2005 Annual Report - Online Audience

During the 2004 election season, the Internet continued its evolution.

• Howard Dean, a strong contender heading into the Democratic primaries, raised $41 million from more than 95,000 people, about half of it through online donations.41

• Liberal Websites like Moveon.org and Meetup.com connected thousands of citizens all over the country during the election season; 180,000 Dean supporters used Meetup.com to organize and find meetings to support their candidate, according to the campaign.42

• Conservative groups like Move America Forward used both the Web and talk radio to urge citizens to boycott Michael Moore's controversial anti-war documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

• Because of a campaign-finance loophole that relaxed the ban on using soft money for online political advertising, both Republicans and Democrats were able to run campaign ads on the Internet, often humorous ones and longer than the traditional 30-second television ad.43

The Web still trails television and newspapers as the public's primary source of news, and that appeared to hold true in 2004 for election news. Nearly eight in ten (78%) indicated television as one of their main sources of campaign news, followed by newspapers (38%), radio (16%), Internet (15%), and magazines (4%), according to a poll conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.44

A Fox News poll conducted by Opinion Dynamics that asked people where they got their information about the presidential candidates during the middle of the Democratic primaries found similar media preferences. The Internet was the primary source for only 5%, a distant third to television (47%) and newspapers (17%). Two in ten (21%) said they received their election information from two or more different media forms.45

Primary Source of Campaign Information, 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll, ’’Voters Still Evenly Divided,’’ March 25, 2004

qu: Of the following, where do you get most of your information about the presidential candidates?

Nevertheless, use of the Web for the election year clearly grew in 2004. More than 40% of online users used the Internet to find political material during this campaign, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That was more than 50% higher than during the 2000 campaign season.46

The phenomenon of the blog - and the personalities behind the blogs - in the media in the 2004 election season perhaps elevated them to a position higher than their actual audience numbers might suggest. Few would doubt, however, that they had a significant impact on the online community. First, there was the astonishing organizational and fund-raising contribution blogs made to Howard Dean's campaign. Next, bloggers were credentialed for the presidential conventions like old-line print and broadcast outlets, their presence capturing a great deal of media coverage. And finally, blogs posted less than accurate poll numbers on Election Day, which gave Kerry supporters a momentary surge of confidence and even got the attention of Wall Street. In 2004, blogs proved that they are determined to be taken seriously even as the new medium experiences some rather difficult growing pains (see blog sidebar for a more in-depth discussion of blogs).

Several newspapers, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, added interactive features to their Web sites, in addition to extensive campaign coverage. For example, LATimes.com had an electoral map that displayed the latest state polling results and the most recent electoral breakdown, showing which states were for Kerry or Bush or were too close to call. The Times site and others also offered electoral maps that people could color in themselves to test different scenarios - what if Ohio goes for Kerry, what if Pennsylvania goes for Bush?

Other sites made an effort for their election coverage to be more reader-friendly rather than to "wow colleagues."47 For example, CNN.com's "Presidential Primary Preview" was praised for its simplicity and conciseness.

In addition to online election coverage from the news organizations, there were non-news sites created specifically to help citizens wade through it all. Factcheck.org, for example, is a program of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania run by Brooks Jackson, who formerly pioneered CNN's ad-watch reports.48 Factcheck.org considers itself a "nonpartisan, nonprofit consumer advocate for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics."49

Despite such advances, though, there is still a good deal of room for improvement. A Project for Excellence in Journalism election study in 2004 of the most popular news Web sites-including those of The New York Times, CNN, ABC, and USA Today - found that users were getting less original reporting than in 2000 and found interactivity still far from common.