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No other event or story generated much attention as the battle for Congress was finally resolved, accounting for more than half of last week’s coverage. Once the voters had spoken, the media pivoted from polls and predictions to post-mortems and projections about the new political landscape. And not surprisingly, President Obama was at the center of the narrative.
Thanks to polls, prognosticators and personal attacks, the congressional election cycle galvanized the news media last week. The economy finished as the No. 2 story, with the foreclosure crisis once again driving the narrative. And a noteworthy news industry firing, that of NPR’s Juan Williams, triggered an impassioned journalistic and political debate.
Overview This report contains data from several different sources. The data on overall Twitter usage and demographics comes from the Pew Internet Project’s November 2010 tracking survey, while the data on frequency of use and types of material posted by Twitter users comes from two Omnibus Surveys conducted in October 2010. The two types of […]
Summary of Findings Though the new Congress convened in Washington last week, Americans focused most closely on news about the nation’s economy – until they heard about Saturday’s shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz., that left six dead and a congresswoman fighting for her life. At that point, the shootings became the public’s top story. Before […]
The media’s post-election analysis of Republican Rand Paul’s victory in the race for Kentucky’s open U.S. Senate seat has focused heavily on the role of negative advertising, with several news accounts crediting Paul’s election at least in part to a TV ad by his Democratic opponent, Jack Conway, which called Paul’s religious beliefs and policy […]