Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Summary of Findings The debate over future Iraq war policy took center stage in Washington and in the national news last week. However, public interest in the story was modest at best as Americans expressed frustration with the quality of the debate and the clarity of the competing arguments. Only 18% of the public paid […]
With the Virginia Tech shootings and Don Imus controversy beginning to fade into the news background, a couple of very familiar subjects commanded the most media attention last week. And Arizona Senator John McCain managed to find himself in the middle of both stories.
In a speech to graduating seniors at Boston University, PEJ Senior Counselor Bill Kovach discussed the need for citizens to carefully sort through disinformation and news to define a “reality” that offers the best understanding of our increasingly complicated democracy.
Overall, that extensive morning show and cable output is largely responsible for the fact that Smith’s death was the third biggest story, accounting for 8% of all the news coverage studied by PEJ in that slightly more than three-week period. It missed being No. 1 by the narrowest of margins. The Iraq policy debate, which […]
In 1955, as the early baby boomers entered elementary school, the nation’s public school enrollment stood at 30.7 million. Sixteen years later, it peaked at 46.1 million. Then, as the boomers delayed or deferred childbearing, the school-age population began to decline, bottoming out at 39.2 million in 1984. The enrollment numbers would have changed relatively […]