ImpactWatch Blog

On December 13^th 2007 Senator George Mitchell released the now infamous Mitchell Report detailing his investigation into performance-enhancing substances in Major League Baseball. We decided it might be interesting to use ImpactWatch, our media-monitoring dashboard, to track the ensuing coverage from mainstream media and blogs.

Since we began tracking, ImpactWatch has collected 23,652 news stories and 1,706 blog posts relating to the Mitchell Report. That’s a significant amount of news. In comparison, during the same time frame one of our biggest corporate ImpactWatch customer had 15,554 news stories and that is a technical firm with all of the product reviews and stories during the Christmas shopping season and leading up to this weeks Consumer Electronic Show.

The big story has turned out to be the accusation and fallout regarding Roger Clemens’ use of illegal substances.

It stands to reason that a seven time Cy Young award winner is getting most of the attention. 15,730 of the stories mention his name, which is right at two thirds. One of the reasons for this has been Clemens’ activities following the release of the Report.

• He immediately issued a denial of the accusations via his lawyers resulting in 2571 stories.
• On December 23^rd Clemens posted a video denial on his website and YouTube which was picked up in the media 524 times.
• Last night Clemens was on 60 Minutes, again denying the accusations (3050 articles mentioning Mike Wallace) and all but calling former Yankee trainer Brian McNamee a liar.
• The fact that former Yankees manager Joe Torre won’t take sides between Clemens and McNamee (1043 stories) could be telling to some, but Clemens says he is willing to take a lie detector test to help clear his name (904 articles) and today announced he is suing McNamee for defamation as well (444 articles so far.)

This kind of information is just he tip of the iceberg of how your organization might use ImpactWatch to track corporate coverage, media events, or any issue you may be concerned with. Plus adding on our rating team, offering expert human-reviewed bias rating, and you can truly dive down into the meaning of your media coverage.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 9:17 am and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.