An Automated Approach to Investigating the Online Media Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections

Abstract

This paper presents the U.S. Election 2004 Web Monitor, a public Web portal that captured trends in political media coverage before and after the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Developed by the authors of this article, the webLyzard suite of Web mining tools provided the required functionality to aggregate and analyze about a half-million documents in weekly intervals. The study paid particular attention to the editorial slant, which is defined as the quantity and tone of a Web site's coverage as influenced by its editorial position. The observable attention and attitude toward the candidates served as proxies of editorial slant. The system identified attention by determining the frequency of candidate references and measured attitude towards the candidate by looking for positive and negative expressions that co-occur with these references. Keywords and perceptual maps summarized the most important topics associated with the candidates, placing special emphasis on environmental issues.

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