At NCA next week I’m presenting my paper on “Negative Messages on Campaign Blog Posts” as a top paper in the Political Communication Division:
An advancement in online campaigning during the 2004 election cycle was the integration of blogs in candidate Web sites. Blogs offer a personalized presentation of the campaign and candidate. This content analysis investigated negative campaigning in the blog posts of George Bush and John Kerry during the general election cycle. Results find frequent discussion regarding the opponent, a great deal of negative messaging, and the dominance of logical appeals.
Here are my basic findings:
- 56% of the overall posts (N = 1190) discussed the opponent. Kerry discussed Bush more frequently.
- 49.6% of all items contained an attack of some sort. Of the items that were classified as political statements, 83.6% were attacks. Of the items that discussed the opponent, 78.8% contained an attack.
- The challenger used more attacks than the opponent, finding further support for previous research that found challengers & Democrats use attacks more often in political ads.
- Blog posts focused more in issues than candidate image.
- Posts used logical (63.6%), source credibility (54.4%) & emotional (24.4) appeals.
One of the most fulfilling pieces of this project for me was that almost everything that previous scholars had found true in televised political ads occurred in these negative campaign blog posts. Much of the campaign Web site literature comes from political advertising, since the Web site itself can be considered a form of adverting. However, research on negative messages on Web sites focus more on the re-purposing of traditional negative messages (tv ads/spots) on the site rather than negative messages that only appear on the Web site.
My mentor and PhD advisor specializes in political advertising & has done a lot of work looking at the impact of Web sites on voters, so I will be very interested to hear her thoughts on this paper.
The presentation is on Friday, November 18 from 12:30 – 1:45 p.m. in the Boston Sheraton in Republic Ballroom A. Please stop to discuss this research!