Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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During the 1998 campaign season, approximately 11 million Americans logged onto the Internet for news and information about the elections. This is an increase of four million people over 1996, bringing the total to 6% of the general population, up from 4% in 1996. These election news seekers are a particularly active group, using the […]
Third Party Witnesses From the earliest days of the Lewinsky story, reports were broadcast and published that Starr was investigating the existence of eyewitnesses to the intimate encounters between the President and Monica Lewinsky. Several stories named potential eyewitnesse s. But in the Starr Report and supporting material, there are no eyewitnesses. On Jan. 26, […]
Betty Currie Shortly after the Lewinsky story broke, Clinton’s personal secretary Betty Currie was named as a potentially important link in Kenneth Starr’s case–a key White House contact for Lewinsky. A round of personality profiles appeared that tried to put a face on the woman–they ranged from that of a motherly friend to Lewinsky, to […]
The Blue Dress The press was largely on the mark in its reporting on the dress that quickly became central to the Clinton-Lewinsky story. ABC’s early reporting turned out to be highly accurate. The stain did turn out to be the president’s semen. And although Lewinsky in her testimony maintained the dress wasn’t, as ABC […]
Vernon Jordan News organizations indicated almost immediately that Kenneth Starr was investigating Vernon Jordan for obstruction of justice. The reports said that Starr had tapes on which Monica Lewinsky said Jordan told her she should lie about her relationship with President Clinton. The initial Jan. 21 Washington Post story, for instance, reported that Lewinsky told […]
The narrative techniques and underlying messages in newspaper coverage.
Local versus National Papers There were some noticeable differences in the way local and regional papers in the study framed stories versus the three national papers, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The differences suggest that the front pages of local papers carry more straight forward reporting that focuses […]
Public displeasure with the national news media is clear, but this sentiment has not eroded the credibility of major news organizations. While public evaluations of most news organizations’ credibility are lower than they were in the mid-1980s, the basic believability ratings have not changed since the Center’s last survey in 1996. The words people choose […]
Introduction and Summary The Pew Research Center’s biennial news use survey finds that overall Americans are reading, watching and listening to the news just as often as they were two years ago. But the type of news Americans follow and the way they follow it are being fundamentally reshaped by technological change and the post-Cold […]