Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The media narrative moved from overseas to the Beltway last week as budget battles trumped press interest in Libyan fighting and Japanese nuclear worries. The question is whether a long run of dominant international news will now give way to ongoing coverage of domestic concerns.
The fallout from the killing of Osama bin Laden continued to generate the most attention of any story in the mainstream media last week, though coverage fell off substantially. On cable news, where politics often dictates news agenda, the level of attention varied widely: CNN devoted the most attention to the story and Fox gave it the least.
The killing of Osama bin Laden accounted for more than two-thirds of all news coverage last week as the media spent much of it trying to piece together exactly what happened in that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. And that proved to be an ever-changing and evolving narrative.
Summary of Findings The public’s interest in developments in Egypt remained high last week as the media focused increasingly on domestic debates over how to deal with the fiscal troubles facing many states and how to bring down the federal deficit. About a third of the public (32%) says they followed news about the situation […]