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Project for Excellence in Journalism
Are Candidate Web Sites Propaganda or News?
With its early start and crowded field, the 2008 presidential campaign has generated an extensive amount of media coverage. Since the beginning of the year, the race to become the 44th president of the United States has been the second-biggest story, trailing only the debate over Iraq war strategy.
But the mainstream media are not the only information source for citizens seeking news about the candidates. The campaigns themselves, through their official websites, seem to be challenging the press as a destination for campaign news. Furthermore, these highly interactive sites are facilitating everything from blogging to fundraising to social networking.
To get a sense of what these sites offer and how the candidates use them, The Project for Excellence in Journalism conducted a detailed study of the official websites of all 19 announced presidential candidates -- eight Democrats and 11 Republicans.
We found that the online campaign is clearly a two-way conversation between candidate and voter and often even among voters themselves. The content on the sites focuses more on issues than the "horse race" tactics that often interest the mainstream media. On the other hand, these sites are self-serving and lack traditional journalism's scrutiny, balance and ability to compare candidates against one another.
Among the key findings:
- Democrats lead Republicans in using their Web sites to get visitors involved in the campaign by encouraging them to engage in the dialogue and to participate in grassroots activity. Barack Obama is the clear leader here, followed by Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Bill Richardson.
- Perhaps the most fundamental grassroots activity of all, getting people to register to vote, is surprisingly lacking on these candidate sites. Only four candidates--Hillary Clinton, John Cox, John McCain and Barack Obama--feature information or tools to register to vote on their sites.
- In their choice of language, there were some notable differences between Republicans and Democrats. The GOP candidates emphasize such words as "leadership," "taxes," and "values" while Democrats stressed "children," "family" and "protect."
- When the candidates are talking about themselves, there are certain words that they have chosen to ignore. Nowhere to be found in the biographies are "God," "moral," and "progressive." No Democrat uses the word "liberal", and even Republican front runners shy away from using "conservative." Hillary Clinton almost entirely avoids mentioning her husband.