2008 Election Coverage.

Although the 2008 election is still a long way away, political campaigning, advertising, blogging and reporting is already in full swing. And though 2008 won't be the first year the internet will be a valuable election platform, the Web promises to be more of a factor in '08 than ever before.

The big players deliver their coverage as expected from their established points in the political spectrum -- MSNBC from the left, CNN from around the center and FOX from the right. The political alignment of a particular news source is evident in the quantity of stories per candidate, slant of those stories, pictures and placement on the Web site. For example, democratic links outnumber republican links 2:1 on MSNBC while the ratio is more even at CNN. Fox has a dominant feature about a recent republican debate.

While each news source certainly has a political identity, they generally show an effort toward some objectivity. For example, news about the two opposing parties will be paired equally in the same page element, or the candidates will be listed in alphabetical order.

Important issues seem to be the middle-eastern conflict -- specifically, the Iraq war, Iranian situation and "War on Terror" -- as well as health care, global warming (environment), the economy (taxation) and the usual hot-button issues of abortion and gay marriage.

Other less-established sites were all over the political spectrum. Some were clearly party-affiliated, while others were following the major networks' attempts at objectivity. Of these sites, many were blogs. One in particular, LostRemote, covered a panel discussion that touched upon a couple noteworthy points: that mainstream journalism's election coverage is underappreciated, but also that much of their material is first broken by bloggers. It also said that journalists too often sacrifice truth for fairness in the election setting.

Regardless of where you get your election coverage online, there is no doubt that the material there is very Web-specific. The entire Fox election page, for example, was dominated by video profiles of Republican candidates. CNN features an applet that allows users to compare candidates according to their views on hot-button issues. All of the sites have live polls and other types of user-created statistics that are some of the most timely indicators available.

Using the Web is also more efficient for the consumer, because they only have to consume the news that they choose. In the past, TV and radio editors have had to choose an appropriate selection of election news found it difficult to be fair and objective at the same time with strict time constraints. On the contrary, the online experience is consumed according to the user's preferences and tastes and is much more versatile.

And as the voting public becomes increasingly computer-literate, don't be surprised to see the web wield more and more influence over the political landscape.