Labor Day brings a traditional shot heard ’round the world: the starting gun’s pop that launches the U.S. political campaign season.
Of course, the presidential campaigns have long since jumped the gun, but an epic presidential fight is brewing, and much of the electorate can follow the fray with an awesome resource: the Internet and its many tens of thousands of politics-related Web sites, blogs and forums.
Such unprecedented information power is available to those with Internet access. That’s more than 232 million Americans, according to www.internetworldstats.com. The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s 2007 Broadband Adoption report estimates that 47 percent of all adult Americans have a high-speed Internet connection in their homes.
Those who scout the Internet for credible political information face a formidable array of useful and useless content. So do the journalists covering politics, but they have help from bookmarked sites they trust as they keep tabs on developments involving candidates and issues in the Web’s roiling universe of everything from educated analysis to vapid hyperbole.
Readers occasionally ask where Star-Telegram political writers go for helpful information online. Here’s a look at some favorites.
Assistant Managing Editor John Gravois, a former Houston Post Washington bureau staffer and our lead editor in political coverage, says the best national political calendar is ABC’s at www.abcnews. go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=140388.
Other sites he checks regularly are www.realclearpolitics.com, www.opensecrets.org, www.pollingreport.com and www.thehill.com. He warns that lack of verification can lurk in blog postings and Wikipedia content: “Verify what you read with an original news source.”
While following Texas politics, staff writer Anna Tinsley and Austin bureau staffer John Moritz often turn to www.QuorumReport.com. “It’s gossipy and topical and a place for one-stop shopping for news and rumor of the day,” Moritz said. “There are interesting think pieces, but QR’s stock in trade is getting info out there fast. Austin insiders go there first thing in the morning.”
Caution: A single one-year subscription to QR is $275.
A must-read, Moritz said, is Texas Monthly Senior Executive Editor Paul Burka’s blog at www.texasmonthly.com/burkablog. “He’s analytical and reasonably quick. Great institutional memory and will ‘fess up when he’s proven off the mark.”
Then there’s www.politicalwire.com, Moritz said, which is “good for rundowns on what’s going on nationally.”
For those who question journalists’ credibility and may dismiss such Web resources as liberal fodder, I asked a trusted academic — Adam Schiffer, Ph.D., a political scientist at Texas Christian University — to share with readers his favorite workhorse sites.
“One of the oldest and most comprehensive nonpartisan, nonideological Web sites is Project Vote Smart (www.vote smart.org),”; said Schiffer, who’s working on an examination of press power in politics.
“It has a vast array of information on candidates and current officeholders at the federal and state levels. It specializes in the type of information that would help a voter decide whether a candidate aligns with his/her values and interests. It is a welcome alternative to the trivial character issues that dominate news coverage of campaigns.”
The best site on polling is www.pollster.com, he said. “Pollster is run jointly by a professional pollster and a political scientist who studies polls, so it combines academic rigor with real-world experience.
“It uses state-of-the-art statistical analysis and user-friendly graphics to uncover the underlying trends from every major commercial and media poll pertaining to national elections.
“The press is often sloppy in presenting poll results,” Schiffer said. “News reports of polls tend to read too much into small movements that most likely result from sampling error, and too often parrot the spin that is put on polls by interested parties (such as candidates).”
Schiffer and journalists find great value at www.factcheck.org, the Annenberg Political Fact Check. “One of the biggest complaints about campaign coverage is the ‘he said/she said’ spin and counter-spin, with little attempt to adjudicate the truthfulness of the competing claims.
“Fact Check is devoted entirely to doing just that. Run by former journalists and current academics, it picks on both sides equally when they run afoul of the truth.”
Many other credible, nonpartisan sites populate the Web. As with journalists and academics, readers have their favorites. If you have one, e-mail me about it. I’ll put together a reader’s-choice list in observance of that political necessity: an information exchange.
