News Habits & Media

President Bush's decision to send more troops to Iraq, and the reaction from Capitol Hill to Baghdad, overwhelmed virtually every other event in the media last week. The only non-Iraq stories to crack PEJ's News Coverage Index Top 5 last week were the Democrats in Congress and U.S. military strikes in Somalia.

Nancy Pelosi's swearing in as the first female Speaker of the House turned the Congressional transfer of power into the top story of the inaugural edition of PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index. Gerald Ford's funeral, the policy debate in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein's hanging also were among the top stories in the American news media the first week of 2007.

More than three years ago, in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, the New York Times announced it would hire its first-ever public editor or ombudsman to act as an independent monitor of the paper. Now a published report raises the issue of whether the Times is thinking about eliminating the position. Such a decision would likely reverberate throughout the newspaper industry. What are Times officials thinking?

The impact of the internet is evident in many ways in China

Once again, public opinion played a major role in the most important news stories of the year. Some of the strongest 2006 trends in public opinion carried over from previous years -- notably growing concern about the Iraq war and mounting dissatisfaction with the performance of the Republican-controlled Congress.

64% of registered voters received recorded telephone messages in the final stages of the 2006 mid-term election.

Some critics have assailed Time magazine’s choice for 2006 Person of the Year in recent days, calling the editors’ selection of “You” with a mirror on the cover gimmicky. But this wasn’t the first unconventional choice for Time’s honor – or the first time a group of people was selected. PEJ takes stock of Time’s past Persons of the Year from 1927 on.

What difference has Tony Snow made since becoming President George W. Bush’s press secretary? The President has been more accessible, for one thing. Tony Snow, it turns out, also talks more than his predecessor, Scott McClellan. A PEJ analysis suggests that in his regular give-and-take with the White House journalists, White House Q&A sessions are wordier and longer with the former TV and radio talk host at the helm.

It’s hard to know whether the universe of satellite radio companies is about to be cut in half. Is Sirius Radio boss Mel Karmazin’s talk about a merger between his company and XM Radio simply chatter or a prelude to a deal? Any union of the two intensely competitive satellite radio services would have to pass regulatory muster. Here’s a look at how the two satellite radio services stack up.

A two-year-old experiment in shrinking the global village, Global Voices features bloggers who often write about parts of the world that are ignored by the mainstream media. In this PEJ interview, co-founder Ethan Zuckerman talks about the promise of the blogosphere and some of the problems with traditional journalism.