So everyone has been talking about whether or not the media have been ignoring Ron Paul in the wake of his second-place finish in the Ames Straw Poll. Well, the Pew Research Center decided to settle the issue, with math. Their findings?
Basically, yeah, the media have been ignoring Ron Paul, and a lot of the bandwidth went to Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump and Sarah Palin.
Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) also went to additional efforts to assess the amount of coverage Paul received immediately after he narrowly missed a straw poll win. If anything, Paul's coverage was even further diminished:
In a further attempt to gauge the post-straw poll attention to Paul’s campaign, PEJ also used the Snapstream server’s closed captioning capability to assess the candidates’ television coverage in the first few days after that balloting.
The sample included the three network Sunday morning panel shows on August 14, the morning and evening network news programs on August 15 and four hours of prime-time cable and one hour of daytime from each of the three major cable news networks on August 15.
According to that analysis, Paul was mentioned just 29 times. By comparison, Perry was mentioned 371 times, Bachmann was mentioned 274 times, and Romney was mentioned 183 times.
Elsewhere, Kevin Drum says that "Ron Paul's 15 Minutes Are Up." The irony there is that Paul's "15 Minutes" were used up debating whether he deserved "15 Minutes" in the first place. Ron Paul, victim of metaphysics!
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Jon Huntsman, savvy as ever, gets a profile in Vogue, so I'd expect that massive poll bounce any day now. [Vogue]
Huntsman also wants you to know that he loves Captain Beefheart. [@jonhuntsman]
How have reporters reacted to Rick Perry entering the race? Basically, by saying "SQUEEEEEEE!" Says Mark Halperin, "I'm ready to cancel my vacation to cover Rick Perry." No, no, Mark, we were really looking forward to your vacation. [CJR]
Dave Weigel will fill you in on the latest fad in GOP politics, Lean Six Sigma -- a culty management technique famously sent up by "30 Rock." [Slate]
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