• by Shankar Gupta , May 17, 2005

Political bloggers were remarkably effective at generating buzz and driving opinion during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, but mass media still acts as the main information brokers, according to a joint study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and BuzzMetrics released Monday.

The study focused on the impact of major political blogs on the national agenda during the last two months of the presidential race of 2004. Researchers examined blogs such as Instapundit.com, LittleGreenFootballs.com, and Powerline.com on the right and DailyKos.com, OliverWillis.com, and Atrios.Blogspot.com on the left. For the study, researchers tracked conversations in a number of different channels--including political Web logs, the campaign sites of George W. Bush and John Kerry, several Internet forums and chat rooms, and media coverage from major mass media outlets like the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post.

The report examined several issues--including fallout over a CBS report on Bush's history in the National Guard, the Iraq war, the release of a pre-election video by Osama Bin Laden, a scandal involving a missing cache of explosives in Iraq, and concerns about the resurrection of the draft--and tracked how many mentions they received in the blogs, campaign sites, chat rooms, and mainstream media.

Discussions about those issues more often started with articles in the mainstream media, then moved into the blogosphere--and from there, went into the major online forums, according to the report. The researchers found a 78 percent correspondence of blog posts to stories in the mass media, and from there, an 81 percent correspondence of topics discussed in the forums to the blog posts.

This strong relationship between stories that are covered in the mass media and issues examined in the blogosphere shows that bloggers tend to flesh out what's already in the mainstream news. "What political bloggers are doing is taking the stories and then amplifying the hell out of them," said Dan Gillmor, the founder of Grassroots Media, Inc., a blog devoted to the discussion of grassroots journalism.