According to a Wall Street Journal Poll, Democrats would vote for Charlie Sheen for President over Sarah Palin 44% to 24%.
Republicans would vote for Charle Sheen over President Barack Obama 37% to 28%.
Clearly, we as a political nation have a problem.
I also have a Charlie Sheen problem. Well, I’ve Sheen enough. No more posts on the guy.
I was doing some research for my upcoming book, using my tried and true “number of Google results as popularity” method, and I found some interesting results.
Who has more tongues wagging (well, fingers wagging) on the internet? Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga or President Obama?
Obama has about 366 million Google results. Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga have about 224 million and 242 million, respectively. Smackdown by the tag team of Sheen and Gaga.
And since I mentioned Charlie Sheen, he’s easily outdistancing fellow crazy people Hugo Chavez (who recently claimed the lack of life on Mars was due to capitalism) and Khadaffi/Gaddafi/Qaddafi combined (at about 40 million).
Justin Bieber is just trailing Charlie Sheen (185 million) but completely buries media darling Sarah Palin (38 million) and the always quotable Vice President, Joe Biden (16 million).
This is important for my friends inside the beltway in Washington, DC. In the city they almost affectionately call “Hollywood for ugly people”, where the stakes are far higher than at the Academy Awards (73 million Google hits), they miss one important point: most of the voters aren’t nearly as tuned in as beltway folk are. The details are lost, the vox populi is elsewhere.
Those populi aren’t really even focused on massive worldwide topics like Egypt (445 million) or Iraq (347 million). Or even America (1,410 million Google results).
Your very important political product, beltway friends, is losing eyeballs, clicks, and mindshare to one of the largest Google search results I could find: Facebook (8,810 million results).
Michael Jackson killed the internet, bringing Google News, CNN, LATimes, Twitter, and AOL Messenger to grinding halt. Details at the link:
BTW, fairspin.org is a very interesting website for getting balanced news coverage. Crowd sourced analysis of the political leaning of stories.
I was wondering which was more contagious – Swine Flu, or the Swine Flu press coverage?
To answer that question, I used the sometimes flaky data from Google News search (meaning it gives different answers at different times).
The results are in and it’s a landslide. Swine flu press coverage is far more contagious than swine flu.
With 279 confirmed cases of swine flu in the United States as of May 4th, the number of press articles on that day was 154,617,297. That’s 554,184 articles per patient.
But wait, the confirmed cases is cumulative. So I have to accumulate the swine flu articles since the first US case on April 23rd.
Again, Google News search gives different answers to each search, but adding up the returns of articles on each day, there have been roughly 2.5 billion news article hits through May 4th. That’s nearly 10,000,000 articles per confirmed case.
Even more interesting (at least to me). It is essentially one article, per day, for every person in the United States, including those that are illiterate or do not speak English.
So we are far more infected with press coverage than we are by the swine flu virus. Even worse, press coverage may be more lethal.
Playing fast and loose with the numbers, in the last year I’ve heard claims by gushing actresses and supposedly sane television talking heads that both the Academy Awards and the Superbowl garner 1 Billion worldwide viewers.
Poppycock.
I was going to complain about it, but the New Yorker has better writers than me:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/28/050228ta_talk_radosh
The news reports contained last week the desperate hope that Beckham and Posh Spice are going to save U.S. Soccer. It is a hope too far. It is akin to believing that Tom Brady can save European Football
First a test. Does anyone recognize this person? 
OK, now how about this person:
and finally, this one:
If you are sitting in the US, it is much more likely that you recognized the 2nd picture, George Clooney, over the first, David Beckham, or the third, popular Bollywood Actress Ashiwarya Rai. But using my handy “Google hits as survey” technique, Clooney and Beckham have similar numbers of hits at about 2,800,000. Ms. Rai comes in behind but still quite substantial at about 2,000,000 hits. They are each massive stars in some part of the digitized world.
The point of all this is that in this globalizing world, stardom that stretches worldwide is elusive. Just because the honchos at Major League Soccer know who Beckham is, it’s less likely that the fans who currently aren’t coming to MLS games will suddenly start flocking there. Instead they may stay home and watch (1,400,000 hits):
Sean Foote's Blog 