»TV coverage of the conventions (and the winner is… Hurricane Gustav!
Yesterday, I was wondering who got more national TV coverage during the Republican and the Democratic Conventions, so I decided to put the mostly-hidden graphing feature in SnapStream Enterprise through its paces.
I have a SnapStream Enterprise TV Server that records all national TV news programs (including financial news and sports news programs). I had it produce a graph of daily mentions of McCain, Palin, Obama and Biden. And then I took the graph it created (and, yes, I agree with you, our graphs are very ‘Lotus 1-2-3′ — we’re working on improving this) and added some annotations of my own:
(click to see a larger version)
My takeaways:
- Biden’s not getting much TV coverage! He had a big spike when he was announced as the Democratic VP candidate, but he hasn’t had much TV coverage after that.
- The Democratic VP nominee (Biden) got a bigger spike in coverage when he was announced than Republican VP nominee (Palin) did when she was announced, but…
- Palin’s overall received more coverage than Biden (this, in spite of Biden’s 1+ week head start)
- Obama received more coverage during the Democratic Convention than McCain received during the Republican Convention.
- Palin and McCain have been getting almost equal mentions on TV since the Republican Convention was kicked off. In contrast Obama is getting maybe 5x more mentions than his VP candidate!
- Finally, over labor day weekend, Hurricane Gustav killed nearly all discussion of the presidential campaigns!
So in conclusion, Gustav was the winner over the two conventions of the past two weeks! 
September 20th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Hey, this is interesting. It had never occured to me to do this kind of data mining with tv programming but that’s an amazing tool. Good job guys, and I never even knew you’d been working on this capability
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:31 am
I think it is really a shame that the news media will stop at nothing to be negative…………..You can not tell me that the Democrats have not spent money, a lot of it on their wardrobes, hair, travel comfort etc. Why only mention what Sarah is doing. I for one would rather see her represent us, than the very liberal press and or most of the democrats in this country. She is a REAL person and not just a mouth piece. And by the way she is not NEGATIVE about being a TRUE AMERICAN.
What ever she does, the liberal press will always make it negative. What a shame and how disappointing our news media is to have falllen so low in their profession.