Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Thanks to some bruising campaigns and controversial remarks, the 2010 midterms led the mainstream news agenda again last week as an outspoken gubernatorial candidate moved to the center of the narrative. And the happy conclusion to the story of the 33 trapped Chilean miners, captured on live television, finished as a strong No. 2 subject.
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.
The country’s ongoing mortgage crisis sparked outrage from many bloggers last week while others discussed the compatibility—or lack thereof—between faith and science. On Twitter, images of the rescued Chilean miners drew cheers. And on YouTube, a movie star’s surprise visit to a school received millions of views.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” – the 17-year-old policy that bans gays from serving openly in the military – has become a heated issue in elections in Nevada, Missouri and Florida. The issue gained prominence in late May, when the Senate Armed Services Committee and the full House of Representatives voted to allow the Department of […]
In a year of attention-grabbing election surprises, nothing generated as much media interest as Delaware’s GOP Senate race last week. The troubled economy attracted significant coverage as well, but this time the focus was on tax cuts rather than employment figures. And education issues made a rare appearance on the list of PEJ’s top-five stories last week.
A presidential mention, and intense interest from talk show hosts, pushed a proposed Islamic center in New York City to the top of the news agenda last week. Meanwhile, a milestone in the drawdown of troops in Iraq attracted more media coverage than the war has received in more than a year.
With balloting little more than a month away, the 2010 congressional elections again topped the media agenda as a good chunk of that narrative focused on the power and potential of the tea party. And one factor that will clearly influence the outcome on election night, the state of the U.S. economy, was the No. 2 topic.
Anti-war and anti-Obama bloggers weighed in last week over the costs of the Iraq conflict and a quotation on a new rug in the Oval Office. On Twitter, the New York Times publisher’s prediction about the future of print from drew attention. And a YouTube-based talk show proved very popular.
The Gülen movement refers to a cluster of religious, educational and social organizations founded and inspired by Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamic scholar, author and speaker now in his late 60s. The movement strives to give faithful Muslims the secular education they need to thrive in the modern world. At the same time, it also […]
The Pew Forum’s religious knowledge survey included 32 questions about various aspects of religion: the Bible, Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, world religions, religion in public life, and atheism and agnosticism. The average respondent answered 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions correctly. Just 2% of those surveyed answered 29 or more questions correctly (including just eight […]