Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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With Internet use skyrocketing in virtually every major demographic group, more than one-third of Americans (36%) are now going online from work or home. What’s more, those who go online have a large appetite for news and information and are turning to the Internet as yet another news source. The Internet is quickly becoming a […]
Tabloids The breakdown of coverage in the tabloid press differed from the more serious press only slightly. Whereas the serious press in March relied on named sources 28% percent of the time, the tabloid press did so in four out of ten statements (41%). The serious press relied on anonymous sourcing 12% of the time […]
Different Types of Media Print was much more specific about characterizing sources than television. Newspapers, the Associated Press and the news weeklies used the vaguest characterization of anonymous sourcing–sources said or the news organization has learned–26% of the time. Television used this blind characterization 68% percent of the time. The two media were much closer […]
Today, what Americans know may differ greatly depending on their source of news. In the second part of the study, looking at a broader universe of the news media in the fall of 1997, we also found different kinds of news media offering markedly different definitions of news depending on what they perceived their market […]
Is there really a trend toward entertainment as news?
Breakdown by News Genre Factual Reporting Overall, 59% of the reportage was factual reporting–it described what had happened. This reporting had several levels of verification: from multiple named sources, to a single anonymous source to another news outlet. Looking just at this universe of factual reporting, substantially less than half, only 42%, was based on […]
Demographics On the whole, both samples (even unweighted) fairly closely reflected the American public. In most demographic categories, both samples differed from U.S. Census figures by 4 percentage points — the statistical margin of error — or less.[1. All demographic comparisons presented in this section are based on unweighted data. Most surveys use mathematical weighting […]
The first part of the study compared coverage from 1977, 1987 and 1997 in seven media outlets. It looked at all the coverage on the three main network newscasts for one month (March) of each of those years, as well as the front page coverage of the New York and Los Angeles Times, and the […]