Analysis: Our Studies
This section, Studies, contains PEJ's major empirical research studies, including our annual reports on the state of journalism divided into searchable subchapters. They are listed below in chronological order. Or you can use the menus on the left to filter our entire archive and find exactly what you want.
| | April 23, 2008 | | Many people expected Rupert Murdoch to be an activist owner when he bought the Wall Street Journal last year. So what’s happened to the paper under his tenure? A PEJ study of Journal front pages finds that under the new regime, there’s a lot less business and a lot more Beltway.
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| | January 9, 2008 | | It wasn’t quite “Dewey Defeats Truman,” but after the Jan. 8 Granite State primary confounded many of the pollsters and pundits, one of the key story lines that emerged in coverage of the McCain and Clinton victories was the media’s proclivity to predict and pre-analyze the results.
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| | December 19, 2007 | | What image of war did journalists—challenged with reporting events from Iraq—portray to the American public in the first 10 months of 2007? What role did violence play in the coverage? Who did reporters rely on for information? A new study of Iraq war coverage addresses these questions.
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| | December 6, 2007 | | The Iraq policy debate re-emerged as the No. 1 story, replacing the campaign, in the third quarter, according to a detailed analysis of PEJ’s News Coverage Index. But terror fears, a troubled economy, and man-made disasters also grabbed the media’s attention. So too, did the three top newsmakers who ran afoul of the law.
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| | November 28, 2007 | | In a new PEJ survey, journalists reporting from Iraq say the conditions are the most dangerous they've ever encountered. Ninety percent say most of Baghdad remains too dangerous to visit. Nearly 60% of the news organizations have had at least one Iraqi staff member killed or kidnapped in the last year. The survey is of 111 journalists from 29 news organizations reporting from Iraq.
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| | October 29, 2007 |
How have the news media covered the early months of the 2008 presidential election? Which candidate enjoyed the most exposure, which the best, and which the worst? With the race starting so early, did the press leap to horse race coverage from the start? A study by PEJ and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center has answers.
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| | September 12, 2007 |
What would a world in which citizens set the news agenda rather than editors look like? A new PEJ study comparing user-news sites, like Digg, Del.icio.us,and Reddit, with mainstream news outlets provides some initial answers. The snapshot suggests both a drastically different set of topics and information sources.
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| | September 4, 2007 | | 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.
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| | August 20, 2007 |
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.
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| | July 12, 2007 | The presidential hopefuls are using their web sites for unprecedented two-way communication with citizens. But what are voters learning here? Is it more than a way to bypass the media? A new PEJ study of 19 campaign sites finds Democrats are more interactive, Republicans are more likely to talk about “values,” and neither wants to talk about ideology.
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