Internet resources can
help you dig deeper to go beyond the sound bite when profiling and interviewing
candidates.
Project Vote Smart
This comprehensive site provides data on more than 13,000 candidates,
including biographical information, issue positions, voting records, interest-group
performance evaluations and campaign finance data. Project Vote Smart recently
expanded its coverage to candidates running for mayoral, city council and county
commission seats this year; it also provides fact-checking services to reporters
free of charge.
www.vote-smart.org
Library of Congress
The Thomas search engine is the ultimate search engine for past
bills in Congress. Thomas provides a way to assess your representatives’
positions on the issues as well as their level of involvement.
thomas.loc.gov
CBS’s Ad Watch
During the 2000 campaign, the CBS News site kept an archive of
political advertisements, from Bush to Planned Parenthood to the DNC. Click and
watch...
cbsnews.cbs.com
New York Times Campaign
Ads Archive
Staff writers for the newspaper compiled ad watch reports on
the political advertisements of 2000, all still available online.
www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/
“The 30-Second
Candidate”
For more perspective on television advertising, visit the site
for PBS’s Emmy-winning “The 30-Second Candidate.” In the Tricks
of the Trade section, you can even piece together your own fictional commercial.
www.pbs.org/30secondcandidate
Television Bureau
of Advertising
This site provides a historical
perspective on spending on political TV ads from 1970 to 2000, statistics
on voters’
political outlook according to program type (who watches what), and more.
www.tvb.org
Campaigns and Elections
Browsing this magazine’s site will give you a sense of how
sophisticated political campaigns have become. The site features articles from
previous issues and an online version of the magazine’s Political
Pages directory of campaign consultants, products and services, a great resource
for story contacts. Another interesting feature is The Political
Oddsmaker,which sets odds and picks winners in election races across the country.
www.campaignline.com
NetElection
A project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University
of Pennsylvania, NetElection provides thorough data on how the Internet was used
by candidates in the 2000 election. The
Site Analyzer compiles over 1,400 campaign sites, offering a report card on
what features have been incorporated into each site (place for citizen feedback,
voter registration information, position papers, etc.)
netelection.org
Politics Online
Offering “fundraising and Internet tools for politics,”
their Media
Reference Center collects news stories from around the globe pertaining to
the intersection of politics and the Internet.
www.politicsonline.com
Democracy Online Project
As part of the Graduate School of Political Management of George
Washington University, this site monitored political Web sites during the 2000
campaign, and explored issues like computerized voting systems.
democracyonline.org
Alliance for
Better Campaigns
In the 2000 campaign, this organization pushed for more “candidate-centered discourse” on national television in the month preceding the general election. Their advocacy includes promotion of television as a medium for election news, but also concern for the weight that advertising dollars have in the television industry (greedytv.org).
Institute for
Global Ethics: Public Policy Program
Their Public Policy Program is “a nationwide undertaking that promotes voluntary, candidate-endorsed codes of campaign ethics as a vehicle for addressing the problem of attack advertising and the citizen cynicism it engenders.”