Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The economy, a hate crime, health care and Detroit’s problems all competed for attention in last week’s news landscape. But a presidential vote in Iran commanded much of the late-week coverage, as the press focused on a nation it often tends to ignore.
In another week with a mixed news agenda, the media provided some cautiously optimistic assessments of the troubled economy and offered some strikingly different treatment of the tax day tea party protests.
Several big events vied for the attention of the media last week. But for the second time in two months, a major overseas presidential foray topped the news agenda when it demonstrated Barack Obama’s dramatically different approach to foreign policy.
As attention to the economy dropped, the nation’s anti-terrorism policies dominated the news agenda for the second time in the past month. Since the release of the interrogation memos, coverage of this topic has jumped dramatically.
A story that suddenly emerged from nowhere, the threat of a global influenza pandemic, sent the media into overdrive last week. The flu scare knocked a number of significant events out of the headlines and by week’s end, began to spawn a backlash.
A financial report card for U.S. banks returned the economic crisis to the top of the news agenda last week while the fighting in Pakistan and Afghanistan also became a major story.
The intensifying protests and political ferment inside Iran eclipsed some major domestic stories in the U.S. news agenda last week. And as the mainstream press confronted daunting restrictions on coverage, an outpouring of social media reports—but not all from Twitter—helped drive the Iran narrative.