News Habits & Media

Now that Fred Thompson has formally announced his candidacy for President, his live campaign can begin to match the vigorous cyberspace campaign he's been running for months. In a follow-up to a July 12 report on the Web sites of the other Presidential hopefuls, PEJ finds that Thompson’s full-service site is among the most sophisticated of anyone running--even before he had declared.

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.

Campaign swag and the political network effects of the internet

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.

Pew Internet, Pew Research, and McKinsey analysts all come to similar conclusions: the online news space is active and ripe for innovation.

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 […]

In the second of two parts, Pew Research Center consultant Michael Robinson analyzes data from 165 surveys on audience news preferences to examine news interest across decades and describe how the public's news interests have changed -- or not changed -- over different news eras.

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.