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Internet Arrives As Mainstream Election News Source
WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A., 2000 DEC 5 (NB) -- Political information on the Internet is having the desired impact - it is affecting the way that voters vote, especially among the young. And that, a new survey says, is great news for mainstream news operations.
In a joint report analyzing user behavior at Web sites featuring election information, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Internet & American Life Project on Monday declared that, in the year 2000, the Internet arrived as a major source of political information among U.S. citizens.
The report, "Internet Election News Audience Seeks Convenience, Familiar Names," says the Web this year attained increasing mainstream status among the U.S. public. "As the audience for online campaign news has expanded - increasing fourfold over the past four years - it has gone more mainstream in its preferences and pursuits," the report says.
The survey was based on phone interviews with 8,378 adults - 4,186 of whom were identified as Web users - conducted during October and November. In it, the cooperating Pew organizations project that fully 18 percent of all Americans went online for election news during campaign 2000 - a 4 percent increase over 1996, the last presidential election year. Moreover, the survey asserts, fully one-third of Americans with Web access got election news from the Internet this year.
In do so, they sought out mainstream news organizations like CNN.com and MSNBC.com rather than specialized election sites like Voter.com or the various party and campaign Web sites made available to interested Netizens, the report says. That's in fairly marked contrast to results of a similar 1996 Pew Research Center survey, according to Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
In 1996, he said, the Pew Research Center did a survey of Internet users and election sites at a time when the Web was new to most people. At that time, Rainie said, many respondents said a major appeal of the Internet as an election-information tool lay in its ability to allow citizens to steer around traditional news sources - news organs of which they plainly suspected bias.
In 1996, respondents said, "You didn't have to take what was news elites - usually the 'liberally biased news elites' - and you could go straight to the source," said Rainie. "You could see the speeches themselves, you go directly to candidates' sites, you could bypass these powerful institutions.
"Now," he continued, "that's not the case. The attractiveness of going beyond traditional media sources is not nearly as potent. I think part of that is explained by this growth of the Internet population. The early adapters were really well-educated, really anxious to exploit the technology. These newer users are much more likely to stress the convenience and the time-saving aspects of going online, and also being able to get the news when they want it."
In part, he said, the need to go outside mainstream news organizations is minimized by the presence of a great deal of direct-from-the-source information on sites like CNN.com, CBSnews.com and other. For instance, at the end of last week, many mainstream news sites streamed audio from a crtically important U.S. Supreme Court hearing on the U.S. presidential election.
In September 1998, many users went to mainstream news sites to read the infamous Starr report during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.
"The point is, you don't have to go anywhere else," Rainie said.
According to the report, the information people sought in 2000 had clear influence. The study shows that 43 percent of online election-news seekers found information online that directly affected their voting decisions, an increase from 31 percent of 1996 respondents who said the same thing.
"My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that more than 13 million people say that online information had an influence on their vote," Rainie said.
The Youth Vote
That influence is especially pronounced among young people, the report said. It indicates that half of online political-news seekers under age 30 said that information they gleaned from the Web "made them want to vote for or against a particular candidate." That is notable, the report said, but it goes on to say that is not an indication that the Net actually is attracting more young people, or anyone else, into the political process; it means only that those who went were more likely to be influenced by what they found than in the past.
Still, younger people - as well as the highly educated and the wealthy - are the most likely to take in election news from the Web. The report said that people between the ages of 18 and 29 are more than twice as likely as those over age 50 to get news about the election online.
"This disparity is driven largely by the fact that a much higher proportion of young people use the Internet in the first place," the report states. "Looking only at Internet users, the survey shows that those under 30 are only slightly more likely to use the Web as a source of election news (34 percent) than are those over 50 (30 percent)."
"The thing that this illustrates clearly," Rainie said, "is that for people who are interested in politics news, they are really engaged citizens."
CNN Comes Out On Top
The new survey asked respondents to name specific sites they visited to seek information during the 2000 campaign. Among them, the CNN.com Web site was visited most frequently, with 20 percent of all overall Web users saying they got election news there at least once during 2000, and 59 percent of those who specifically seeking election news clicking onto the site during the year.
Yahoo and MSN were highly rated by election-site users: 22 percent of all Netizens surveyed visited those portal sites for campaign news, as did 57 percent of those seeking election news specifically. One-in-five online users visited MSNBC.com for campaign news; more than half of all election news consumers said they had gone to that site in 2000.
Meanwhile, sites associated with broadcast TV networks and major newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times were also used frequently by election news consumers. Of the newspapers, the Post was visited by 45 percent campaign-news seekers, while the Times was visited by 33 percent of that subset of users.
Local news sites were visited by roughly three in 10 election news consumers, the survey said, while more than 25 percent mentioned visiting the AOL News Channel.
Given the results of the 1996 survey, Rainie said, the popularity of mainstream sites for elections is a solid indicator that, as more people get online, the Internet gradually is losing its much-vaunted, staunchly independent libertarian political bent.
"It's still the case that the segment of Internet users who get political news are more Republican, more male, more well-to-do and have higher level of formal education than the overall Internet population," Rainie said. "Nevertheless, it's true that the Internet population is looking more and more like the rest of America. And that means that its political views are changing. They are not as libertarian in 2000 as they were in 1996."
The data based from the survey of Web users have a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent, according to the report.
The full report is online at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press site, at http://www.people-press.org/.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project is online at http://www.pewinternet.org/.
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com
Kevin Featherly, a former managing editor at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, is a Minnesota journalist who covers politics and technology. He has authored or contributed to five previous books, Guide to Building a Newsroom Web Site (1998), The Wired Journalist (1999), Elements of Language (2001), Pop Music and the Press (2002) and Encyclopedia of New Media (2003). His byline has appeared in Editor & Publisher, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Online Journalism Review and Minnesota Law and Politics, among other publications. In 2000, he was a media coordinator for Web, White & Blue, the first online presidential debates.
Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly