Thread by @Ben_Guinaudeau

The campaign for the 🇫🇷 presidential election 2022 officially started on January 1st.

Media stations are required by law to publish how much attention they dedicate to each candidate.

Here is a 🧵 on the data available and some preliminary findings.

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#Présidentielles

In routine periods - outside political campaigns - the @Arcom_fr publishes every month the airtime EACH politician obtains on radio and TV channels.

I collected this data and packaged it in csv and rds format. Follow the Github link for more details.

github.com/benjaminguinau…

This data can be used to track down, which politicians had the most airtime in the three months before the official campaigns.

As expected, the executive dominates the debate. The spectacular attention devoted to the far-right is also noticeable.

However, this becomes more nuanced once we aggregate across ideologies. The picture seems much more balanced.

Aggregated results can be confusing, as they hide differences between channels.
This chart confirms a general intuition, that the private channel C8 acted as a promoter for the campaign of the Far-Right and populist candidate Eric Zemmour.

Again, this idea is confirmed when we look at the distribution of ideological sides across channels.

On January 1st, the campaign officially started and the data format slightly changed. The airtime is now aggregated for each candidate (no personality-level data anymore).
For each candidate, three types of speakers are considered: the candidates, their support & the journalists

Full disclaimer: two weeks of data is not enough to infer strong conclusions about channels' ideological diets. But again, some strong differences can already be observed.

Before closing this thread, it is important to notice that airtime is a bad proxy for attention.
1. It does not take into account when diffusion happens. Night-shift can hardly be compared with prime time.

2. Attention is not only about mentions but also about priming and framing. Praising sb takes as much time as bashing sb. This is not captured here.

3. TV and radio are important public spaces for the campaign but not the only ones. A lot also happens on social media or youtube and is not taken into account by the measure.

So overall, these results and data should be considered carefully.

Feel free to reach out, if you have any questions about the visualizations or the data.