Topic bias in the social media - The representation of political topics in Obama's 'Open for Questions'-campaign in comparison to traditional media and the blogosphere

There is a large body of research on the topic of political communication in traditional media and in online media. Since President Obama has made use of new forms of participation and interaction in politics via digital media during his election period, the question about a potential media bias is discussed more than ever. Political topics in online participation processes such as the 'Open for Questions'-campaign and in social media such as the blogosphere are compared with their dispersion in traditional media, whereby the preliminary correlation analysis is subject to certain conditions. The aim of this paper is to show if there is a correlation between the reporting on political topics in different media sources on a topic-focused basis without going into a qualitative depth of the content of each source.