Overview Before you read the report, test your own News IQ by taking the interactive knowledge quiz. The short quiz includes many of the questions that were included in a national poll. Participants will instantly learn how they did on the quiz in comparison with the general public as well as with people like them. […]
Another way of looking at the media coverage is to assess which religious faith was featured in each story studied. The data underscore just how prominently evangelicalism featured in the media narrative about American faith and politics. Evangelical Protestants received more coverage in the campaign than did the religion of either candidate – Mormonism and […]
In additional to the main analysis, researchers also examined two alternative streams of information: social media and niche publications directed at the Mormon community. Each revealed a tenor quite different from the mainstream media as well as from each other. An additional analysis of the conversation about religion and the two major candidates between August […]
In contrast with the 2008 presidential campaign, moments in which either of the candidates was challenged on his religious identity, or forced to defend a controversial religious position, were muted and short-lived. Among the incidents that rose to the surface, at least momentarily, was when a Baptist minister from Texas described Romney’s Mormon faith as […]
This report on media coverage of religion in the 2012 presidential campaign uses data derived from two different methodologies. Data regarding the coverage in the mainstream press were derived from the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s in-house coding operation. (Click here for details on how that project, also known as PEJ’s News Coverage Index, is conducted.) Data […]
Four years ago, in the 2008 presidential election, media coverage of religion focused on a pivotal, defining moment for each candidate. In Romney’s case, the coverage peaked in December 2007 when he delivered a major speech about faith in public life in an effort to reduce public unease with Mormonism; many media reports likened Romney’s […]
Muslims number 1.6 billion, representing 23% of all people worldwide. There are two major branches of Islam – Sunni and Shia. The overwhelming majority (87-90%) of Muslims are Sunnis; about 10-13% are Shia Muslims.8 Muslims are concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region, where six-in-ten (62%) of all Muslims reside. Many Muslims also live in the Middle […]
Three years ago the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life launched an effort to generate up-to-date and fully sourced estimates of the current size and projected growth of the world’s major religious groups. As part of this multi-phase project, the Pew Forum has assembled data on the size and geographic distribution of […]