Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
This study compares the news stories from user-determined news aggregators with those that were part of PEJ’s News Coverage Index. In this study PEJ chose to look at three different independent user-news sites: Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. In addition, PEJ looked at the three components of Yahoo News that depend on user input. These are […]
Summary of Findings The 2008 presidential campaign began much earlier than usual, but public interest in the campaign is at most only modestly higher than in previous campaigns. While Democrats are following the campaign more closely than at the same stage in previous primary contests, Republicans are no more engaged than in the past, resulting […]
With the news split between stories like the Utah Mine collapse and the resignation of Karl Rove, the leading topic in the media last week was he 2008 campaign, but only barely. And by week’s end the nations’ economic turbulence was grabbing headlines.
Summary of Findings An overwhelming majority of the public (87%) says celebrity scandals receive too much news coverage. This criticism generally holds across most major demographic and political groups. Virtually no one thinks there is too little coverage of celebrity scandals. When asked who is most to blame for the amount of coverage these kinds […]
That’s the number of Americans who now seek out news on the internet on a typical day. The daily audience online for news has grown dramatically since 2002 — a surge fueled by the rise in home broadband connections.
The publics of the world broadly embrace key tenets of economic globalization but fear the disruptions and downsides of participating in the global economy. In rich countries as well as poor ones, most people endorse free trade, multinational corporations and free markets. However, the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey of more than 45,000 people finds they are concerned about inequality, threats to their culture, threats to the environment and the threats posed by immigration. And there are signs that enthusiasm for economic globalization is waning in the West.
The political skirmishing in advance of General Petraeus’ progress report made the Iraq debate the top story last week. And Fred Thompson’s entry helped generate coverage of the 2008 Presidential race. But a new video, a major arrest in Germany, and two mysterious men in Seattle proved why terrorism is still a major newsmaker.
When the top stories of the quarter are put into the larger category of general topics, even broader patterns emerge. The war in Iraq becomes part of a larger grouping of coverage of U.S. foreign affairs. The campaign becomes part of a broader topic of politics. Anna Nicole becomes part of a grouping that includes […]