NEW YORK, Oct. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Barack Obama continued to widen his lead on many fronts in the media coverage race during the past week, but with a week to go until Election Day, opponent John McCain managed to narrow the gap in some battleground states, according to results from the Dow Jones Insight-2008 Presidential Election Media Pulse. During the period of October 19 through 25, Obama increased his lead in total number of headline mentions in four battleground states -- Nevada (by 21 percentage points, on the heels of visits by him and his wife), North Carolina (by 10 points), Florida (4 points) and Missouri (3 points). He lost ground, though, in Colorado (where his lead shrunk by 6 percentage points, with a strong push by McCain there), Ohio (2 points) and Pennsylvania (2 points). The headline race appears closest in Pennsylvania, a battleground state where Obama has a comfortable lead in public polls but where the McCain camp insists its private polls show the state at a dead heat. For the week of October 19 to 25, headline mentions for the candidates showed a 51%-49% split, with coverage barely leaning Obama's way. Of the issues being discussed, the economy and taxes were the top two. In comparison to the other battleground states, Pennsylvania's coverage differed slightly, with the issue of "experience" showing up among the top 10 tracked issues, which was not the case in the other battleground states. The everyman message of "Joe the plumber" also continued to resonate in Pennsylvania as in the other battlegrounds, being mentioned more than the issues of jobs, health care and the financial bailout. International issues, including both wars, did not make the top 10. Issues Coverage Hits a Plateau but Obama's Share of It Does Not With Election Day approaching, the volume of mainstream and social media coverage of the two candidates on key election issues has leveled off considerably from the sharp increases we'd seen in our past several analyses, but Barack Obama still managed to widen his lead in terms of the number of issues on which he received higher coverage than John McCain. In our latest analysis, covering the period September 26 through October 26, Obama achieved an overall coverage advantage on 14 of the 26 issues tracked, while McCain led on just one issue and 11 were categorized as ties, or as having a difference of fewer than six percentage points between the two candidates. According to analysis of 20,000 mainstream media and 2 million social media sources by Dow Jones Insight during the period of September 26 through October 26, when the issues are grouped by type we again see modest changes in coverage: -- Discussion of the various issues related to the economic crisis made up 46% of the total this time around, down one point from 47% -- The percentage of talk regarding non-economic domestic issues, like education and same-sex marriage, decreased one point to 16% from 17% -- Candidate-specific issues (such as faith and race), which accounted for 24% of the discussion, were up one point from 23% -- Issues related to the wars and the Middle East stayed level at 13% of the total Of the individual issues that changed hands, Obama added taxes and immigration to his side of the ledger, both of which had previously been too close to call, while Israel moved from the Obama side to a tie, resulting in the net gain of one issue for the Democrat. McCain led on North Korea this time, giving up his former coverage advantages on the economy, the housing slump and Social Security, all three of which are now ties. In terms of total issues-related volume, for the period September 26 through October 26 there were 1,666,011 mentions of the candidates in proximity to one or more of the 26 issues in all tracked sources. That represented an increase of 3.5% over the 1,609,083 issues-related mentions in the previous rolling 30-day period. Bush Still Gets Some Press in this Election Frenzy In taking a look at how the end-point of Bush's presidency has impacted his coverage in the media, Dow Jones Insight found that Bush had an 11% share of voice, compared to Obama's 49% and McCain's 40%, when counting headline mentions from September 27 to October 26 in approximately 20,000 mainstream news publications and media Web sites. The loss of attention for President Bush is more apparent in the social media landscape than in the traditional media, with Bush hardly ever making it into the headlines, getting just 2% of all social media headline mentions of the three during the same timeframe. When the president has gotten mentioned in the mainstream media of late, it's generally in reference to the economy or the financial sector bailout. For the economy, from September 27 to October 26, Bush received headline mentions a bit less than one-third as often as either McCain or Obama, with 11,762 Bush mentions compared to 31,116 for McCain and 31,106 for Obama. For the bailout, the president saw much more comparable volumes, netting 11,310 headline mentions to McCain's 15,138 and Obama's 14,300. No 'Surprise' in October as Obama Rolls Along The last full month of the 2008 presidential election is nearly over and we have not had the "October surprise" many political analysts have quietly speculated might occur. Instead, the mainstream media and the blogosphere have seen little excitement through October, at least as measured by media mentions. McCain had a strong September in the media, passing Obama for the first time during the general campaign. However, it was short-lived, with Obama re-emerging as the lead in media coverage early in October and expanding his lead every week since. Meanwhile, Palin, who was greatly responsible for McCain's rise in media coverage in early September, continues to gain more coverage than Biden -- topping him by more than 2 to 1 on most days -- but her coverage has remained below that of McCain's in the weeks following the vice presidential debate. The Dow Jones Insight-2008 Presidential Election Media Pulse provides a high-level view of a competitive media landscape and demonstrates how candidates and issues are covered in the media and how that coverage changes over time. Dow Jones Insight combines proven research methodologies, trusted content and advanced text-mining and visualization tools to deliver strategic qualitative and quantitative media measurement metrics. Organizations use the analysis to nurture their reputation, demonstrate the effectiveness of their communications strategies and achieve business objectives. The platform processes nearly a million articles, Web pages, blogs and message board posts per day. The charts are available at http://dowjonesinsight.blogspot.com/ and can be reproduced in print and online media. For further information about the Dow Jones Insight solutions visit http://www.dowjonesinsight.com/ and to learn more about The Dow Jones Insight-2008 Presidential Election Media Pulse, please contact Shannon Sullivan at +1 609 627 2312 or . ABOUT DOW JONES Dow Jones & Company (http://www.dowjones.com/) is a News Corporation company (NYSE: NWS, NWS.A; ASX: NWS, NWSLV; http://www.newscorp.com/). Dow Jones is a leading provider of global business news and information services. Its Consumer Media Group publishes The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and the Far Eastern Economic Review. Its Enterprise Media Group includes Dow Jones Newswires, Dow Jones Factiva, Dow Jones Client Solutions, Dow Jones Indexes and Dow Jones Financial Information Services. Its Local Media Group operates community-based information franchises. Dow Jones owns 50% of SmartMoney and 33% of STOXX Ltd. and provides news content to radio stations in the U.S. DATASOURCE: Dow Jones & Company CONTACT: Shannon Sullivan of Enterprise Media Group Public Relations for Dow Jones & Company, +1-609-627-2312, Fax, +1-609-627-2301, Web site: http://www.dowjones.com/ http://dowjonesinsight.blogspot.com/ http://www.newscorp.com/

Copyright