Libya is the big story this week, in both the MSM and blogs:
Compare MSM vs. blogs, week of 02/28/11
and their coverage of the story is remarkably similar:
compare "Libya" MSM vs. political blogs, week of 02/28/11
Both political blogs and MSM show significant frequencies of words related to other Middle East/North Africa conflicts (Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen), though Bahrain is being discussed only in the blogs. With multiple versions of Gadhafi’s name, it seems we still haven’t reached consensus on how to spell it.
The big domestic story of the week, the standoff between unions and the Governor in Wisconsin, curiously only appears at significant levels in political blogs. The MSM seems to be focusing more on the national significance of the story (with terms like “teachers” appearing in the MSM cloud but not the political blogs cloud), but terms like “Wisconsin” and “Walker” (the Republican governor) only appear in political blogs (see word cloud at the top of this post). Wisconsin is the tenth most frequent word in political blogs but only 108th in the MSM.
When we compare the left and right blogospheres and their coverage of Wisconsin, we find a few interesting things:
Compare "Wisconsin" left vs. right blogospheres, week of 02/28/11
While the overall similarity score is pretty high, there are some words that only appear in one blogosphere or the other. The left is talking about the Koch brothers while the right is not. The right is talking about Sarah Palin while the left is not. The right also shows high frequencies of the words “communist” and “thugs” while the left uses “activist” pointing to a clear difference in tone between the two blogospheres.