Political Blogs and the Bloggers Who Blog Them - School of ...

was predicted to produce an additional .4 blog posts on moral values and, even more impressive,
media coverage of moral values explains nearly 20% of the variance in blogging activity on
moral values. For some issues, therefore, media coverage does seem to exert a strong influence
on blog content.
On the other hand, there was no statistically significant correlation between media
coverage and political blog posts for 17 of the 25 political issues included in this study. For 8 of
these 17 issues (North Korea, immigration, Afghanistan, affirmative action, terrorism, No Child
Left Behind, welfare and the forged documents controversy involving Dan Rather), the amount
of media coverage explained none of the variance in the number of political blog postings.
Furthermore, the slope coefficients of the regression analysis for 16 of these 17 issues were all
small and statistically insignificant. The one exception was media coverage and blog postings on
Iran – where approximately 17 stories are predicted to produce one additional political blog post.
For the majority of issues, however, it appears that there is little relationship between the amount
of media coverage and the number of political blog posts.
In order to explore the possibility that the overall findings obscure important differences
in how partisans respond to mainstream media messages, I also analyzed the relationship
between media coverage and blog posts for Democrats and Republicans. The results of this
analysis are presented in Table 3. As Table 3 clearly displays, there are striking differences
between the strength of the relationship between issue coverage and blog posts for Democrats
and Republicans. While there is, for example, a significant correlation, between media coverage
and blog posts for Democrats on Iraq, the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, gay marriage
and weapons of mass destruction, there is no significant correlation between media coverage and
blog posts for these issues for Republicans. Similarly, while Republicans exhibit a significant
correlation between media coverage and blog posts on abortion, Osama bin Laden, the military
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