might McCain be a new Reagan..? Well, Reagan won by crushing Carter in a presidential debate. With the last debate over I think we can safely say that McCain did no such thing…

Tom Holbrook doesn’t promise much excitement either. His predictions for the electoral college is currently at 354-184 in Obama’s favor.

Some times the simplest argument is the best. Didobamawin.com offers compelling simplicity. That nagging feeling at the back of my head seems to agree with their “not yet” in huge letters… I’ll still be paying attention.

And in case you need divine advice, here’s some: www.godhatesobama.com – not your usual zealot hate-campaign.

(Special thanks to The Monkey Cage for some good sources for this post.)

Current numbers (September 30th 2008):
Obama: 106 articles, +29 balance
McCain: 73 articles, -3 balance

It does however seem clear as well that this enthusiasm doesn’t translate into a campaign against McCain. The coverage of McCain’s campaign seems well-balanced, with the number of negatively and positively angled articles roughly balancing each other out.

The Republican convention seemed to be a changing point. Before this the coverage of Obama’s campaign outweighed McCain’s by much more. A significant “Palin effect” seems to account for much of this. Palin has grabbed a major part of the media attention after her appointment. First impression, without having done actual counting is that she has contributed much to volume of articles, but that the positive and negative coverage balances out. After her appointment as VP candidate, it was largely positive, but as the novelty of her candidature has faded, she seems to attract more and more negative focus.

A complete exported table of the data can be found here in Microsoft Word format:080930_uselectiontable This is available in other formats on request.

The saved information is the date, title of the article in Norwegian, my translation into English, the URL, the name of the newspaper and an encoding of bias towards each candidate, where 0 means it’s roughly balanced, 1 means it’s mainly positive while -1 means it’s mainly negative. The “balance” statistic I use is merely the sum of these numbers for each candidate, while the count statistic is the number of non-empty fields for each candidate.

On article titles I might add that I started out not translating, but rather describing in one sentence in English, and changed to more or less literal translaitons later on. Also some articles have different headlines on the newspaper front page and main page. In such cases I’ve picked one more or less at random. In other words, too much shouldn’t be read into article titles.

My hypothesis is that Norwegian media would favor any Democratic candidate very strongly over his or her Republican counterpart. I assume this to be a representation of the general opinion of the Norwegian public. I further assume that in this election, this favoritism will benefit Barack Obama greatly.

As the table above shows, the data so far supports this hypothesis quite clearly. With about 130 articles entered, the Obama campaign appears to have had about twice the coverage the McCain campaign has as counted in the number of articles. Furthermore, the amount of of positive coverage outweighs the negative coverage for both candidates, but much more so for Obama than McCain.

The research method is quite simple. I read the online edition of three different Norwegian newspapers frequently. Every time I come across an article on the American election in one of these newspapers, I enter it into a database marking whether the article gives a positive, balanced or negative presentation of each candidate and his policies. I then count the number of articles covering each candidate (they quite frequently overlap)

These three newspapers, Aftenposten, Adresseavisen and Dagsavisen represent both the left and right wing on the political scale, are published in two different cities and have a varying mix of local, regional, national and international news. All three are among the less tabloid Norwegian newspapers.

I will most likely not pick up every article on this topic from the newspapers in question. I do however assume that systematical differences in which articles I notice are created mostly from the different priority these articles get in the corresponding newspaper. I consider such differences of priority to be part of the editorial profile of the publication in question, and thus not a source of error to the research.

As of now, there is also a small gap in the coverage between September 5th and 18th, that I will remedy over the next few days. When this is done, I will publish the entire database table for anyone to examine the data on their own.

Expect more to follow on this topic when I have more time available.