Pope Benedict XVI, the spiritual leader of some 1 billion Catholics worldwide, announced on February 11 that he will retire from his post by the end of the month, citing weakness and age. It will make him the first pope to resign in 600 years.

Perhaps the most visible religious figure in the world, Pope Benedict has attracted a significant share of news coverage over the years. Since Pew Research Center began tracking the U.S. news media in 2007, the pope has been by far the central figure in mainstream religion coverage.[i]

A new analysis of 2,700 religion stories in newspapers, websites, cable and broadcast news programs and audio outlets over a five-year period finds that:

• When covering religion, the U.S. media gave Pope Benedict far more attention than any other figure. The pope was the main newsmaker in 32% of all religion stories studied from July 2007 through May, 2012. That is nearly three times as much as the No. 2 religion newsmaker, Barack Obama (12%).
• Looking across all topics and the many thousands of people in the news over the last five years, Benedict still ranks high. The pope was the 27^th most-covered individual, the focus of more attention than figures such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, John Boehner or Hamid Karzai.
• In the context of religion coverage, not all media sectors have given equal treatment to the pope. On network TV, fully 38% of the religion coverage studied over the five years has focused on Benedict. On cable TV, however, only 14% has done so. Among other sectors, newspaper front pages (20%), audio news programs (23%) and major news websites (27%) fell somewhere in the middle.

Despite all the pope’s activities over the years, the U.S. media primarily focused on two main stories, with little attention to religious issues the Pope dealt with during his tenure.

• Benedict’s 2008 visit to the U.S. accounted for nearly a third (31%) of all pope-related news over the five years studied: That is nearly twice as much as the No. 2 story, the Catholic priest abuse scandal (18%). (For more analysis of media coverage of the Pope, see the Pew Research study of Benedict’s visit to the U.S. and a study of the clergy abuse scandal.)
• Benedict’s other travels, including visits to the UK, Cuba and Africa, accounted for another 17% of the coverage.
• Hot-button social issues accounted for very little of Benedict’s coverage. The pope’s positions on abortion and same-sex marriage together made up less than 1% of his media coverage over the five years studied.

Related Research:

Resources on Catholicism and the Pope

Infographic: Catholic Views of Catholic Leaders

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.

Overview

Events and controversies related to Islam dominated U.S. press coverage of religion in 2010, bumping the Catholic Church from the top spot, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Much of the coverage focused on the plan to build a mosque and Islamic center near ground zero in New York City, a Florida pastor’s threat to organize a public burning of the Koran and commemorations of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Stories related to these three events collectively accounted for more than 40% of all religion-related coverage studied in mainstream U.S. media (broadcast and cable television, newspapers, radio and major news websites).

Mainstream media devoted more attention to religion in 2010 than in any year since the Pew Research Center began measuring coverage of religion and other subjects in 2007. The amount of space or time media devoted to religion doubled between 2009 and 2010, going from about 1% of total coverage to 2%. And for the first time since tracking began in 2007, neither the Catholic Church nor religion’s role in American politics were the No. 1 topic of religion coverage in major news outlets.

These are some of the findings of a new study that examined news stories from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2010.

Among other key findings:

• Although the volume of religion coverage in the mainstream media increased more than two-fold from a year earlier, it was still small compared with coverage of some other topics, especially elections and politics.
• The Tea Party replaced the religious right as the most talked about element of the Republican Party’s grassroots support in coverage of the 2010 midterm elections. Religious individuals, groups or institutions were mentioned in only about 1% of all mainstream media coverage of the elections. By contrast, the Tea Party movement was mentioned in nearly one-in-six midterm election stories (14.1%).
• In 2010, religion appeared as a major topic more often in the blogosphere than it did in traditional media. Religion was among the most-discussed topics on blogs in 12 of the 48 weeks studied by PEJ and the Pew Forum. In three of those weeks, the plan to build a mosque and Islamic center near ground zero was among the top subjects.
• Analysis of social media, produced with technology from Crimson Hexagon, indicates that people who were active on social media sites were deeply divided about the proposed New York City mosque. About a quarter of the comments about the mosque and Islamic center posted on blogs, Twitter and online forums were neutral in character; the remaining comments were roughly evenly divided between those ardently for and those ardently against construction of the proposed mosque and Islamic center, now known as Park51, for its location at 51 Park Place in Lower Manhattan.

The study of traditional news sources analyzed 50,508 stories from newspaper front pages, home pages of major news websites, the first half hour of network and cable television news programs and the first half hour of radio news and talk shows. (For details, see the full methodology.) The new media content was analyzed separately by aggregating and coding a sample of blogs, tweets and other sources monitored by Technorati and Icerocket, which track millions of blogs and social media entries. (For details, see the full New Media Index methodology.) In addition, PEJ and the Pew Forum used software provided by Crimson Hexagon to analyze a broader range of social media conversations about the New York City mosque controversy during the period when the debate was most intense, Aug. 16-Sept. 13, 2010. That analysis monitored the tone of the conversations on blogs, Twitter and public forums. (For details, see Crimson Hexagon’s website.)

Read the full report at pewforum.org or journalism.org.

The heavy coverage in Europe was a reversal of the pattern in 2002, when a Boston Globe series triggered an avalanche of reporting on sexual abuse by priests in the United States but relatively few stories appeared in the European press. In early 2010, by contrast, much of the reporting focused on sexual abuse of children in Europe, and English-language European newspapers published three times as many articles on the scandal as U.S. papers did, the new study finds.

In addition, the media scrutiny this year zeroed in on the pope himself. During the six-week period from March 12 through April 27, Pope Benedict XVI was a major focus of more than half the stories on the scandal in the mainstream U.S. media, including print, radio, network television, cable TV and online news sources.

These are among the key findings of the study, conducted jointly by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, both of which belong to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.

The amount of coverage devoted to the pope may not be unusual, given his role in the church and the media’s tendency to focus coverage of scandals on individuals rather than institutions. But the thrust of the recent coverage — dwelling particularly on allegations that the pope abetted the cover-up of abusive priests in his native Germany and elsewhere — has been toxic for Benedict’s image.

In a nationwide poll released by the Pew Research Center in April, for example, just 12% of the public said the pope has done a good or excellent job addressing the scandal, down from 39% two years earlier. About seven-in-ten Americans (71%) said Benedict has done a poor or only fair job, up from about half (48%) who felt that way in 2008.

The new Pew Research Center study examined coverage of the scandal in 52 mainstream U.S. news outlets: 11 newspapers, 12 news websites, seven network TV programs, 15 cable TV programs and seven radio programs and news updates. In addition, the study looked at blogs and social media, relying in part on data from Tweetmeme, a Twitter monitoring service. A Nexis search of English-language newspapers around the world from 2002 through 2010 was used for historical comparisons. Stories from three Catholic news organizations were analyzed separately, as were religion blogs carried by major U.S. newspapers.

Among the findings of the study:

• From mid-March (when the pope’s role in a decades-old abuse case in Germany came under scrutiny) through late April, clergy sexual abuse was the eighth biggest story in the mainstream media, beating out coverage of nuclear weapons policy and the Tea Party movement. The biggest week of coverage was March 22-28, when news organizations reported on the failure of Vatican officials years ago, including the future pope, to defrock an American priest who had abused nearly 200 deaf boys. The church scandal was the fourth-biggest topic in the mainstream news that week.
• Benedict was by far the biggest newsmaker, featured in 51.6% of the stories about the scandal in the mainstream media during the six-week period studied. All other individual figures combined, including cardinals, bishops and priests, appeared as lead newsmakers in just 12% of the stories.
• The level of coverage this year came very close to that of 2002, when the news erupted that Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and other bishops across the United States had shuffled accused abusers from parish to parish without informing the police or public. A Nexis keyword search of 90 media outlets found 1,559 stories mentioning the scandal in the first four months of 2010, just 77 fewer articles than in a similar four-month period in mid-2002 (May 1-Aug. 31). No other developments in the scandal during the intervening eight years even came close to generating that level of coverage.
• An examination of three Catholic news outlets reveals wide differences in their approaches. The National Catholic Reporter, an independent weekly, devoted fully two-thirds (66.7%) of its Vatican coverage to the scandal. Two Catholic news services, on the other hand, devoted considerably less of their Vatican coverage to the story. Catholic News Service gave it 44.8%, and the Catholic News Agency gave it 33.3%.
• The scandal found little traction in new media, however. Across the millions of blogs and Twitter posts tracked in PEJ’s weekly monitoring, the clergy abuse scandal registered as a leading topic in only one of the six weeks analyzed. During the week of March 29-April 2, when new information emerged about the Milwaukee archdiocese’s handling of an abusive priest, the scandal was the second-largest story, making up 9% of all Twitter links to news reports. But it did not rank in the top five most blogged-about news stories at all.
• Among the religion blogs published by high-circulation U.S. newspapers, those operated by USA Today and The Washington Post contained the most entries on the clergy abuse scandal — a total of 12 each during the six weeks studied.

Continue reading the full report at pewforum.org.

The pope, though he made no visits to the United States last year, was the subject of two of the top 10 religion stories, while the Obama administration accounted for three of the top 10 religion-focused storylines during the year.

No single event dominated religion news coverage in 2009 the way the pope’s visit to the U.S. did in 2008. Instead, when religion made the news, it was often just one element of a larger story, such as the debate over abortion funding and health care reform, the impact of the recession on religious institutions, or the actions of President Barack Obama’s administration, including its continuation of the “faith-based initiative.”

These are some of the findings of a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life that examined news stories from January through December 2009.

Among other key findings:

• The overall amount of religion coverage remained fairly steady, at 0.8% (compared with 1% in 2008) of the newshole — the total space or time available for news content in newspapers, on television and in other media.
• About two-thirds of religion coverage in 2009 focused on stories that took place in the United States. About a third of the content focused on stories outside the U.S., down from 42.3% in 2008.
• Religion-related issues drew more attention in new media than in traditional press outlets. In a separate analysis of blogs throughout 2009, religion-related news made a list of top stories in 11 out of the 45 weeks studied. The topics that showed up in new media ranged from a Swiss ban on construction of minarets to a French trial of a group of Scientologists to the debate about same-sex marriage.
• The importance of new media platforms as a place for news and discussion about religion may grow as the number of religion writers in traditional news outlets decreases. According to the Religion Newswriters Association, at least 16 major print news outlets have reduced or abandoned their religion beats since 2007.

The study of traditional news sources analyzed more than 68,700 stories from newspapers, the internet, network and cable television, and the radio (for details, see the full methodology). The new media content was analyzed separately by aggregating and coding a sample of blogs, tweets and other sources monitored by Technorati and Icerocket, which track millions of blogs and social media entries (for details, see the full New Media Index methodology).

Religion Coverage Overall in 2009

Religion accounted for 0.8% of the mainstream media’s newshole in 2009.¹ This level of attention was on par with press attention to several other specialty areas, such as education and immigration.

While some news topics received much more attention in 2009 than they had a year earlier, religion coverage remained fairly steady. Health news coverage, for example, nearly quadrupled to 11% of the overall newshole, an indication of media interest in the debate about health care reform. Religion coverage saw a slight dip, dropping from 1.0% of overall news coverage in 2008 to 0.8% in 2009.

The bulk of the religion coverage in American media outlets in 2009 (67.0%) focused on stories that took place in the United States. About a third of the content (32.8%) focused on stories outside the U.S., primarily on coverage of Benedict’s travels and activities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Attention to events on foreign soil was down from 2008, when 42.3% of religion-related coverage dealt with events abroad.

Top Stories of the Year

The pope’s visit to the Middle East from May 8-15 accounted for 4.5% of all religion news last year, making it the No. 2 religion news story of 2009. The only storyline to receive more attention was the role of religion in the Obama administration, but this narrative ebbed and flowed for several months, following a number of different actions taken by the new administration. Obama and Benedict also dominated many of the other top religion stories of 2009, such as the president’s speech to the Turkish parliament in April and the papal pardon of a controversial bishop.

Taken together, the various actions of the pope accounted for 7.3% of religion coverage for the year. Religion storylines related to the Obama administration made up 9.6% of all religion-related news.

 Press Still Followed the Pope

Press coverage of the pope’s activities focused on his diplomatic efforts as well as several controversies. Benedict’s trip to the Middle East was the biggest of these storylines, at 4.5% of the religion newshole. Some news reports picked up on the pontiff’s efforts to build bridges both to Jews and to Muslims in the region. On May 11, for example, NBC’s Today Show reported on the pope’s visit to Bethlehem, where he honored Holocaust victims and called for a Palestinian homeland.

But some other reports painted a picture of an embattled pope. For example, a segment on the May 12 broadcast of ABC’s World News Tonight described the pontiff’s attempt to promote peace, but it also focused on the politics that continued to prevent peace in the Middle East. As ABC News Middle East correspondent Simon McGregor-Wood noted, “Pope Benedict XVI came to Jerusalem today as a pilgrim of peace, but this is a place of conflict.” And a BBC News Web story on the same day referenced Benedict’s involvement in Hitler Youth during World War II. “The chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Directorate, Avner Shalev, said he was disappointed that the pope did not more strongly condemn the Nazis,” reported the BBC.

The pope also made news in January for lifting the excommunication of a group of bishops who had been ordained 20 years earlier without the Vatican’s approval. The pardons drew criticism from European leaders when it turned out that one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, recently had questioned whether 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust and claimed that none were killed in Nazi gas chambers (2.3% of all religion coverage). The pardon was a home page story on ABCNews.com on Feb. 3.

The third major papal storyline was the pontiff’s trip to Africa in March, which garnered 0.5% of religion coverage for the year. Once again, controversy followed Benedict. On March 27, National Public Radio broadcast a BBC story about a British medical journal’s denunciation of the pope’s stance against the use of condoms in Africa. “The pope, who will shortly celebrate his 82nd birthday, has been involved in a series of public relations gaffes,” reported the BBC’s David Willey. “The Vatican has so far shown no sign of any willingness to modify its doctrinal views on the necessity of changing peoples’ sexual conduct rather than relying on condoms.”

The pope also was featured prominently in many stories during the Christmas holiday season. Holiday stories accounted for 4.2% of religion coverage and about half of these were about a papal Mass at which Benedict was attacked and dragged down by a female assailant, who was quickly subdued; the pope was not injured in the incident. A Dec. 25 CNN.com report described the scene: “The pope was quickly helped to his feet by his aides-prompting cheers from the crowd-and the service resumed.”

Religion and the President

Three of the top religion stories of the year revolved around the ideology, policies and rhetoric of President Obama. Together, these stories made up 9.6% of the religion newshole in 2009.

One storyline, which accounted for 5.8% of all religion coverage, centered on the role of religion in the new administration. Early in the year, the media covered the administration’s choices for the presidential inauguration festivities, where both evangelical pastor Rick Warren and an openly gay Episcopal bishop, Gene Robinson, delivered prayers. CNN’s Campbell Brown, in her prime-time program on Jan. 12, delved into the political implications of these choices, recalling that “it was only a few weeks ago that gay rights groups were pretty outraged when Obama picked Pastor Rick Warren, who, of course, campaigned against gay marriage in California, to say the prayer at the inauguration. Is this a way of placating everybody?”

Other news reports from early in the president’s first year raised questions about Obama’s religious ideology. For instance, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, in his program’s opening segment, “Talking Points Memo,” stated that “the president is a secular guy.” O’Reilly proceeded to describe some incidents he felt were indicative of Obama’s approach to religion in the public sphere: When Obama spoke at Georgetown University, a religious symbol behind him was covered; he did not choose a home church once in office; and he did not attend National Day of Prayer events. Other news outlets picked up on the latter observation. CNN’s Situation Room aired a story on May 6 describing how the new president had upset certain Christians by not participating in the National Day of Prayer in May. CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry noted, however, that “many past presidents marked the occasion by just signing a proclamation.”

Additionally, a number of media accounts focused on Obama’s continuation and expansion of former President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative (see the report by the Roundtable on Religion & Social Welfare Policy) and the creation of a faith-based advisory council (see the Pew Forum’s report on Obama’s advisory council). On Feb. 6, Barbara Bradley Hagerty of National Public Radio interviewed Jim Towey, who ran the office under Bush for five years. Towey’s advice to Obama was that “he’d better pray, every day, because you really need the wisdom to navigate a very treacherous landscape between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution.”

Two other media storylines focused on speeches by the president. His April address to the Turkish parliament and a related news conference received 2.1% of religion coverage in 2009. While in Turkey, Obama stressed the positive impact of Islam on the United States and the world, which generated some backlash from conservative talk show hosts. Radio broadcaster Michael Savage argued on his April 6 program that Obama was wrongfully defending Islam during the visit. “Obama said that ‘Islam has made contributions that have shaped or shaken the world, including my own country.’…so I said I couldn’t think of one contemporary Islamic contribution to America other than Obama … Barack Hussein Obama, their mouth piece.”

In May, the topic of abortion and Catholicism appeared in the news when Obama delivered the University of Notre Dame’s commencement address. Some bishops took issue with the university’s selection of Obama because the Democratic president’s views on abortion made him, in their view, an inappropriate choice for a Catholic university. Coverage of the event made up 1.7% of the religion newshole for the year. Fox News’ Sean Hannity interviewed anti-abortion activist Randall Terry, the founder of stopobamanotredame.com, on his May 15 program, where Terry said, “Human life is being snuffed out because of President Obama. And they’re honoring him.”

Press coverage of Obama’s speech at Cairo University in June focused almost entirely on the diplomatic angle of the event. Although Obama addressed matters of faith explicitly, even quoting the Koran, the vast majority of the mainstream coverage emphasized the broader international relations aspect. “Most notable in the hourlong address was Mr. Obama’s reiteration of his support of a state for Palestine, and his rejection of continued construction by Israel of new settlements on disputed land,” reported the Wall Street Journal on June 4. Only about halfway down did the article briefly touch on Obama’s references to Islamic traditions and beliefs, noting that Obama “quoted from the Quran and recited Muslim contributions to the world and to America.”

Religion and Public Affairs

Attempts to change the U.S. health care system and the struggling economy were two stories that generated a great deal of coverage in 2009. These two issues also generated some religion-related coverage.

Faith groups’ activism around health care reform made up 3.0% of the religion newshole in 2009, sometimes providing a window into how religious groups take different stances on the same issue. An Aug. 11 CNN story published on Google News described the efforts of religious groups in favor of health care reform. The story quoted a Baptist minister and a Jewish rabbi who argued that access to health care is a moral issue. But some reports examined religious coalitions that opposed an overhaul of the health care system. A front-page New York Times story on Aug. 28 described a group of Catholic bishops opposed to the proposed health care legislation, having “concluded that Democrats’ efforts to carve out abortion coverage are so inadequate that lawmakers should block the entire effort.”

Religion narratives tied to the economic recession accounted for 2.2% of all religion-related coverage. These stories mostly examined how houses of worship were faring under financial duress, as well as the growing demands on religious charities and social service providers. A few stories went deeper, such as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s front-page account on July 8 of the pope’s encyclical about the moral aspects of economic responsibility. Reporter Ann Rodgers noted where the pope spoke to Wall Street in “Caritas in Veritate.” “The pope criticized economic decisions made solely for the short-term interest of investors, particularly when jobs are lost,” Rodgers wrote.

The perennial debate over abortion rights also made the news in 2009, accounting for 1.7% of religion-related coverage during the year. Most of the coverage focused on tensions between the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and Catholics who question or depart from the church’s teachings, particularly on abortion. For example, Yahoo News carried an Associated Press story in November that reported that Providence, R.I., Bishop Thomas Tobin had asked Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy to refrain from receiving Communion in light of his stance on abortion.

Other Notable Stories

Two other religion-related stories received notable coverage in 2009. One of these was the shooting at Fort Hood, which filled 2.0% of the religion newshole. When Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan went on a shooting spree at the Texas military base in November, the media focused on whether and how the Muslim psychiatrist had been radicalized.

Worried about a backlash, leaders of the American Muslim community were eager to convey their own message through the media. NPR’s Nov. 6 broadcast of Morning Edition contained a statement by Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He insisted that “this is just something that … should not be used to somehow paint Muslim military personnel or the American Muslim community as somehow unpatriotic or anti-military.”

The cable news channels were another venue where Islamic leaders spoke freely. On MSNBC’s Nov. 6 edition of Hardball, host Chris Matthews spoke with Nihad Awad, also of CAIR. Awad told Matthews, “Sincerely, I offer condolences for the families who lost their loved ones and I pray sincerely for God to give a speedy recovery for those who were injured in this attack. But also I remember the thousands of Muslims continuing to serve in the U.S. military and also the many headstones in Arlington National Cemetery that have crescents on them.”On the same day, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow interviewed Suhail Khan, an expert on Muslim-Christian relations, who also stressed that thousands of Muslims serve with honor in the U.S. military.

Another storyline involved Republican Sen. John Ensign, who admitted to having an affair with the wife of one of his aides. Stories on this topic, which accounted for 1.6% of religion-related coverage for the year, addressed Ensign’s conservative Christian positions on social issues and his ties to The Fellowship (also known as The Family), an evangelical Christian group that includes members of Congress and other public officials.

Read the full report including religion coverage in blogs and other new media at journalism.org or pewforum.org.

_{1. Percent of newshole is calculated using an algorithm that accounts for total space or time devoted to news content in newspapers, television, audio and Web sources.}

But a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that Obama’s faith-based initiative has so far generated little of the contentious press coverage associated with Bush’s effort. And the program is not as closely associated with the current president as it was with the man he succeeded.

The new study examines newspaper coverage of the faith-based initiative during the first six months of the Obama and Bush administrations and finds that the topic received nearly seven times more coverage in the first six months of 2001 than it did during the same period in 2009.

The faith-based initiative was an early priority of the Bush administration — “one of the first items on his agenda as president,” as described by The Washington Post. But the program met resistance from both religious and nonreligious leaders, who voiced concerns that the effort was being politicized and fears that the initiative would undermine church-state boundaries. The controversial nature of the initiative became the focus of much of the early 2001 press coverage.

But when Obama established his own faith-based initiative, the press coverage focused primarily on procedural matters — including the renaming of the office as the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships; its new director, Joshua DuBois; and a new, 25-member faith-based advisory council — as well as questions about how Obama would address issues that arose during the eight years of Bush’s faith-based initiative. The one controversy that generated a relatively significant amount of coverage in the first six months of the Obama administration concerned whether faith-based groups that receive federal funds should be able to consider a potential employee’s religion when making hiring decisions.

These are some of the key findings of the study, which analyzed 331 newspaper stories from January-June 2001 (281 stories) and January-June 2009 (50 stories) in eight national and regional newspapers. Using Nexis keyword searches, stories addressing the faith-based initiative were identified for analysis. Additional keyword searches and qualitative textual analysis were used to identify major patterns in the newspaper coverage. (A more detailed discussion of the methodology can be found in the full report.)

Also among the findings:

• Coverage of the faith-based initiative was almost 50% more likely to be on the front page of newspapers in 2001 than in 2009. In the first half of 2001, 15% of the stories — 43 stories in total — appeared on the front page. In the first half of 2009, that number dropped to 10%, or only five stories.
• Issues related to the separation of church and state were the top concern in the press in 2001. Fully 40% of the newspaper coverage focused on whether the initiative violated this constitutional line. In 2009, the top controversy in the coverage analyzed was the unresolved faith-based hiring issue. More than a third of the stories (36%) dealt with this debate.
• In each year studied, Christianity was referenced nearly as often as Judaism and Islam combined. In total, the Christian faith was directly referenced in 32% of the stories. This was followed by references to Judaism and Islam, at 21% and 15%, respectively.
• In both years, newspaper coverage of the faith-based initiative was often a Washington-focused story. Of all the articles analyzed, 56% carried Washington, D.C., datelines, while no other single city came close.

Continue reading the full report at pewforum.org.

Related: Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships

Attention to Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States in April eclipsed even faith-related controversies surrounding the 2008 presidential election campaign, including candidates’ associations with controversial religious figures such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

For the year overall, religion coverage represented only a small slice of a mainstream news agenda dominated by politics and the economy. Nevertheless, religion received about as much coverage as immigration, education, and race- and gender-focused stories. In 2008, religion coverage filled 1% of the newshole — the time or space available in an outlet for news content — studied by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in their annual report on American journalism, The State of the News Media. (See Methodology.)

The biggest religion story of the year by far (making up 37% of the religion newshole) was Pope Benedict’s trip to the United States during the week of April 14. The pope’s visit was the second-biggest news story in PEJ’s News Coverage Index during that week. (The presidential campaign topped the news agenda.) By the next week, however, the pope’s visit had practically disappeared from the headlines.

The pope’s trip was a highly anticipated event that included scheduled stops in Washington, D.C., and New York City, two major media markets. However, more than half (54%) of visit-related coverage focused on two sub-stories: the ongoing impact of the clergy sex-abuse scandal (37%) and the pope’s relationship with American Catholics (17%).

Pope Coverage by Story Focus

Media Coverage of April 2008 Visit

With the presidential campaign dominating all media coverage in 2008 (36% of the total newshole analyzed by PEJ for the year), one might expect that campaign-related religion stories would have eclipsed the pope’s visit. This was not the case, however. Much of the coverage of campaign-related events — including then-Sen. Barack Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the presidential candidates’ forum sponsored by evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s galvanization of “values” voters — focused on the “horse-race” aspects of the campaign rather than on the religion angles of the stories.

Religion Coverage in 2008 Over Time

Two other religion stories that gained some traction in the press in 2008 were both tied to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: The death of Mormon leader Gordon Hinckley in January (1% of religion newshole) and the police raid on a Texas compound associated with fundamentalist sect leader Warren Jeffs (2%).

Religious conflict around the world received sporadic attention from the press (combined, these stories filled 3% of the religion newshole). Two of the biggest events — the November terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, and ongoing unrest in Iraq — centered on religion-related violence. Religious conflict also was a storyline in coverage of religious freedom issues in Russia under Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Were there any unifying themes to the mainstream press coverage of religious issues in 2008?

Throughout much of 2008, the media generally seemed to follow two patterns in its coverage of religion. First, religion reporting was often episodic, clustering intensely around big events such as the pope’s visit and religion stories related to the 2008 holiday season. Religion stories also faded quickly from the headlines.

Second, the angle of religion coverage frequently gravitated toward controversies, such as Barack Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright and stories about the clergy sex-abuse scandal that surfaced during the pope’s visit. This was particularly problematic for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates, who were inundated with questions concerning their faith.

This report is a part of PEJ’s 2009 State of the News Media. This special analysis was written in collaboration with the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.