Political Sentiment Analysis and Obama: The New York Times Doesn’t Quite Get it

In the article On the Press Bus, Some Questions Over Favoritism New York Times Reporter Jacques Steinberg writes about the perceived favorable press bias toward Obama.

Overall an illuminating piece, but he gets one key element wrong IMHO:

“It would be difficult to analyze systematically whether the mountain of articles, blog postings and video segments tilts toward one candidate or the other. But the Project for Excellence in Journalism…”

In reality, there are scores of companies that will eagerly perform this task. “Difficulty” is not really the issue. Since the traditional services charge a lot for this kind of thing, Steinberg may have meant it was likely to be prohibitively expensive to analyze the media sentiment.

Consequently, the article only refers to frequency of Obama mentions, not sentiment.

What Steinberg and the Project for Excellence in Journalism didn’t know was that our Sentimine system can process thousands of articles, blog, posts and video segments a day and tag them with human level accuracy. This for a fraction of what most traditional services charge.

If anyone really wants to track sentiment (and not just volume) for Obama vs Clinton let us know. We could really sink our teeth into that assignment…

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