An Automated Approach to Investigating the Online Media Coverage of US Presidential Elections

This paper presents the US Election 2004 Web Monitor, a public Web portal that captured trends in political media coverage before and after the 2004 US 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 half a million documents in weekly intervals (www.webLyzard.com). The study paid particular attention to the editorial slant, defined as the quantity and tone of a Web site’s coverage as influenced by its editorial position. The observable attention and attitude towards 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.