It's Not All About Obama
On a morning in which newspaper headlines and cable commentators focused on Barack Obama’s speech, the online universe once again demonstrated independence in its agenda.
Despite the drama of Obama’s Thursday night speech in a packed football stadium, only two of our five online bellwethers featured Obama’s acceptance address as their top story Friday morning. And despite the mantra that information is instantaneous and fleeting in cyberspace, two of those top online stories were about events that occurred before the Obama speech.
To get a sense of the online buzz during the conventions, PEJ is monitoring five online destinations each morning at 9 a.m. The sample includes the top political headline on the Drudge Report, top political headline on the Huffington Post, the political story most linked to by bloggers in the previous 48 hours, according to the blog aggregating site Technorati, the most emailed political story on Yahoo! News, and the most viewed political video on YouTube.
Seizing on a key phrase in Obama’s address, the Huffington Post headline was “The American Promise.” The liberal blog site then used iconic old media imagery—morning newspaper headlines—to capture reaction to the speech.
The story that Yahoo! News users had most emailed to friends, in turn, was an Associated Press transcript of the Democratic nominee’s speech. That marked the second time the most emailed item was a unfiltered account of a major address void of punditry and commentary, the other being a transcript of Hillary Clinton’s Tuesday speech.
The top Drudge Report headline during the convention has consistently pointed forward to the next big development rather than offering a post-mortem on the last. That was true on Friday, as well. Drudge took a stab at GOP vice-presidential prognostication with a headline “And the Mate Is…?” The answer was a mock campaign button with the images of John McCain and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. (The news that McCain had selected Palin, a dark horse in the veepstakes, broke later that morning.)
In the blogosphere more generally, for the second day in a row, the most linked to item, according to Technorati, concerned a story that had less to do with the horse race and more with the nature of the political process. It was the ABC account of one of its news producers being arrested for trying to film Democratic senators and major donors coming out of a meeting.
And the most popular video on YouTube—which has tended to capture two-day-old events—was an unscientific referendum on the Wednesday speeches. Former President Bill Clinton and Vice-Presidential nominee Joe Biden both delivered major prime time addresses that night. On YouTube, excerpts of the Clinton speech attracted about 400,000 views, roughly double the amount for Biden.
PEJ will continue the Convention Buzz Detector throughout both the Democratic and Republican gatherings.
Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ