Where They Stand and Voters’ Guides

     Many news organizations have tried to help guide their readers by providing a synopsis of the major campaign topics under an “Issues” section.  Some news organizations like the Chicago Tribune have expanded their scope to include gay marriage and guns, while others have veered from the norm.  The Houston Chronicle for example, listed NASA, but did not mention Iraq as one of the major issues.  But on the whole, there was little variation.  The major issues were defined as Iraq, Iran, health care, climate change, the economy and immigration.

     Other organizations supplemented or substituted their “Issues” section with voters’ guides or questionnaires like the “candidates match game”.  Most of the questions stemmed from where the reader stood on the aforementioned “issues,” and at the end of the quiz, readers were told which candidate was “most like you.”  The anomaly, however, was the Christian Science Monitor, whose Patchwork Nation project categorized readers into 11 communities based not on issues but on personal questions like religion and income.  Instead of telling the readers which candidate they were most like, the Patchwork Nation unveiled how each community tended to vote. 

     The topic of executive power was never mentioned as a major campaign issue in the “Issues” sections or in questionnaires, not even by CNN who had the most comprehensive list of issues (abortion, economic stimulus, education, energy, environment, free trade, guns, health care, homeland security, housing, immigration, Iran, Iraq, same-sex marriages, social security, stem cell research and taxes), and whose phone survey at one point revealed that 25 percent of people were either unsure or believed that other more important issues had yet to be included under CNN’s list of issues.