Is the Occupy Movement Getting A Fair Share of Media Coverage? Maybe Not!

Media coverage of the Occupy movement appears to have slowed and some publications have already noted this fact.  However, Occupy Wall Street searches continue to outpace tea party searches on Google while news coverage volume has Occupy Wall Street and the tea party movement in a dead heat, according to the Christian Science Monitor.  Some of the data for their conclusion comes from Google's Politics and Election Blog.  Posted Thursday, October 27, 2011.  Here is a summary of the trends Google has spotted in comparing the internet interests v. media coverage of both Occupy Wall St. and the Tea Party.

Based on search patterns from Google users, Americans' interest in these two large groups is clear.

Here’s what we found:

• Searches for Occupy Wall Street started on Sept 16th & peaked one month later on October 15th
• NY is tops in searches, right? Wrong. Top 3 states for most “Occupy” searches: Vermont, Oregon, New York
• Search interest in OWS is higher than the Tea Party. Both currently and in looking at the birth of each
• Searches for the Tea Party peak each April as Americans begin to file their taxes

[snip]

  


Search interest for [Occupy Wall Street] jumped ahead of the [Tea Party] on September 24, and hasn’t looked back. In a historical context, when viewing the snapshot of their nascent birth, we can see the peak of [Occupy Wall Street] has slightly more interest in American than searches for the [Tea Party] did during the groups peak in 2009. 
 [snip]

But, what about media coverage? Despite big leads in polls and search traffic for Occupy Wall Street, it is almost in a dead heat with the Tea Party for the volume of news coverage. Using Advanced Search in Google News we found that between October 7 and last week, Occupy Wall Street only barely bests the Tea Party when we examine the number of news pieces covering each movement: 29,000 to 22,000.

We’ll be keeping an eye on the trends that are shaping the political landscape across the country. If you spot one, let us know. It might just be featured in our next post. 

Posted by:  Jake Parrillo, Google Politics & Elections Team