Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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Overwhelmingly, Americans place a premium on accuracy and timeliness and, to a somewhat lesser degree, information that is helpful and hard to find. Fully 90% say that it is important that the news is accurate; 88% say it is important for the news to be timely and up-to-date. Over three-quarters (78%) want the news to […]
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 […]
The public’s news interests help explain the relative resilience of these news sources. Crime, health and community — the focus of much of today’s local news — are the subjects that most interest Americans. The public expresses considerably less interest in news about political figures and events in Washington and international affairs — topics which […]
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 […]