Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
This election is unprecedented in terms of its early start and how much early coverage it received. By February 2007, nearly 11 months before any citizen would cast a primary vote or gather for a caucus, the race became one of the biggest stories in the news. This coverage reflected the candidates’ early and heavy […]
For a PDF of the topline data, click here. This is a joint report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. PEJ and Shorenstein together designed the […]
How have the news media covered the early months of the 2008 presidential election? Which candidate enjoyed the most exposure, which the best, and which the worst? With the race starting so early, did the press leap to horse race coverage from the start? A study by PEJ and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center has answers.
Summary of Findings When asked about which issues, if any, get too much attention from the news media, fully 40% of the public cites celebrity news. That is more than three times the number citing any other subject. About one-in-ten Americans (12%) say the news media has devoted too much attention to the Iraq war, […]
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 […]
Key West, Florida Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2008 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Recent advances in neuroscience and brain-imaging technology have offered researchers a look into the physiology of religious experiences. In observing Buddhist monks as they […]
Pew Forum Faith Angle Conference Key West, Florida Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in December 2007 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Stephen Prothero, chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University, discussed the issue of religious illiteracy in the […]