Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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Three of the top-10 topics on the cable and radio talk shows last week directly involved the hosts themselves. They included an argument over the SCHIP health care program, the debate over U.S. policy in Iraq, and the strange case of Randi Rhodes.
Just a few years ago, when user-driven media was in its infancy, even the strongest supporters worried about its capacity to inform the public, a role the mainstream media had claimed for at least a century. A well-known advocate for expanding the role of citizens in journalism, Dan Gillmor, wondered and worried in 2004 what […]
Summary of Findings Hillary Clinton continues to lead Barack Obama by a wide margin in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. But Obama has something Clinton doesn’t have — the support of Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey endorsed Obama in May of this year and recently held a fundraiser for him at her Malibu, Calif. home. […]
Summary of Findings For the second week in a row, the plight of six miners trapped in a Utah mine dominated public interest. Though coverage of the miners fell off significantly from the previous week, 32% of the public paid very close attention to the story and roughly the same proportion (34%) said this was […]
Although the size and scope of the American news media have changed dramatically since the 1980s, audience news interests and preferences have remained surprisingly static. Of the two major indices of interest that are the focus of this report — overall level of interest in news and preferences for various types of news — neither […]
Yes, newsmakers like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton were major topics in talk media last week. But it was two of the hosts themselves, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, who inspired some of the most passion.