Proof Media Ignored Ron Paul Campaign

I have been involved in a lot of discussions recently on ATS as to rather or not Ron Paul was treated fairly by the media, and thought this may shed some light on the subject.

Google trends is a new tool that allows you to search how many google searches on a subject have been done by people, and compares that to the number of news stories that have been done on those subjects. It also allows you to compare two or more subjects at a time.

So this makes it a very effective tool for tracking how popular a candidate is. Its like a poll taken everyday to see how much interest there is in a candidate, except in normal polls only a couple of thousand are polled, but here there are millions a day. The more a candidates is searched, the more popular they are. It also will allow you to see how news coverage affects a candidates popularity.

So, using this we can compare Ron Paul to other candidates, see how there popularity compares, and how news coverage corresponds.
Paul is in blue and McCain in red.



As you can clearly see, Paul is destroying McCain in popularity when their media coverage is close to the same. Bit notice how despite his popularity, the news starts covering McCain overwhelmingly in the beginning of 2008.
Despite the fact that Paul is nearly three times as popular on the internet at the beginning of 2008, the media pays him very little attention compared to McCain. This is crucial, as this is when voting is starting.

Then notice how much more ridiculous is gets as you move into 2008. At the B point it is February, and McCain is getting a whopping 5 times as much coverage despite the fact at this point they are evenly popular. By looking at the graph, its clear to see Paul was covered barely at all compared to McCain, despite his popularity.

Another thing to look at is how McCains popularity (top graph) corresponds to the coverage he gets (bottom graph). The graphs are almost an exact match. This shows, as expected, that media coverage increases popularity. You will find that pretty much every candidate besides Ron Paul follows the same pattern. At looking at all of the major candidates, Paul clearly has the lowest media coverage by far, and is the only one whos top graph of popularity is very high compared to his bottom graph.

Lets look at Paul (blue) compared to Hillary Clinton (red)



Same story. Hillary gets overwhelming media attention compared to Paul, despite him having more popularity, and again her popularity directly links with the coverage she got.

One more graph. This time lets compare Paul (blue) to Rudy Giuliani (red) whom Paul was beating in primaries in many states.



Notice how Rudy's media coverage is ridiculously higher than Pauls the whole way, despite the fact that Paul is way more popular. Its almost laughable how much more coverage Rudy is getting betweens points E and F despite the fact of how more popular Paul was at the time. Even these graphs show that when Rudy was getting more coverage, he was gaining popularity.

So the here are the conclusions reached from all of this.

1. At the beginning of 2008, Ron Paul led all candidates from both parties in searches.

2. Ron Paul got the least media coverage of all of the major candidates (by far) despite his overwhelming popularity.

3. Every candidate besides Paul had their popularity as a direct result of the coverage they got, so because Paul got so little coverage, the MEDIA IS DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for his poor performance in the election!

You can go to Google trends and check it for out yourself if you want.

The real point of this is to show how the media controls our voting process. Even if you aren't a Ron Paul supporter, this should upset you, because it shows that we don't live in a true Democratic Republic, because we can all of our elections are rigged to favor handpicked candidates. I don't think we will ever have another truly democratically elected politician until this corruption ends.



[edit on 17-7-2008 by Grambler]

[edit on 17-7-2008 by Grambler]

Well done, these sort of posts are what the "Wake up" meme is all about. Arguably the best presidential candidate was sidelined by media lead social engineering, and was also victim of sidelining from his own corrupt party.

That's hardly new, Fox yanked him out of their online polls despite his strong presence. The media not only tried to extinguish his presence, they succeeded. About three years ago, this would have filled me with righteous anger. I know I should be outraged, and to some extent I still am, but I've given up on justice and expect crap like this on a daily basis.

Its also obvious that the Paul campaign focused a lot of concerted effort in New Hampshire, and that was the debate he was excluded from attending.

Not that significant, interesting yes but there are plenty of people who watch the news who are still not internet savvy. McCain has a large amount of older supporters who are not internet savvy yet watch the news, such as FOX.

Simply because someone receives many searches that doesn’t mean they have overwhelming support or are news worthy. People are curious about him is all those results prove. There are plenty of people who meet high Google search standards and are not noticed by the media. Ron Paul is also in no way the first presidential candidate to be ignored who did not win the candidacy of the Republican or Democratic Party. I doubt it is apart of a large conspiracy, simply that the news is covering what they believe will get them the best ratings- as usual.

It is up to the candidate to lead and organize a campaign, not the media's. With all the big bucks Paul raised, you would think he could have hired a better publicist, and a better public relations person.

It looked like the best Ron Paul could do was organize a legion of supporters who were good at spamming online polls. The media picked up on that pretty quick, saw it for what it was, and ignored it.

reply to post by RRconservative


Ummm no.

This story is spot on correct. If you need further proof, try putting Hill against Obama. The more people here a name in the media, the more popular a candidate gets. Here is a better way to look at it.. think 'Iraq War, Weapons Of Mass Destruction' or look at how cheery the media looks at the Feds actions concerning the value of our dollar.

Media did a great job there didnt they? Did you hear that Paul just got 10K people to show up in DC on the 12th? Obama is the only politician I can think of that can get that right now. Not one major story on it. Did you hear his book has been on the best seller list for weeks? At least this week all the financial channels are in agreement with him over his economics. The cheerleaders for the Fed are fools who enjoy paying for their own slavery. I think Jim Rogers wiped the floor with CNBC here: www.youtube.com...

It wouldnt have mattered if Ron Paul hired God to run his campaign. He was the black sheep that the media wanted to silence. I was there the entire campaign (well, from when Rudy destroyed his candidacy by taking on Paul) This is my first go at politics and can tell you honestly, the media treatment of Paul was shameful. I cancelled my cable over it. CNN and FOX were disgusting in their treatment.

'Advertisements are the only truths to be relied upon in newspapers.' Thomas Jefferson

reply to post by RRconservative


I really do believe that the search index is really telling. Not even close to perfect, but it's a very, very rough guess.

And remember that you can only vote once in a poll, so you can't really spam it alone...

I like your signature a lot though.

This doesn't prove that lack of media coverage kills a campaign. It proves is that lots of media coverage increases online popularity. It also proves that they ignored him, which is the more basic and more important point. People will naturally draw the conclusion that the media blackout killed his campaign - we don't need proof to see the correlation.

Yes, the blackout was shameful, especially since a whole lot of these MSM prostitutes are recently vindicating everything he was saying about the economy. But don't cry about it. There's only one thing we can do to fix the situation: keep doing the same thing we've been doing for the last year. The world isn't going to change overnight.