Analysis: Our Studies, Commentaries and Backgrounders
This section, Analysis, is the complete archive of all the research studies, commentaries, background reports, articles, or speeches PEJ has published. They are listed below in chronological order, but our archive is also searchable. Use the menus on the left to filter the contents and find exactly what you want.
| | July 10, 2008 | Through the 2008 primary election season, two candidates—Democratic Senator Barack Obama and Republican former governor Mitt Romney—received more media attention about their faith than any of the other candidates combined.
For both, the attention raised concerns about their relig ... |
| | May 29, 2008 | | What were the dominant personal narratives conveyed in media coverage of the presidential candidates? Which contenders fared best in the press and how critical was that coverage in influencing public opinion? How did those candidate story lines change over time? A new PEJ study of the 2008 primary season examines these questions. |
| | May 8, 2008 | | In a survey last year, Americans named Jon Stewart one of the nation’s most admired journalists, despite the Comedy Central host’s insistence that’s not what he does. A new PEJ content analysis of 136 episodes of The Daily Show examines the intersection of comedy and news that is the key to the show’s success.
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| | 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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| | March 26, 2008 | | The tactical success of the surge and the tactical failures of the new Democratic Congress are among the reasons why the five-year-old conflict seems to have disappeared from the headlines. And then there are the competing demands of covering the most intriguing presidential campaign in recent memory.
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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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| | January 4, 2008 | | The media were busy anointing winners after the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. And the theme of change and surprise also resonated throughout much of the commentary. But a PEJ look at the caucus post-mortems finds that perhaps the most distinct aspect of the coverage was the certainty that something major had occurred that night in Iowa.
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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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