Norwegian media loves Obama, but doesn’t hate McCain September 30, 2008
Posted by Sverre in : US Presidential election , comments closed
As I wrote about some days ago, I’ve been gathering data on the Norwegian media coverage of the US Presidential Election. I’m now up to date with all registering of data, and have taken a little more time to analyze it. With 154 registered articles, the main conclusion still stands: Norwegian media favours Barack Obama both in volume and in positivity of the coverage.
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. (more…)
The finance crisis: How can the US Congress do nothing? September 30, 2008
Posted by Sverre in : Political economy, World politics , comments closed
The finance crisis certainly took a turn for the unexpected today when the US House of Representatives turned down the $700 billion rescue package proposed by president Bush. Of course it was controversial for USA to consider this in the first place, given that they have been the largest driving force in pushing the International Monetary Fund to try and discourage other governments from doing the same in times of crisis. Wall Street seems to have expected them to go through with it this time though, as the news brought the biggest plummet in stock prices in American history. So how could they possibly risk the crisis getting even worse?
There are a lot of different reasons, possibly as many as the 227 congressmen that voted against. Here are a few. Off the top of my head I’ll try to point to a few. (more…)
Yes, Tun Mahathir – we can fault the BN concept and governance September 21, 2008
Posted by Sverre in : Malaysia, World politics , comments closed
In this post on his blog chedet.com, former Malaysian Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamad, of whom I have previously written quite a bit asserts his claims that the recent election losses by the Barisan Nasional coalition have been caused by loss of confidence in the BN leadership rather than because of genuine support for the opposition.
His analysis is for the most part sound. It makes sense that people would vote for a genuine opponent rather than a utopian third party candidate if what they wanted was to punish the BN. I believe he is right that at least a good portion of the opposition votes were the result of BN disillusionment. I do however think he underestimates the genuine support in Malaysia for reform, and most importantly I think he is mistaken with regard to his final point:
14. We cannot fault the BN concept and governance. We have to look elsewhere for the loss of confidence in the party.
For reasons I have discussed at much more length earlier, there are several things that make me believe that the very UMNO (and BN) system is unsustainable in the long run: (more…)
Norwegian media loves Obama September 20, 2008
Posted by Sverre in : US Presidential election, World politics , comments closedWith an estimated 23.000 eligible American voters, it isn’t likely the American presidential election will be decided in Norway. Still, there is a great interest in it. USA’s decisions, especially with regards to the economy and foreign policy affect the entire world. This year I’ve started my own little informal and quasi-scientific research project to see how Norwegian media covers the American election.
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.
| Obama | McCain |
| # of articles | 96 | 50 |
| Bias points | 28 | 4 |
| Data extracted on: | 20. september 2008 |
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.
(more…)