Cable News and Campaign Websites During the Primaries

When MSNBC called Wisconsin, only 4% of the votes had been reported. 4%. They must have relied on incredibly overwhelming exit polling results, because it turned out that this time, yes, they were correct and Barack Obama had won the state.

Within minutes the Obama camp had updated their website, initially running a headline that said “Obama wins in WI,” and a small article briefly noting that he had won the state and that win made it nine straight against Clinton. Almost as if to prove the point, MSNBC cut Clinton’s speech of the night short and went over to Houston, TX, where Obama was speaking to 19,000 people in his victory speech. His speech, somewhere in between a victory speech and a call for help, was broadcasted in full; Clinton’s speech was not.

It was remarkable how the two forms of media, an unbiased cable news network and a heavily biased campaign website, seemed to interact with one another. As the results poured in, Obama’s website was right on the money with the numbers, was just as quick to report how many delegates his win meant for his campaign, and soon afterwards the focus went right to Ohio and Texas.

Clinton’s website, in contrast to Obama’s, put up more visible donation links, a link to her speech in full and removed a delegate counter that was once on her home page. She also put up a quote saying how important it was for people to get involved online because it creates a level playing field.

MSNBC did have pundits across the board saying what this victory meant for Obama and what it meant for Clinton to lose another state, and the websites did not generally have the same type of analysis. Because the result came in so quickly and Wisconsin had become such a sure bet, it was hard to gauge much more than the reactions of the pundits and the websites. Unlike Super Tuesday, it wasn’t a constant barrage of information, so at some point the pundits had analyzed just about as much as they could and they, too, moved on to talk about Ohio and Texas. By my watch it was roughly about 20 minutes after Obama’s camp had updated his website to talk about the next two states that MSNBC started analyzing the next states. Of course, cable news was broadcasting Obama’s speech, the website was not.

The different types of media broadcasted according to their means of consumption: the website could not broadcast the speech and the news network could not (I hope) broadcast the words of the Obama camp, thanking supporters and moving right along to the next states.