Remember when people were still experimenting with how to integrate bloggers into a media relations program (… and still are!)? Well, in the summer of 2004 the 2 major American parties decided to credential bloggers - alongside traditional media - to cover the nominating conventions.
For the most part, the parties treated them just like the regular media. There were special availabilities with politicos planned for them, they were given embargo’ed information subsidies … it was the real deal.
And so I looked at this coverage - analyzing every single sentence the credentialed bloggers wrote in their “coverage” during the week of the convention - to see if they were “biased”:
Sweetser, K.D. (2007). “Blog bias: Reports, inferences, and judgements of credentialed bloggers at the 2004 nominating conventions.” Public Relations Review, 33 (4), 424-428.
Public relations practitioners awarded bloggers media credentials in 2004 to the summer presidential nomination conventions. Using the Hayakawa-Lowry bias categories, this quantitative content analysis reviewed sentences posted by credentialed bloggers during the convention to examine blogger reports (attributed, unattributed), inferences (labeled, unlabeled), and judgments (attributed and favorable, unattributed and favorable, attributed and unfavorable, unattributed and unfavorable) to analyze potential bias in “coverage.”
Key words: bias, blog, media relations, credential, political public relations, campaign
I’d like to thank Dr. Steve Banning for his help on this project. He was the one who suggested I look into the Hayakawa-Lowry news bias method & in the end that was the best way for me to quantitatively determine bias.
Note: When PRR updates the PDF (from in press to published), I’ll just switch out the files so you can have one with page numbers.
Updated: PRR released the final version so I updated this entry with page numbers & am now linking to the final PDF as published rather than the proof.