Search results for: “topics newspapers 2008”

For one week at least, the battle over health care reform and the troubled U.S. economy faded in the news. Instead, a series of daunting overseas challenges, highlighted by a surprise announcement about Iranian nukes, drove the press narrative.

The debate over health care took a new turn last week, as politicians and the media reacted to a new Senate proposal. And one outgrowth of the polarizing battle was that race played its biggest role in the media narrative since Obama became president.

Last week, the health care debate remained the lead story as talk hosts argued about whether the confrontations between protestors and politicians were genuine or choreographed. And thanks to a dramatic prisoner release in North Korea, a former president made almost as much news as the current one.

The intensifying protests and political ferment inside Iran eclipsed some major domestic stories in the U.S. news agenda last week. And as the mainstream press confronted daunting restrictions on coverage, an outpouring of social media reports—but not all from Twitter—helped drive the Iran narrative.

The economy, a hate crime, health care and Detroit’s problems all competed for attention in last week’s news landscape. But a presidential vote in Iran commanded much of the late-week coverage, as the press focused on a nation it often tends to ignore.

In the last several weeks, terrorism has topped the news agenda more often than the economic crisis. As last week’s dueling Cheney-Obama speeches showed, that’s what happens when a hot-button topic becomes the Beltway’s primary political fault line.