Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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Summary of Findings Sen. John Kerry enters the Democratic convention next week bolstered by a number of favorable trends in public opinion, although he remains locked in a statistical tie for voter support with President George W. Bush. His party is dominant on key domestic issues and at least competitive with the Republicans on every […]
Men pursue and consume the news online more than women do. The popularity of getting news from the Internet has grown over the years, with additional boosts following major news events like September 11 or the start of the Iraq war. Since 2000, when the Pew Internet & American Life Project began tracking participation in […]
Americans are turning to the Internet for news coverage they can’t find in the mainstream news media. During recent months, a significant number of Americans have been turning to the Internet as a source of news and pictures that are not available in the mainstream media. This has come at a time of intense and […]
Summary of Findings There are considerably fewer swing voters now than at this point in the previous three presidential campaigns. But the swing vote, while smaller in relative terms, is still substantial and certainly large enough for a presidential candidate to win a big victory. Pew’s most recent survey, conducted June 3-13, finds 21% of […]
The second phase of this study was a survey of the public by the Pew Research center for the People and the Press to see if the narrative themes about the candidates in the press were having an impact on public attitudes. While the public perceptions of the candidates character traits do not match precisely […]
Americans’ news habits have changed little over the past two years. Network and local TV news viewership has been largely stable since 2002. Daily newspaper readership remains at 42% (it was 41% two years ago). And the percentage of Americans who listen to news on the radio on a typical day is virtually unchanged since […]
The place where political messages are reduced to their simplest form, but perhaps also their most enduring, is late-night comedy/talk shows. Here news events that have entered the American psyche are morphed into accepted attitudes and become punchlines. Late night comedy is also a place where some Americans, particularly young people, glean information about the […]
This Pew Internet & American Life Project report is based on a random digit dial telephone survey of 2,925 Americans age 18 and over conducted between June 25, 2003 and August 3, 2003. The survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates and was administered in English. For results based on the total sample, one […]
Summary of Findings With three months to go until the presidential election, the American public remains largely dissatisfied with economic conditions and with President Bush’s stewardship of the economy. Two-thirds rate the national economy as “only fair” or “poor,” while just one-third judge it to be “excellent” or “good.” Accordingly, Bush gets low ratings for […]
Newsroom staff cutbacks are hitting print journalism at both the national and local level. About half of respondents working at newspapers or magazines (48% nationally, 54% locally) say the size of their newsroom staff has decreased in the past three years. Relatively few in the print sector are seeing growth in the number of staff. […]