When it was a major story, however, most of the coverage focused on the politics of the bill rather than the substance of the legislation. And the language and framing of the issue favored by the bill’s Republican critics was far more prevalent in the news coverage than the language and framing favored by Democrats supporting the bill, according to research conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Read the full report.

It took Mitt Romney 15 weeks into the Republican primary season to

get a secure hold over his party’s nomination for president. But Romney

established himself as the clear winner in the media narrative of the

campaign during the last six weeks of that period, following a narrow

but key win in his native state of Michigan.

A main component of that shift in the narrative is that after the

Feb. 28 win in Michigan, the news media began to view Romney’s

nomination as essentially inevitable. A close look at the coverage finds

that references to delegate math and the concept of electoral

inevitability spiked in the media the week after Michigan, rising twelve

fold on television news programs. From that point on, the amount of

attention in the press to Romney’s candidacy began to overwhelm that of

his rivals, and the tone of coverage about him, which had been often

mixed or negative, became solidly positive.

Read the full report, which includes:

• Analyses of the coverage for Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul
• An examination of President Obama’s coverage
• Comparison between 2008 and 2012 of the amount of “horse race” coverage

mainstream news media, and 2011 was no exception. When religion did make

news, it was often because of accusations about extremism or

intolerance.

The biggest religion stories in the news during 2011 centered on tensions over Islam and the U.S. presidential campaign, with more than half of the politically-focused coverage involving Republican hopeful Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith. This was the finding of the annual review of religion coverage by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) and the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Stories related to the 2012 election topped the list of religion stories in the mainstream media last year, with much of it prompted by an evangelical pastor’s suggestion that Romney’s faith should be a concern for voters. Six of the top ten religion stories focused at least in part on Islam — the highest number since PEJ and the Pew Forum began monitoring religion news in 2007. The top Islam-related story of the year was the congressional hearing organized by Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) on the subject of radical Islam in the U.S.

The discussion of religion in social media differed significantly from the coverage in the mainstream press. None of the top religion-related subjects among bloggers in 2011 was a top story in traditional media outlets. Favorite topics for bloggers included the Rapture predictions of a Christian radio host, and science and religion. Bloggers also tended to cover religion in a less sustained way than the mainstream media. On Twitter, there was only one week during 2011 when a religion-focused story appeared among the top five subjects on the micro-blogging site.

Read the full report for more findings, including:

• A review of the top ten religious stories of 2011 in the mainstream media.
• The amount of attention paid to religious stories.
• The amount of coverage given to different religious faiths.
• Trends in coverage of religious stories over the last five years.

In a very heavy news year, coverage of the weakening economy jumped substantially from 2010 and emerged as the No. 1 story in the news media, according to The Year in News, a look back by the The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report is based on analysis of 52 different traditional news outlets from the main five media sectors — newspapers, online news sites, television broadcasts, radio programming and social media. The project analyzed close to 46,000 stories.

On Twitter, in contrast to other news outlets, technology companies were the subjects that showed up as the most discussed stories.

These are two of the results users can find in the report or explore for themselves using the Year in the News Interactive 2011 tool.

With the Interactive tool, users can also explore:

• The most and least covered stories
• Coverage of foreign news
• Breaking news events that dominated coverage
• The topics that got the most coverage
• The top newsmakers of the year
• Differences in focus among the cable news networks

See also: The Stories the Public Followed the Most in 2011