A few number crunchers at Dow Jones have been pretty busy as of late. Researchers at the company’s Insight division have spent a good portion of their waken moments between mid-February and early March trawling 6,000 newspapers, wire services, magazines, and radio and TV transcripts, 13,000 “current-awareness” news websites, and a purported 2 million “influential blogs.” Their mission: to find out what issues are of most concern for the voting public.
Nevermind the clear red herring found among the sourced figures - the blog count. Indeed, it looks unreasonably large for the title of “influential,” yes? Two million noteworthy blogs? Two million? As if. But let us move forward and focus on the big picture here. Dow Jones has undoubtedly taken on a noteworthy initiative to document just what people are talking about. Big-media people. Indie-media people. Every people. No silly, wasteful door-to-door polling for samplings of a couple thousand spur-of-the-moment political guinea pigs. Just some quality, fly-on-the-wall readings of what’s talked about most, and what’s talked about the least. And, of course, everything in between.
One thing is absolute. Whatever the presidential candidate, the economy is where the discussion is at. Money is in prime focus. Health care, terrorism, an energy follow behind. It’s the green that’s in the country’s bill-fold that’s at the top of the agenda now.
Looking at the graph, it’s not especially easy to distinguish which items take precedence over others. Sure, the more prominent colors represent the issues more often discussed. Yet the findings clearly vary by candidate, and the data can quickly seem to conflict with itself. Which leads me to a personal determination: Segmentation of issues said to concern the citizenry is too often done to eventual ill effect. Just as people are generally averse to anything overly complex, people aren’t keen on playing part in the construction of pie charts and the like. Which is what analysts regularly default to, and understandably so.