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Project for Excellence in Journalism
Blogs Focus on Obama Critics
From public protests to race to health care, domestic issues dominated the commentary from bloggers last week. Combined, the three topics made up almost half (46%) of the links the week of Sept. 14-18, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
It was not a discussion of the issues themselves, however, but a debate about the motives and extent of the president's opposition that drove the conversation online. That debate was triggered by a remark about race and politics, a large protest in Washington D.C. and a censure of a congressman who heckled Obama. The events and ensuing commentary rolled out sequentially during the course of the week.
First, on Monday, came the response to the Tea Party protests held in Washington, D.C. over the weekend. Many bloggers voiced sympathy with the protestors and accused much of the media of downplaying a major event. While they had largely moved on to other matters after Monday, the subject still ranked third for the week, receiving 13% of the links.
On Tuesday it was a health care story about recent poll numbers that drove bloggers' assessments of Obama's political fortunes. A second story about congressional action taken against Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) for his outburst during the president's Sept. 9 speech on health care triggered additional discussion on Thursday. Together the two health care stories ranked fifth for the week at 5%.
On Wednesday, the biggest topic of the week emerged, garnering 28% of the links. It was the reaction to statements by former President Jimmy Carter that racism played a role in some of the opposition toward Obama. Much of the online commentary took Carter to task for those sentiments.
Together, the discussion surrounding these three storylines amounted to a week spent in large part in assessing the president's standing with the American public.
Some of these topics also showed up prominently in other social media outlets, including Twitter and YouTube. On YouTube, the second-most-viewed news video was of CNN correspondent Lisa Desjardins being drowned out during a live report from the Tea Party protests, while the fourth-most-viewed video was of the Joe Wilson incident during the Sept. 9 speech. On Twitter, the report about Carter's remarks on race was the fifth-largest subject of the week, receiving 6% of the news-focused links.
The political focus in the blogosphere was also echoed in the mainstream press. According to PEJ's News Coverage Index, the health care debate was the top subject, filling 17% of the week's newshole, while questions about Obama and race constituted the fourth-largest subject at 5%.
The two other stories that received significant attention in blogs last week were of a very different nature and involved celebrities. The second-largest story, with 16% of the week's links, was the death of Patrick Swayze from pancreatic cancer. Bloggers shared their favorite memories and movies of the actor and dancer.
The fourth-largest story (9%) involved British comedian Eddie Izzard who had just finished an amazing achievement of running 43 marathons in 51 days, despite limited training and preparation.
On Twitter, the trend of users focusing on technology stories, most specifically Twitter itself, continued. The top story, with 19% of the news-related links, detailed how users will soon be able to make phone calls on Twitter with a new third-party application known as Jajah@call. This is the sixth time in the last seven weeks that a story about Twitter has finished among the top three subjects.
The second-largest topic on Twitter (at 12%) involved several stories about a different social networking site: Facebook. These included stories about the coming of a voice-chat option to the site along with a CNN video about a new function called "status tagging."
Obama and Racism
When Jimmy Carter said in a Sept. 15 speech at Emory University that race was playing a role in some of the protests and opposition to Obama, it served as a trigger for a heated online debate.
Some bloggers said it took courage for Carter to voice such statements.
"I'm glad he said it because that is the ‘elephant in the living room' and it took a Southern white gentleman with nothing to lose to put that reality on the table," applauded Ellie Finlay at the blog Child of Illusion. "[A] lot of the hysteria out there is about race -- especially all that nonsense about people keeping their children home from school to keep them from seeing their president give a speech on television."
"This perception of [Obama] as ‘the other' has to have an effect on their level of anger and yes, fear," agreed Mauigirl. "The continual claims that Obama is a Muslim, that he wasn't born in this country despite all the evidence that he was, are evidence of this. When people protested against FDR, LBJ or Clinton, this aspect was not part of the conversation."
More common, though, was criticism of Carter's claims, and some bloggers attacked Carter personally.
"Our opposition to Pres. Obama's policies is not about race," declared blogger Jeffrey A. Setaro. "We simply have fundamentally different vision of the role government and as Americans we have a God given, constitutionally protected right to disagree."*
"Carter's words only show what an idiot, and removed from reality, Carter has become," affirmed Common Fold Using Common Sense. "This is an important issue, for it illuminates exactly why the Obama's poll numbers are falling like a rock ... The Left just cannot understand, not accept, that the problem between the Obama administration and Joe Sixpack is not race, but rather that the general public does not like what Obama is saying in his speeches and does not like the direction he is trying to move the country."
"You'd think Carter would be a little more careful when slinging around charges of racism," wrote Sharon at the blog Gold-Plated Witch on Wheels. "But Carter, at 85, is a bitter, twisted, nasty individual who should be the first volunteer for the death panels. Yes, I said that."
The Size of the Tea Party Protests
Many of the bloggers who commented on the Sept. 12 protests asserted that the event represented a major groundswell of opposition to the president.
Initially, some also hammered the media for failing to cover such a big event and argued that the press underestimated the size of the crowd. Many linked to a Washington Post report that stated that "tens of thousands" of protestors turned up to protest Obama and express concerns that the country was moving toward socialism.
"They [the Washington Post] refused to actually receive an estimate of the people involved in the rally," complained Jason at the Tree of Liberty. "I gave my estimate based on the area covered with people at around 1 million (1.5M assuming even coverage of the space involved) ... One thing is certain: local law enforcement was not ready for the sheer volume of people."
"There was a huge protest in DC with an estimated 1.3 to 2 million people descending on the Capitol to protest out of control government and its out of control spending," wrote Big Dog's Weblog. "The protests were about the health care overhaul as well as the stimulus, the cap and trade and all the other items that have led to a deficit of 1.3 TRILLION dollars. People have awakened to how out of control government is, a condition that is not specific to any one party."
Eventually, independent media reports concluded that the attendance was smaller than many bloggers had estimated and more in line with the mainstream media reports. As the fact-checking site PoliFact.com detailed, many bloggers had originally relied on a picture to show the size of the protest which was actually of a 1997 rally. A number of bloggers had also cited ABC News, which they said estimated the crowd size as large as 1.5 million. The network, however, issued a report saying it was falsely quoted and never claimed the crowd was that large.
A few bloggers, including Big Dog's Weblog, revised their estimates, even if they also used the occasion to criticize their political opponents.
After acknowledging that many of the initial crowd reports were not supported, Michelle Malkin added, "If only [the left] were as vigilant about policing other figures -- e.g., the "47 million uninsured" statistic..."
For more on the New Media Index, including the week’s top YouTube videos and methodology, see journalism.org.
*For the sake of authenticity, PEJ has a policy of not correcting misspellings or grammatical errors that appear in direct quotes from blog postings.