GoodCount Shows a Breakdown of Presidential Candidate Coverage by Major News Websites

What does GoodCount do?

GoodCount keeps track of presidential candidate coverage done by major news websites such as cnn.com and foxnews.com. GoodCount counts the number of times candidates' names have been mentioned on daily basis.

Motivation behind GoodCount

Have you ever wondered how much coverage different presidential candidates get? I noticed that certain candidates get disproportionate amount of coverage by mainstream media than others. On the one hand, this should come as no surprise. No one expects say, Marxist-Leninist Party should get the same amount of coverage as Democratic Party. However, the question becomes more complicated when we are dealing with presidential candidates running for the party nomination.

Republican-candidates-nh-debate

Ron Paul supporters have been at the forefront of challenging mainstream media to give Ron Paul a fair share of news coverage since 2008 election. Now 2011 is ending and the same disgruntled attitude still remains relatively unchanged. I wanted to find out whether if this attitude was justified by evidence.

What GoodCount doesn't do?

  • GoodCount does not keep track of TV, paper and radio coverage of candidates.
  • Number of candidate coverages are not normalized. For example, one instance of Obama on NY Times is treated the same as one instance of Obama on LA Times even though NY Times has a larger readership than LA Times.
  • GoodCount cannot distinguish between negative and positive coverage of candidates. Remember when almost all media coverage on Obama was negative hit pieces on the topic of Jeromiah Wright and birth certificate during 2008 election? GoodCount is agnostic about the attitude of the coverage.

Some technical challenges GoodCount face

  • Some candidate names are mentione through Twitter feeds, but GoodCount can't detect them.
  • I would love to get GoodCount to perform even a rudimentary sentimental analysis of articles.

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I have some exciting plans for this project. If you find the project interesting, please share it with others around you. Also let me know of features you'd like to see from the project.