Sunday, March 11, 2012

Who's Making News?

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


The Washington Post has a feature called "The Mention Machine" which tracks the amount of times that the presidential candidates are mentioned in the mainstream media and on Twitter on a weekly basis.  The numbers are interesting, but not entirely what I would have expected.

Last week President Obama led the pack in mainstream media mentions, not surprising since he is the President of the United States and not just some right-wing wannabe.  Mr. Obama had 13,854 mentions followed by Mitt Romney with 7,389, Little Ricky Santorum with 5,660, Newt Gingrich with 4,262, and the man the media most likes to ignore - Ron Paul - with 2,744.

But when it came to what real people were talking about - on Twitter - things changed.  There Mitt Romney had 179,237 mentions, the President came in a close second with 170,300, Little Ricky was again third with 107,440, Ron Paul moved into fourth with 98,915, and Newt finished last with 68,666.

What would really be interesting would be if the Post had some way of sorting those Twitter mentions into positive, neutral, and negative.  That might tell us more than the national polls, and it would certainly get the Twitter freaks banging harder on their keyboards!

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