Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton dominated coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign last week, but in very different ways. While Obama got a big bounce from primary wins, the Clinton campaign was besieged by bad news. Meanwhile, John McCain inched closer to inevitability.
All year long, Hillary Clinton has dominated the campaign conversation on the talk airwaves. And last week, signs that the Democratic battle for president might be tightening had many hosts talking up the idea of a Clinton swoon. Plus, Michael Savage on steroids. (Talking about them, not taking them.)
The Iraq policy debate re-emerged as the No. 1 story, replacing the campaign, in the third quarter, according to a detailed analysis of PEJ’s News Coverage Index. But terror fears, a troubled economy, and man-made disasters also grabbed the media’s attention. So too, did the three top newsmakers who ran afoul of the law.
The unlikely surge of former Arkansas Governor helped generate the biggest week of coverage for the presidential campaign so far in 2007. But as Huckabee is learning, some media attention is more welcome than others. Plus, the Mitchell report turns steroid abuse in baseball into a front-page story—some might say at long last.
The increasingly heated exchanges between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney helped make the race for the White House the top story last week in PEJ’s Index of the news. On the Democratic side, a former President generated a good chunk of the coverage, and it wasn’t all good. That, plus a football murder case.
The wildfires that raged in Southern California last week featured numerous tales of bravery, tragedy, and plenty of missing pets. But one reason the disaster became such a major story was that journalists couldn’t resist raising the comparison—fair or not—with the 2005 fiasco on the Gulf Coast.
For years, journalists struggled to report on the activities the private security firms in Iraq, companies who functioned in some ways as private armies. But last week, when the story of one such company moved from the streets of Baghdad to the hearing rooms on Capitol Hill, the media shed more light on the mystery.