Douglass Gaking at the IndyTruth Blog writes:

With a background in the CIA, an alarming congressional record, and a platform that still has libertarians uneasy, Bob Barr is far from the best thing the third parties can offer this year. How then is Barr dominating coverage in the Internet Media?

Austin Cassidy’s Independent Political Report posted an analysis of Google News hits today, which concluded that “Bob Barr, Ralph Nader dominate online coverage of alternative candidates.”

“Bob Barr, Libertarian Party” makes up 58 percent of the total share, while “Ralph Nader” comes in a distant second with 34 percent. No other candidate surpassed three percent. It is no surprise that Nader is doing so well. This is his third consecutive run for the presidency. How is it that Bob Barr dominating?

Before he even began his campaign for the presidency, Bob Barr was already attracting attention in the third party world. Since America is trapped in a two party, left-right paradigm, it helps as an outsider to be a former insider in one of the two major parties. Barr is viewed as a former Republican by the media much more than a Libertarian. This alone will draw more mainstream media attention to Barr.

In the first two weeks of Barr’s general election campaign, he managed to attain appearances on some highly rated prime time cable television shows. He was a guest on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. After a successful segment with Glen Beck on CNN, he was invited back to do a full hour interview, which was also featured on Beck’s daytime radio show. Televised appearances always pick up blog chatter, especially when they appear on YouTube seemingly within seconds of their live broadcast.

Finally, what I attribute most to Barr’s domination of the online media is a tool that is hardly mentioned as a key to successful campaigning, press releases. From the first days following the nomination, the Barr campaign has been printing out press releases on a daily basis. If a day goes by without one, the next day will have two.

These aren’t boring press releases or the three paragraph cookie-cutter releases that I often find myself snoozing through. They discuss hard issues in detail, and many of them are quite provocative.

Read on…