Turning News Into Knowledge

JibJab has just released its ‘2008 Year in Review‘.

Need I say more?

Enjoy.

This past week we undertook an interesting analysis centered around a word rarely used, often mispronounced and most certainly misspelled: ‘prorogue’.  Yes, you guessed it, the analysis was all about the partisan hoopla in Canada among our political parties.

We undertook an analysis of coverage about the possibility of a Coalition government being formed in Canadian parliament, as a result of a non-confidence motion being entertained in the House. The results of our analysis were picked up by PR Week.

Needless to say it was an interesting exercise to see which major dailies supported the Coalition or the existing Conservative minority government. We focused mostly on the tone of the coverage, regional breakdowns and terms used. The tone was done by our media analysts on an individual story basis, then the data was further crunched using our software MediaMiser Enterprise.

Here are some of the general highlights:

- 526 articles analyzed;

- 20% of articles were supportive in tone of the Coalition; 

- 48% of articles were balanced in coverage; 

- 32% of articles were critical of the Coalition; 

- Almost half of the coverage in the National Post was critical of the Coalition; 

- Coverage in the Calgary Herald reached 60% critical;

- The Toronto Star was most supportive of the Coalition with 16 articles supporting it;

 - The most balanced of all the dailies analyzed was the Globe & Mail, which had equal support for and against.

However, when you look at the data in our system by drilling down further into the results some interested trends appeared:

- Using our Prominence tool to isolate front page coverage, the Globe & Mail only had supportive coverage of the Coalition;

- A regional breakdown highlighted extreme variances in tone, with Western Canada overwhelmingly against, Ontario slightly supportive, and Quebec(English-only) was balanced; 

- The term ‘party funding’ — which essentially started the feud — was only mentioned 14 times…while our favourite term ‘prorogue’ was used 86 times.

I think one of the keys when looking at an analysis like this is the ability to look further underneath the hood for additional insight, and not rely only on the overall tone scores.