Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
A Senate health care bill, new jobless numbers, a recommendation on breast cancer screening, and a presidential visit to China made the roster of top stories in a crowded news week. But perhaps no subject stirred as much media sturm and drang as Sarah Palin’s high-profile book tour.
On Saturday morning, July 18, a 34-year-old Baltimore man named Shawn Sinclair shot and wounded two city police officers before being wounded and detained himself in a gunfight that culminated a wild, drug-infused morning of violence. The incident provided a window into the way breaking violent crime stories, a staple of local media, are covered […]
The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life held a conference call with journalists to discuss the findings of a new 19-country survey, “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa.” The study finds that the vast majority of people in many sub-Saharan African nations are deeply committed to Christianity or Islam, […]
Coverage of health care was up last week, the economy was down and the war in Afghanistan remained about the same. But together, this trio continued their run atop the news agenda, a pattern we began to see settle in earlier this fall.
Overview of responses Background Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has an even grander vision for what the web can be. He and his allies have been working through the World Wide Web Consortium on an evolving initiative they call the semantic web. Berners-Lee and co-authors wrote in Scientific American in […]
A new PEJ study investigates where news comes from in today’s rapidly changing media landscape. An examination of local media in Baltimore provides insight on how the U.S. media ecosystem works. What role do new media, blogs and specialty news sites play in the news cycle? Who is breaking news? Which reports advanced the story? The study answers these questions and more.
Ending a lull in coverage, the battle over health care reform returned as the No. 1 story last week as 23 senators cast votes on the issue. But the nation—and the media—were also captivated by a strange story about a six-year-old boy that began as breathless breaking cable news.
It was a war that often had trouble breaking into the headlines. But in recent months, with President Obama facing a crucial decision over whether to escalate U.S. involvement, coverage of Afghanistan increased noticeably. And last week, as the policy debate intensified, the story dominated finally the news.