Friday, October 17, 2003

All Arnold, All the Time
We conducted a simple experiment for a program here at the Annenberg School for Communication on Aug. 28: That morning, we checked the Web sites of major news organizations to see whether and how they were covering the recall election here in California. We focused on Web sites and newspapers known for serious political coverage.

If anything, this could lead to underestimating the extent of Arnold-driven coverage in more celebrity-oriented media. Variety, the show business journal, has featured Arnold in several Page 1 stories, from "Arnold Pumps It Up" to this week's "Chad Woes Leave Arnold Hanging," a reference to Monday's court decision. One day, Variety had not one but two front-page stories about Arnold's campaign.

Celebrity-oriented coverage was only natural for a candidate who announced his candidacy on Jay Leno's talk show (an announcement excerpted the next day on every television news program in California) and peaked again when he was the guest on Oprah Winfrey's season premiere (also excerpted the next day on every television news program in the state). And the campaign was only a few weeks old.

And to broaden the online sample, in addition to the well-known sites familiar to most Californians, we included a handful of well-known, award-winning, large circulation newspapers around the world to capture a snapshot of international coverage. The Jay Leno and Oprah Winfrey programs are broadcast all over the world, but they have less impact than they do here. But first, a look at the United States.

The Los Angeles Times, as one would expect, has extensive coverage. The Web site even has an entire section devoted to the recall election, positioned to be the Web site of record. Not to be outdone, the newspaper of record, The New York Times, also has an entire section devoted to the campaign, as does The Washington Post.

Among the leading non-newspaper sites, there is daily coverage on the political sections of ABCNEWS.com, CBS News, CNN.com and Fox News.

MSNBC goes further, with both a special section on the recall election and a very useful "California Countdown" update from the NBC News Political Unit. (See a detailed analysis of online coverage by Mark Glaser last week.)

A review of 225 American newspapers and magazines for the month of August counted 3,404 mentions of Arnold, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Incumbent Gray Davis was right behind the challenger, with 3,166 mentions, but it was clear Arnold was driving much of the coverage.

In other countries, coverage of Arnold was also extensive, judging by our Aug. 28 sample of Web sites of leading global newspapers. And no wonder: Again, according to Variety, in just its seventh week of release, "Terminator 3" had international box office totals that surpassed every movie released so far this year except "Matrix Reloaded," which had been in theaters twice as long.

And the sun never sets on Arnold's fans: The country-by-country charts in The Hollywood Reporter showed "Terminator 3" was in the Top 10 on every continent except Antarctica: It was the fifth most popular movie that week in Germany and South Africa, No. 7 in Australia, No. 4 in Britain and Japan, No. 3 in Sweden and No. 1 in Brazil. After three weeks of release there, "Terminator 3" was even the fourth most popular movie in France. Sacre bleu!

This translated into extraordinarily broad reach on Aug. 28 for coverage of what is, after all, a local election:

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1063922071.php

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