News Content Analysis

It’s been a while since the debate over Iraq policy was the nation’s top talk show topic. But the Iraq doubters drove the suddenly re-ignited conversation on the airwaves last week. Meanwhile, the strange saga of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick and his dog fighting operation proved a difficult topic to tackle.

Summary of Findings Michael Vick’s legal troubles attracted a large news audience last week. One-in-four Americans followed the Vick story very closely and 18% said it was the single news story they followed more closely than any other. Overall, the public believes Vick, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback, has been treated fairly by the press, but […]

Two different destructive storms struck the continent and even in the dog days of summer, the presidential race continued to attract significant media interest. But several factors—an intelligence report, a senatorial statement, and a presidential analogy—all combined to re-ignite the debate over U.S. policy in Iraq.

The departure of the Bush Administration’s most-polarizing adviser gave talk shows plenty to talk about last week, as hosts from the left and right assessed the White House tenure of Karl Rove. But even as the aide prepared to shuffle off to Texas, the campaign was on most hosts’ minds.

Summary of Findings For the second week in a row, the plight of six miners trapped in a Utah mine dominated public interest. Though coverage of the miners fell off significantly from the previous week, 32% of the public paid very close attention to the story and roughly the same proportion (34%) said this was […]

With the news split between stories like the Utah Mine collapse and the resignation of Karl Rove, the leading topic in the media last week was he 2008 campaign, but only barely. And by week’s end the nations’ economic turbulence was grabbing headlines.

In the second quarter of 2007, the presidential campaign supplanted the debate over Iraq as the No. 1 story in the media. Barack Obama overtook Hillary Clinton as the candidate getting the most attention. And Republicans began to catch up with Democrats in exposure. PEJ offers a 2nd quarter report on the media.

The actual vote may be 15 months away, but a loaded campaign calendar helped make last week the biggest one so far for the 2008 presidential race in talk media. No other stories really came close. One of the biggest topics in all the talk: Democratic front runner Hillary Clinton.

Summary of Findings While Barry Bonds’ 756th career home run broke one of baseball’s long standing records, it was a non-event for many Americans. Just 12% followed the story very closely, while a 42% plurality did not follow the story at all closely. Bonds’ record received significantly less public attention than the last home run […]

Despite dramatic structural changes in the news media since the 1980s, the interests of news audiences have changed very little over the past several decades. Disaster News and Money News have been at the top of the charts throughout, while Tabloid News and Foreign News have been at the bottom. In this first of two reports, Pew Research Center consultant Michael Robinson analyzes data from 165 surveys on audience preferences taken by the PRC (and predecessor organizations) since 1986.