Recognizing a purposeful media blackout.
With the Democratic primaries in full swing, many campaigns are making the necessary investments to attract more voters to their ranks.
Some candidates have good name recognition and others still struggle to reflect their popularity in official polls.
One could take the very pragmatic view that the media is interested in selling the “product” people want. In other words, if there is interest in one particular candidate, it is natural that such candidate will receive the most coverage. It is basic economics: Supply and demand.
But what happens when there is a disconnect between the supply and demand? Doesn’t it sound counter intuitive to suppress a candidate who has enough appeal? or giving time to candidates with no traction with the public?
Luckily in this day and age, data is readily available, and it is just a matter of putting it together. We can collect the information about the candidates for the last 3 months, and how many times they appeared in traditional media.
We can see from the graph that the top two candidates receiving most media attention are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Notice how Joe Biden’s mentions during this time is larger in most cases to all the other candidates combined.
And by using the Vanderbilt News Archive we can see that for the period of interest again Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders occupy the first and second place.
Well, this could be explained very easily: We The people want to know about Joe Biden. Don’t We?
To answer that question, we look at Google Trends, which tells us how the searches for the individual candidates compare. By compiling the cumulative results of all searches by the specific candidates we can generate the following pie chart.
One can see that Joe Biden has the most internet searches, with Pete Buttigieg in second, followed by Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris tied in third place. This easily explains the coverage these candidates are receiving. Three of the Top 4 most mentioned candidates are the top 4 of the most searched candidates. With Pete Buttigieg seemingly having less coverage than his internet-interest score would suggest.
While one could make the argument that Media mentions affect name recognition, this would be only a theory, and one would have to demonstrate the cause-and-effect (is name recognition a function of coverage, or is coverage a function of name recognition).
Instead, let us focus on the other candidates in this list. This is when things get really interesting.
From the point of view media attention, the next candidates in order of increasing popularity are: Elizabeth Warren, Howard Schultz, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Eric Swalwell, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill de Blasio, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro, and Tulsi Gabbard.
But wait a minute, if we organize the candidates by internet searches, the order is quite different: Pete Buttigieg (16%), Elizabeth Warren (9%), Beto O’Rourke (7%), Bill de Blasio (6%), Tulsi Gabbard (6%), Cory Booker (3%), Kirsten Gillibrand (2%), Howard Schultz, Eric Swalwell, and Amy Klobuchar tied with 1%, and Julian Castro rounding off to 0%
Furthermore, if we consider the total spent by the campaigns in digital advertisement (the corporate media numbers are not readily available), we can see the significant investments by Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden’s campaigns.
The expenditures per campaign are simply a proxy for “bought-access” to media, since the actual investments per campaign in traditional media are not available, this investments are simply listed because we are using google trends as the metric to see how popular a candidate is.
There is no question that Tulsi Gabbard from the point of view of google trends is in 8th place tied with Bill de Blasio, each one accumulating 6% of all the google searches for all candidates in the period of interest.
There seems to be a disconnect between what the market is asking and the coverage media is providing.
Why is the 8th most popular politician relegated to number 14th in mentions in the media? Are the other campaigns buying their way into relevance? The answer seems to be: Yes.
With the exception of Eric Swalwell, all the candidates with more media coverage have outspent Tulsi Gabbard in their digital investments. Howard Schultz does not have data available and he may be suspending his campaign altogether.
The source material is available to anyone with the inclination to verify this article, but I believe the data suggests one of two very troubling explanations:
- Tulsi Gabbard’s popularity is being suppressed by corporate media (given her google trend score she should be mentioned with a frequency similar that that of a top-8-candidate).
- Money can buy enough access to make campaigns without enough support to remain competitive in this race. Which exposes the role that money has in politics in our country.
The first step is to recognize what the problems are, stay informed and vigilant. Learn, research, and do not let others tell you what to think. I encourage people to take the time to look a the data presented here, the source material, and share their observations if they arrived to a different conclusion.
This is our civic duty: To become aware of the facts, and share them with our fellow citizens.
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