How 'tech-savvy' Barack Obama lost the health care debate thanks to sinister Right-wing blogs

Telegraph Blogs (U.K.) ^ | September 10, 2009 | James Delingpole

[Schnucki]

If there’s one thing President Obama’s good at, you would have thought, it would be harnessing the powers of new technology. He’s got the Blackberry addiction. He’s got the Twitter feeds. He’s the most tech-savvy POTUS in US history, who quite possibly wouldn’t even be doing the job he’s doing now if it weren’t for his supreme, almost Neo-like mastery of that thing we call the Interweb.

So how come he has just gone and managed to lose the most important debate of his political career so far - over health care - largely as a result of being beaten hollow by his opponents in the conservative blogosphere?

This is the question being asked by the new media monitoring organization Market Sentinel, in its latest report, pithily entitled “How Obama lost the healthcare debate online”.

It reports:

“Our research suggests that Obama – the candidate who wrote the rules for achieving political success on the Internet – has lost the argument online.”

“To show this Market Sentinel took just one strand of that debate (comparisons between Obama’s proposals and the UK’s NHS service) and used citation analysis to identify who has influence in relation to the topic. For the technically minded, this means that we crawl the internet looking for pages which are about the topic, then we track mutual references between people, institutions, entities mentioned in the context. The resulting structure gives us a mathematically verifiable measurement of “authority” in the context. This analysis began on August 28th and was completed on September 3rd. We have sorted the results according to a sentiment metric where the negative quadrants represent hostility to state run healthcare (as exemplified by the NHS) and the positive quadrants show support for it.”

[Schnucki]

Had to cut the original title short 'cause the Brits like longer titles than FR allows. :-/

It should have read:

How 'tech-savvy' Barack Obama lost the health care debate thanks to sinister Right-wing blogs like this one

[bigbob]

Well I *hope* it turns out that he loses - but not counting on anything yet. Hell, the internet, Fox News and talk radio are all we’ve got, and the truth is, it’s more powerful than the MSM that THEY have.

[Le Chien Rouge]

I would give people like Sarah Palin on Facebook and Michelle Malkin’s website quite a bit of credit also.

Palin broke Obama’s nose with the ‘death panel’ subject.

[Le Chien Rouge]

I would give people like Sarah Palin on Facebook and Michelle Malkin’s website quite a bit of credit also.

Palin put Obama on the defensive just by mentioning the ‘death panel’ subject.

[jessduntno]

He’s getting his ass kicked by a mean old woman in Alsaka...snark...snark...

[KarlInOhio]

The Washington Post and Politico are right at the 0 point of neither positive nor negative sentiment? I think the developer of the graph need some recalibration.

[AFreeBird]

if it weren’t for his supreme, almost Neo-like mastery of that thing we call the Interweb.

Stop the TAPE!

There's a problem right there. Only a n00b calls the "Net", the interweb.

[Old Professer]

Better snapshot here:

http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14398685&source=features_box_main

[socialismisinsidious]

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