How Obama lost the healthcare debate online
September 9th, 2009 -
Barack Obama understands online media. He showed his mastery of it during his successful run for the Presidency in 2008, marshalling everything from online donations, to volunteers for canvassing.
However, the fact is that as he prepares today for the make-or-break speech on healthcare reform he (and his blogger followers) have lost the initiative to the skeptics. Our research suggests that Obama – the candidate who wrote the rules for achieving political success on the Internet – has lost the argument online.
To show this Market Sentinel took just one strand of that debate (comparisons between Obama’s proposals and the UK’s NHS service) and used citation analysis to identify who has influence in relation to the topic. For the technically minded, this means that we crawl the internet looking for pages which are about the topic, then we track mutual references between people, institutions, entities mentioned in the context. The resulting structure gives us a mathematically verifiable measurement of “authority” in the context. This analysis began on August 28th and was completed on September 3rd. We have sorted the results according to a sentiment metric where the negative quadrants represent hostility to state run healthcare (as exemplified by the NHS) and the positive quadrants show support for it.
Our chart shows that Fox News, where Dick Cavuto has described the NHS as a “breeding ground for terrorism”, the Daily Telegraph blogs, where Dan Hannan has called the NHS a “mistake”, and the Investor’s Business Daily Editorials – where the suggestion was made that UK scientist Steven Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance in the UK”, are all far more influential than the liberal blogosphere, represented by Matthew Yglesias, the Huffington Post, and GoFourth (for example). Twitter ranked highest of all, but as – like YouTube – it is used interchangeably by both camps, we ranked it neutral. Specifically, the top 76 stakeholders are shown in the following table.
We will publish more details on this study shortly. In the meantime a synopsis can be found here at the Economist.
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John Stodder September 9, 2009 at 8:26 pm
I find your headline confusing. Organizing for America is Obama’s online tool, and your chart seems to show it is treated with much authority. Less than Fox News, perhaps, but more than anyone in the liberal blogosphere. Who should be perturbed by this data are the people running Huffington Post — and the NYT and Washington Post.
Would love to see names behind all the boxes.
Healthcare Economist · Obama will not insist on a public option September 9, 2009 at 11:33 pm
[...] Economist reports on Obama and the online media. Market Sentinel report shows the 94 most influential online sites and whether or not they favor Obama’s [...]
Mitch September 9, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Garbage in , garbage out.
Washington Post is not neutral, and including the UK Conservative Party is weird.
Garbage in, Garbage out.
Gray September 10, 2009 at 1:05 pm
This chart is total nonsense. You show Twitter and “Daily Telegraph Bloggers” as single points in the graph, even though they are only providing a service for a hodgepodge of users with different opinions. If you would instead have shown single Twitter users , or single bloggers at DT, they would have shown to be so uninfluential that they are located at the lower end of the graph. If you were consistent in your misguided approach, you would at least have treated blogger.com in the same way, which would then have been at the upper end of the chart, too. Sry, but obviously your approach not only doesn’t make any sense, it is really dishonest.
One more point: The “liberal blogosphere” may look uninfluential, but its strenth is in the numbers. If you add three or four blogs with similar opinions up, their aggregated influence passes even the most powerful news publications. And that at a fraction of the costs involved. Not bad at all.
Gray September 10, 2009 at 1:12 pm
One other point that should have rung your alarm bells: According to this study, the Torygraph is more influential than the NYT! Now, come on, really. In your wet dreams maybe! This is obvious evidence that there is something seriously wrong with the algorith used for computing “influence”.
Gray September 10, 2009 at 1:23 pm
To clarify my last point: The Torygraph and the Guardian may be more influential in the UK, I don’t know. But not globally, and certainly not in the US! And, remember, this study allegedly is about the “US Healthcare debate”. But the algorithm doesn’t seem to be limited to influence in the US. Quite to the contrary, it seems to be that you put unduly weight on UK sources when you did “crawl the internet looking for pages which are about the topic” and “track mutual references between people, institutions, entities mentioned in the context”.
This doesn’t make any sense when the focus of the study should have been the “US Healthcare debate”. It’s simply delusional to believe a British newspaper is more influential IN THE US than the NYT. Sry, but this is obvious nonsense.
Mark September 11, 2009 at 5:44 am
Hi Gray,
The presence (and prominence) of UK stakeholders derives from the framing of the topic in the context of the British National Health Service.
Dave September 11, 2009 at 3:16 pm
The graph shows how one blog affects another. To show actual influence on US voters, you need to factor in the US readership of each site – or more strictly, the number of page views of the relevant articles.