Back in 2007, when President George W. Bush pushed for new immigration legislation, PEJ research showed the degree to which conservative talk hosts attacked the measure. And, they themselves took credit for helping to kill it. Will these hosts reprise their staunch opposition this time around? The early indications suggest that perhaps not.
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have both received more negative than positive coverage from the news media in the eight weeks since the conventions, but Obama has had an edge overall, a new PEJ study finds. The report also examines how the candidates fared in different media outlets, the tone of the conversation on social media and offers comparisons to 2008 campaign coverage.
Users of Twitter, Facebook and blogs weighed in heavily on the Supreme Court Health Care ruling last week. PEJ examines the sentiment on each of the three social media platforms, how that sentiment shifted in the days that followed the ruling and the degree to which users delved into implications for the presidential contenders.
A Supreme Court decision forcing California to release thousands of prisoners due to overcrowding received harsh criticism from bloggers last week, while others weighed in on the arrest of a suspect in a brutal baseball game beating. On YouTube, an interview with Jon Stewart on The O’Reilly Factor garnered the most attention.
Bloggers last week continued to follow the troubling news coming out of Japan and returned to a familiar topic—global warming—in stark contrast to the mainstream media’s attention to Beltway budget battles. Google’s new video initiative was No. 1 on Twitter while soccer-related violence was the top YouTube news clip.
In today’s news landscape, both mainstream and new media sources shape the narrative. A new PEJ study finds that no single unified message reverberated throughout the media universe in the wake of the November 2 voting and what one learned depended largely on where one got the news. How did the post election-day narrative differ from the front pages to the television studies and from bloggers to Twitterers?
The race for Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat began largely drama-free and little-covered and ended as the most surprising and intensely-covered political story in the country. Which candidate got the most favorable attention? How did coverage change over time? How did the local Boston papers differ in their reporting? A new study examines newspaper coverage of the race.