News Index

Events occurring outside the borders of the United States led the news for the eighth time in a nine-week span that has tested the mettle of journalists and the resources of their newsrooms.

From March 21-27, the turmoil in the Middle East—particularly the entry of the U.S. and NATO military forces into the Libyan conflict—filled 47% of the newshole studied by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The No. 2 story, the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake—primarily involving concerns about radiation—accounted for 15%.

That represents a reversal of the previous week, when Japan accounted for 57% of the coverage and Libya 17%. The narrative has whipsawed between these two events for the past several weeks.

With the Mideast dominating the news agenda since late January, and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami generating major attention since they struck March 11, almost half the overall coverage this year (43%) has been devoted to international events. That is almost double the normal level. All this comes at a time when newsroom cutbacks have taken a toll on foreign reporting resources.

The current chapter in the Mideast story began on March 17 when the U.N. Security Council voted to enforce a Libyan no-fly zone, a move that paved the way for direct U.S. military involvement.  Last week, there were two basic themes in the coverage of the conflict. One involved the changing situation on the ground; the other focused on the intensifying internal debate over President Obama’s handling of the situation.

Those two subplots were enough to make the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, and particularly the focus on the continuing dangers posed by radiation at the damaged nuclear plant, seem suddenly less urgent.

The No. 3 story last week, at 7%, was the death of iconic movie star and celebrity Elizabeth Taylor at age 79. While Americans under 40 may not remember her film career, many media tributes last week posited that her stardom and impact far exceeded her body of work.

The economy was the fourth-biggest story last week, at 6%, although no one storyline dominated. Unemployment claims dropped a bit and there was more legal wrangling over the effort to curtail union collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin.

Finally, the No. 5 story (2%) was the air traffic controller who fell asleep at Reagan National Airport, an event that sparked a larger public debate about airport staffing.

Libya: The Battle Broadens

Filling nearly half of all the time on radio and television and space in print and online, unrest in the Middle East was the top story last week in all five media sectors studied. But it was, first and foremost, a talk show story. For the week, the cable and radio talk hosts studied by PEJ devoted nearly three-quarters of the airtime studied (72%) to that subject. One major reason was that domestic politics and criticism of the president became a bigger part of the narrative.

When Barack Obama returned from a Latin American trip last week, he encountered growing doubts about his handling of the Libyan situation—ranging from criticism that he acted too late to fears that the U.S. was wrong to intervene. Some critics also asserted that the president had failed to clearly enunciate and explain his Libyan policy to the American people. (Obama gave a March 28 speech to address that subject.)

“Within minutes [after Obama] landed on the ground, he was hit with bi-partisan Congressional criticism,” a letter from House Speaker John Boehner with a “slew of unanswered questions” and a “very tepid statement of support” from House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, reported NBC’s Chuck Todd. “They have this public relations crisis.”

Critics came from both sides of the pundit spectrum. On MSNBC, liberal columnist Eugene Robinson wondered why the U.S. was fighting in Libya, but not in Yemen, where there is also a popular uprising against the leader. “We do it in Libya because we don‘t like Gaddafi, but [that] is not a compelling reason [nor] the keystone of a doctrine that you can use going forward or even apply consistently now,” Robinson declared.

On the right, Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity blamed Obama for not consulting Congress, adding: “A series of reports indicates that the anti-Gaddafi rebels have direct ties to al-Qaeda…I think it’s pretty safe to say these are the people America should not be supporting abroad.”

Hannity’s Fox colleague, Bill O’Reilly took a different view, saying he “supports the coalition action against Libya, and according to a new CNN poll, 70 percent of Americans agree with me.”

Meanwhile, more than 8,000 miles away from the Beltway in Libya, the media were trying to assess the impact of U.S./NATO firepower on fighting that had recently tilted toward the pro-Gaddafi forces. In some cases, there was a kind of cavalry-to-the-rescue feel to the narrative.

“The airstrikes, led by France, carved a trail of devastation that stretched more than 15 miles along the highway to Ajdabiya, another city under siege by forces loyal to Gaddafi,” reported the Washington Post on March 21. “The destruction brought a new hope to Libyan rebels seeking to end Gaddafi’s 41-year-long rule. Less than 24 hours earlier, they were on their heels as Gaddafi’s tanks and trucks pushed into Benghazi, the cradle of Libya’s month-old rebellion.”

And by the weekend, the main combat storyline had the tide once again shifting to the anti-Gaddafi forces who were driving their foes backward.

“Rebels said on Sunday forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi had retreated westwards and may be heading back towards the Libyan leader's stronghold of Sirte, which is about 375 km (230 miles) away from Tripoli,” stated a March 27 Reuters story that captured the theme of the day.

And in one sign of where the Mideast’s rolling revolutions may head next, some modest coverage of the protests in Syria—a very tightly controlled state—showed up in the press last week.

Nuclear Fears in Japan

Coverage of the situation in Japan fell by almost 75% from the previous week, but the key storyline remained the same. Concerns about radiation being released from the crippled Fukushima plant accounted for the overwhelming majority (about three-quarters) of the week’s coverage.

There were several ominous developments that made news last week, including concerns about radioactivity in Tokyo’s drinking water.

On March 23, MSNBC daytime anchor Tamron Hall reported that “parents in Tokyo are being told not to let their infants drink tap water. Water samples there contain more than double the amount of legal limit of radioactive iodine, which can cause thyroid cancer.”

Two days later, the Los Angeles Times reported on another aspect of the worsening situation.   “Japan's government Friday urged residents living within 18 miles of the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant to voluntarily leave their homes and suggested that officials could expand the mandatory evacuation zone,”  the story stated, adding that, “nuclear safety agency officials said that they suspected a breach in the reactor core of one unit at the quake-damaged plant.”

The earthquake’s aftermath drew the most attention last week in the network news (22%) and online (21%) sectors, but accounted for only 5% of the coverage on cable news. That represents a massive drop-off from the previous week when the subject filled 73% of the cable newshole.

In essence, cable—often a bellwether of the most potent story of the moment—abandoned Japan for Libya last week.

Elizabeth Taylor R.I.P.

The death of Elizabeth Taylor on March 23 was a major media event, but it was also a rare celebrity story that generated the most coverage (13%) in the newspaper sector as tributes and obits filled the nation’s front pages. 

The dominant theme of many media remembrances was that Taylor’s looks, body of work and megawatt celebrity made her what NBC anchor Brian Williams called “the last of the true movie stars.”  In Williams’ tribute on his March 23 newscast, he noted that her career “in terms of American presidents…spanned from FDR to Obama.” She gained stardom at age 12 in “National Velvet,” had eight marriages and became the first screen star to sign a million dollar contract when she made “Cleopatra.” In her later years, Taylor was probably best known as a tireless AIDS activist.

“She was always in the public eye,” Williams declared. “So of course, nothing about her life ever seemed quite normal.”

Newsmakers of the Week

From March 21-27, Barack Obama was the biggest figure in the news, registering as a dominant newsmaker in 6% of the week’s stories as the political debate over his strategy in Libya heated up. That is an increase from 4% the previous week. But it is not a particularly high number for Obama, even as critics tried to make him part of the story. (To register as a dominant newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a story.)

Muammar Gaddafi was No. 2, at 5% of the stories, marking the fifth consecutive week that Libya’s mercurial leader was either the first and second leading newsmaker in the U.S. media. The No. 4 newsmaker was another beleaguered Mideast leader on the ropes, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh, at 1%. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a key player in the unfolding Libyan crisis, was the fifth-biggest newsmaker, also at 1%.

The one big newsmaker last week who had nothing to do with the turmoil in the Middle East was Elizabeth Taylor, who was a dominant figure in 3% of the week’s stories. 

About the NCI

PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index examines the news agenda of 52 different outlets from five sectors of the media: print, online, network TV, cable and radio. (See List of Outlets.) The weekly study, which includes some 1,000 stories, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of that media narrative and differences among news platforms. The percentages are based on "newshole," or the space devoted to each subject in print and online and time on radio and TV. (See Our Methodology.) In addition, these reports also include a rundown of the week’s leading newsmakers, a designation given to people who account for at least 50% of a given story.

*Due to technical problems that disrupted satellite reception, some television programs—including daytime cable news from Tuesday, March 22, and some morning network as well as daytime and evening cable news from Friday, March 25—were not included in this sample.

For only the second time since PEJ began measuring social media in January 2009, the same story was the No. 1 topic on blogs, Twitter and YouTube. 

Social media users last week responded in huge numbers to the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake in Japan, including the growing concern about damaged nuclear reactors. For the week of March 14-18, a full 64% of blog links, 32% of Twitter news links and the top 20 YouTube news videos were about that subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The only other time that one topic led the news on blogs, Twitter and YouTube was June 15-19, 2009, when unrest following the disputed elections in Iran-also known as the "Twitter Revolution"-was the No. 1 story.

While all three social media platforms focused on the earthquake last week, each performed distinct functions. The blogosphere offered a place to release and share emotional responses to the disaster and calls for support for the Japanese people. Twitter became a place to seek out and share breaking news as users retweeted stories from news sources. YouTube, the visual medium, captured the astonishing visceral power of tsunami waves that destroyed virtually everything in their path.

In discussing the repercussions of the earthquake many bloggers shared optimism that Japan would recover from the disaster and asked their readers to think of those in that country.

"Japanese society has been well prepared and well rehearsed for such disasters; one of the lessons learnt from the aftermath of the 1995 quake-although the sheer scale of this earthquake and tsunami would have to fall into ‘worst case scenario' in many ways," wrote fnersh rambling, "Like I said, life will never be the same again. But Japan will pull through. Of that, I am sure."*

"The people of Japan are not looting, stealing, wasting, violating orders, or complaining," noted Mark Warschauer at Papyrus News, "They are putting the noses to the grindstone to save their families, their communities, and their nation.  They deserve not only our sympathy, but our deep admiration."

"This is a time of incredible stress but also a time for Japanese society to re-evaluate who they are and what makes them special. I have great hope and optimism for the people of Japan," wrote Ian Kennedy on everwas.com.

Other bloggers expressed shock at the magnitude of the disaster (or disasters) that struck the island nation.

"One big earthquake is bad. One big earthquake plus one big tsunami is really bad. One big earthquake plus one big tsunami plus one explosion at the nuclear plant is really, really bad. One big earthquake plus one big tsunami plus one explosion at the nuclear plant plus a second explosion at the nuclear plant and you're talking real trouble," wrote El Hornito at Scattershot.

And some bloggers noted how modern media coverage can bring the horror of such events to everyone across the planet-the shrinking of the global village.

"Events like this are no longer just stories that happen to foreign people in a far foreign land. They happen right here, right now, in our own living rooms in every place on Earth," said Andy Mayhew at Weather & Earth Science News.

"Watching everything that's happened [in Japan] since the massive earthquake that struck near Sendai has been heartbreaking," wrote TrooperBari at Have Notebook, Will Travel, "Being here and only able to watch the scenes of seemingly endless scenes of devastation is frustrating. I'm not a control freak, but I hate feeling so powerless. It's not as though I can ditch the job, fly to Japan, slap on a hazmat suit and lend a hand, so like so many others, all I can do is lend my financial and moral support."

Those on Twitter devoted more attention to news as it happened than to the broader picture, many of them focusing on the changing conditions at the crippled Fukushima plant.

In response to a March 17 BBC article on how engineers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant were able to lay a cable to reactor two in order to cool it, Marc Love wrote, "First good news out of Japan..."

"What? Earthquake & tsunami not enough?" tweeted dengshot, linking to a BBC article on Fukushima workers withdrawing after radiation spikes.

"two hopes; for enough supplies to reach in NE Japan where facing bitter cold weather, Fukushima nuke plant to come under control," tweeted Pok Mu in response to a March 15 BBC article about radiation rising at the Fukushima nuclear plant.

"What about the Japanese people?" Jonathan Poile asked when tweeting a March 16 BBC article about radiation fears prompting foreign firms to move employees.

Every one of the 20 most popular news-related videos on YouTube last week showed footage of the tsunami waves overtaking Japan. The horrific images of cars, homes and entire towns being overrun by walls of water garnered millions more views than the top videos get in an average week. The No.1 video had 12.7 million views and the second, 8.1 million, compared to a normal week's average of between one and three million views for the leading video.

Many of the clips were from NHK World, a Japanese news channel, but were posted by other news sources, including Russia Today and the Associated Press.

The violent videos showed the power of the tsunami, and since many were short clips, lent themselves to the YouTube format, giving people a powerful snapshot of the disaster as it happened.

The Rest of the News on Blogs

The focus on the disaster in Japan last week was the second-biggest story on blogs since PEJ began tracking social media two years ago-trailing only the economic crisis (65% of links) the week of March 16-20, 2009.

This attention relegated another major international story to very secondary status in the blogosphere.

The No. 2 subject on blogs was the fighting in Libya and the U.S. entry into the war, with 4% of blog links. Many bloggers linked to an opinion piece by General Wesley Clark arguing against U.S. military action. The majority of posts discussing Clark's op-ed were complimentary, even for those who did not concur. "While I disagree with his conclusion...Gen. Clark raises some excellent points," wrote Ben at D.C. Exile.

Next, at 3% of the links each, were three separate stories in the Los Angeles Times.

One was about a 103-year-old man who rides a tricycle almost every day. The centenarian inspired bloggers: "I'm not sure if he knows this or not but as he pedals along, he's testament to one of Satchel Paige's most enduring of the ‘Rules For Staying Young,' which is, ‘And don't look back-something might be gaining on you,' " Wrote lawmrh at The Irreverent Lawyer.

The other two included the story of a CIA contractor who was released from a Pakistani jail after being acquitted of murder charges and an article on Republican lawmakers in California threatening to withhold votes on Governor Jerry Brown's budget unless environmental rules were rewritten to curtail lawsuits, grant waivers to telecommunications firms and exempt urban developers from environmental review.

The Rest of the News on Twitter

Last week's No. 2 subject on Twitter was a Mashable story about PEJ's annual State of the News Media report, with 9% of links.

The rest of the top stories (all coming from Mashable) included one about measuring social media (6%) that discussed the limited access to social media that data professionals in that field face. There was also a piece about the iPad 2 selling out (6%) and a story about Netflix distributing an original TV series starring Kevin Spacey (also 6%).

PEJ's New Media Index is a companion to its weekly News Coverage Index. Blogs and other new media are an important part of creating today's news information narrative and in shaping the way Americans interact with the news. The expansion of online blogs and other social media sites has allowed news-consumers and others outside the mainstream press to have more of a role in agenda setting, dissemination and interpretation. PEJ aims to find out what subjects in the national news the online sites focus on, and how that compared with the narrative in the traditional press.

A prominent Web tracking site Icerocket, which monitors millions of blogs, uses the links to articles embedded on these sites as a proxy for determining what these subjects are. Using this tracking process as a base, PEJ staff compiles the lists of links weekday each day. They capture the top five linked-to stories on each list (25 stories each week), and reads, watches or listens to these posts and conducts a content analysis of their subject matter, just as it does for the mainstream press in its weekly News Coverage Index. It follows the same coding methodology as that of the NCI. Note: When the NMI was launched in January 2009, another web-tracking site Technorati was similarly monitoring blogs and social media. PEJ originally captured both Technorati's and Icerocket's daily aggregation. In recent months, though, this component of Technorati's site has been down with no indication of when it might resume.

The priorities of the bloggers are measured in terms of percentage of links. Each time a news blog or social media Web page adds a link to its site directing its readers to a news story, it suggests that the author of the blog places at least some importance on the content of that article. The user may or may not agree with the contents of the article, but they feel it is important enough to draw the reader's attention to it. PEJ measures the topics that are of most interest to bloggers by compiling the quantitative information on links and analyzing the results.

For the examination of the links from Twitter, PEJ staff monitors the tracking site Tweetmeme. Similar to Icerocket, Tweetmeme measures the number of times a link to a particular story or blog post is tweeted and retweeted. Then, as we do with Icerocket, PEJ captures the five most popular linked-to pages each weekday under the heading of "news" as determined by Tweetmeme's method of categorization. And as with the other data provided in the NMI, the top stories are determined in terms of percentage of links. (One minor difference is that Tweetmeme offers the top links over the prior 24 hours while the list used on Icerocket offers the top links over the previous 48 hours.)

The Project also tracks the most popular news videos on YouTube each week.  

*For the sake of authenticity, PEJ has a policy of not correcting misspellings or grammatical errors that appear in direct quotes from blog postings.

Note: PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index includes Sunday newspapers while the New Media Index is Monday through Friday.

By Emily Guskin, PEJ

The U.S. media began a challenging and dramatic week mobilized to cover growing radiation fears in Japan. They ended it reporting on U.S. military intervention in Libya’s civil war. 

For the week of March 14-20, the still unfolding drama at a Japanese nuclear facility and continuing coverage of the humanitarian catastrophe there accounted for 57% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That makes it the third-biggest story in a single week since PEJ began tracking news coverage in 2007. 

Things changed dramatically, however, on Thursday, March 17 when the United Nations voted to enact a no-fly zone in Libyan air space to be enforced by the U.S. and its allies. At that point, the priorities of the mainstream media shifted abruptly. 

From Monday through Thursday, the situation in Japan accounted for nearly-two thirds of the overall coverage (64%) while the Mideast accounted for only 10%. But on Friday, the Libyan crisis generated more attention than Japan and remained atop the headlines throughout the weekend. 

The military action in Libya—combined with a small amount of attention to Bahrain, Egypt and other troubled countries in the region—was the No. 2 story, accounting for 17% of the newshole and relegating Japan to secondary status by the end of the week. 

With these two top events combining for 74% of the coverage studied, overseas stories have now led the news agenda for seven out of the past eight weeks. Indeed, from January 24 (when the protests heated up in Egypt) until March 20, foreign news has accounted for more than 40% of the overall U.S. media newshole, about twice the usual level of attention. 

The extensive focus on events in Libya and Japan left little room for other stories. Well back at No. 3 (5%), was the U.S. economy. The newsmakers there included a Wisconsin judge blocking the recently passed bill that would limit collective bargaining rights for public employees and the House of Representatives voting to defund NPR, which has turned into something of a partisan issue. 

At No. 4 (2%) was the 2012 presidential election. No single theme emerged in the coverage, although some pundits did make arguments that two of the country’s best-known politicians—the president and former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin—would face some significant electoral obstacles.

The U.S. education system was the fifth-biggest story (2%) as several news reports highlighted the impending 10-year anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act, which President Obama said he wants rewritten before the next school year.

Nuclear Fears in Japan

A story that seemed almost like an afterthought by Sunday was anything but that for most of the week.

The aftermath of the Japanese earthquake was the top story in every media sector studied by PEJ, but network TV led the way, devoting 82% of the airtime studied to the story last week. Closely behind was cable news, at 73%.

And almost three-quarters of last week’s overall earthquake coverage focused on nuclear concerns stemming from the damaged plants.

“Japan and the world trying to deal with two overlapping crises right now, the humanitarian disaster and then the urgent effort to control an unprecedented nuclear emergency,” said ABC’s Good Morning America anchor George Stephanopoulos on Monday, March 14, following a second explosion and a third partial meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan.

While the disaster offered plenty of powerful visuals that aided the extensive television coverage,  news organizations made contributions by providing explanations of the ramifications of the damage to nuclear facilities.

When Tokyo Electric said radioactivity levels were higher at the plant than normal, the Washington Post parsed the technical aspects of what that meant: “Radiation at the plant’s premises rose over the benchmark limit of 500 microsievert per hour at two locations, measuring 751 microsievert at the first location at 2:20 a.m. and 650 at the second at 2:40 a.m., according to information Tokyo Electric gave the government. The hourly amounts are more than half the 1,000 microsievert to which people are usually exposed in one year.”

The storyline grew increasingly ominous as a deluge of sea water failed to cool the reactor cores at the Fukushima plant. On March 15, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Japan’s nuclear crisis showed signs of spinning out of control.”

That night, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams posed the question of how much worse the situation could get to Professor Frank von Hippel, a widely interviewed Princeton expert on nuclear energy. “It could potentially approach a Chernobyl-type situation,” said Hippel.

On Wednesday March 16, the news seemed to get even worse.

“Adding to the alarm tonight [are] statements from top Obama administration officials that they too are getting mixed signals and conflicting information from Japan. And those new U.S. assessments that the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi complex is more grave, U.S. officials say, than the Japanese people are being told,” said John King in his CNN prime-time program that evening.

By Thursday March 17, however, there were some reports that weren’t as grim.

That day, a Voice of America story on Google News, called the situation “serious but stable…The U.N. nuclear agency says the situation at Japan’s earthquake and tsunami-crippled nuclear reactor is ‘very serious’ but there has been ‘no significant worsening’ in the past 24 hours.”

It was at this point in the week that stories began to take a more U.S.-centric approach, looking at the disaster’s impact on the U.S. domestic nuclear industry, as well as fears in U.S. of radiation poisoning in this country.

Those fears—which spiked briefly amid news reports of west coast residents making a run on potassium iodide pills to protect against radiation—were quickly debunked in much of the media. As Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in an NPR story from March 18: “Basic physics suggest little risk to anyone in the United States.”

A New War

While the media were riveted to the disaster in Japan early in the week, Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s  forces were pushing their way eastward early in the week, advancing on rebel strongholds en route to Benghazi.

But the volatile situation in Libya captured the world’s—and the media’s—attention on Thursday when the United Nations Security Council voted to authorize military action against Gaddafi. 

Both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave speeches on March 18, he from Brasilia, she from Paris. As the networks waited for Obama’s remarks, there was a sense that the U.S. military was about to get involved.  

“As you know, the president of the United States, the Secretary of State, they’ve been saying for days now that Gaddafi must go,” said Wolf Blitzer on CNN. “Well, he hasn’t gone, he’s only intensified his offensive against the rebels, against the opposition. So it’s going to have to be a lot more than just a U.N. Security Council resolution, and more tough talk, that’s not going to be enough.”

In that early coverage, some outlets noted that even though the U.S. was about to enter a war, the president was not eager to create the appearance that the country was taking the lead in this effort.

ABC’s Jake Tapper said on March 18 that “President Obama has done everything he can to internationalize this conflict in making sure that the Arab League is involved as well. He does not want to be seen as the United States once again attacking and invading a Muslim country. He wants us to be seen as the world vs. Gaddafi.”

A March 20 opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times asserted that Obama was going to war quietly. “This is not the way American presidents go to war. The opening act is supposed to feature the president sitting solemnly in the Oval Office, explaining the reasons, laying out the goals, talking tough. Barack Obama did not even announce the start to the third U.S. war in the Muslim world in a decade,”—leaving that for Secretary Clinton, who did so in Paris.

Cable news analysts had different takes on the authorization for military action, but few seemed brightly optimistic

On the Fox News Channel, national security analyst KT McFarland said:  “The Devil’s in the details… “Who’s going to be part of this military engagement? What are they going to do? What’s the objective here? When are they going to start fighting? Is the goal regime change?”

On MSNBC on March 18, retired Army Col. Jack Jacobs was more blatantly pessimistic. “In the end, our waiting until now—until a time when there’s almost nobody left of the rebels to fight—means that Gaddafi has won. In the end, it really doesn’t matter what we do or what Gaddafi does.” 

By Sunday morning, the story had moved from talk to action. New York Times readers were greeted with an image of a Tomahawk missile being launched from a Navy destroyer, under the headline “Allies Open Air Assault on Qaddafi’s Forces.” 

Newsmakers of the Week

From March 14-20, Barack Obama was the subject of more media attention than any other newsmaker, featured prominently in 4% of all stories studied, a slight drop from 5% the week before. (To be a prominent newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a story.)

Second to Obama was Libya’s Gaddafi, registering prominently in 2% of all stories. That is down slightly from 3% the previous week, but Libya did not really get back on the media front burner until late last week. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ranked as the No. 3 newsmaker last week, also at 2%, drawing attention for her public statements on Libya as well her announcement that she would not serve a second term in her post.

The No. 4 newsmaker of the week, a former Special Forces soldier working for the CIA named Raymond Davis, was released from a Pakistan jail after being acquitted of two murder charges. He was featured heavily in 1% of stories. Finally, at No. 5, was General David Petraeus, (less than 1% of the stories) who delivered an assessment of the Afghanistan war to Congress.

About the NCI

PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index examines the news agenda of 52 different outlets from five sectors of the media: print, online, network TV, cable and radio. (See List of Outlets.) The weekly study, which includes some 1,000 stories, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of that media narrative and differences among news platforms. The percentages are based on "newshole," or the space devoted to each subject in print and online and time on radio and TV. (See Our Methodology.) In addition, these reports also include a rundown of the week’s leading newsmakers, a designation given to people who account for at least 50% of a given story.

Shortly after 12:46 am EST on March 11, when a massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of northeast Japan, Twitter began to reverberate with posts about the catastrophe.

"Major quake shakes Japan - preliminary M7.8," tweeted Martyn Williams, a reporter and bureau chief for the IDG News Service. "JMA warns of tsunami, up to 6 meters off Miyagi coast."

 "wow, that was a crazy earthquake... ran out of the building. 7.9 at epicenter," posted tech blogger Chris Latko from the scene.

For the one day, Friday, March 11, fully 66% of the news links on Twitter were about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. For the entire week, March 7-11, 20% of the news links were on that subject, making it the No. 1 story.

The response to the earthquake illustrated the different ways in which Twitter functions as a social media tool. Initially, the site served as a way to get breaking information from a variety of official and unofficial sources, including some eyewitness accounts. It also acted as an electronic bulletin board, passing on tips about everything from the location of bathrooms to ways of tracking loved ones.

And once the scope of the catastrophe became apparent, Twitter became a place to raise funds for the recovery effort and for users to express their thoughts and condolences for the victims.

Since PEJ began its New Media Index in January 2009, there have been several occasions in which Twitter has become a go-to site during times of disaster and other major world events. In January 2010, Twitter was central to the fundraising effort following the earthquake that rocked Haiti, and was an important communication tool during the Iranian protests in June 2009. 

The No. 2 story on Twitter (at 15%) last week was another international crisis, the civil war in Libya, with a particular focus on the danger to foreign journalists covering the fighting. Most of the links were to articles about a BBC Arabic news team that was detained and beaten by Muammar Gaddafi's security forces. (Libya was also the fourth-largest subject on blogs last week.) This marks the third consecutive week that the situation in Libya has been a top-five story on Twitter.

A report in the British newspaper, The Sun, that pop star Justin Bieber rode through an airport terminal in Birmingham on a skateboard was third with 13%.

Business stories about Google were fourth, at 10%, including a Mashable report that the company would be expanding the staff of its popular video site, YouTube, by 30% in 2011, adding roughly 200 new positions. And a preview of Apple's new iPad 2, which went on sale March 11, was fifth at 7%.

Presidential Politics Dominates the Blogs

The mainstream media has yet to evince much interest in the slow-starting 2012 presidential race. But 10 months before the Iowa caucuses, the top story on blogs, with 37% of the links, was that looming campaign.  

Most of the attention was on the potential crop of Republican candidates. Many bloggers linked to a Washington Post column in which George Will criticized statements made by some of the potential candidates such as Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich. Others highlighted a BBC story discussing whether former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was capable of winning the presidency. For the most part, bloggers agreed with Will that there was no clear frontrunner for the nomination, and there seemed to be little enthusiasm for the crop of potential candidates as a whole.

The No. 2 story on blogs, at 17%, was the passing of Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist David Broder at the age of 81. Some bloggers marked his death by recounting their favorite Broder columns, while a few took the opportunity to criticize Broder's work as too centered on the Washington establishment.

Third, at 10%, was the news that Obama signed an executive order to create a formal system of indefinite detention for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. This marked a reversal of Obama's position since he had signed an executive order vowing to close the detention center more than two years ago.

Another Washington Post column by George Will, raising doubts about the wisdom of U.S. intervention in Libya, was fourth at 7%.

And a Washington Post interview with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko regarding allegations that the recent presidential election there was fraudulent finished fifth, at 6%.

Tweeting the Earthquake

Even while the details of the disaster were still unclear and before many mainstream news outlets reported specifics, a number of people in Japan who had web access began producing first-hand accounts.

Within an hour of the quake, at least 1,200 tweets per minute were coming from Tokyo, according to Tweet-o-Meter, a site that measures Twitter traffic.

"Wow, that was the biggest earthquake I've felt in my nine years in Japan. Very scary," tweeted Tomoko A. Hosaka, a journalist for The Associated Press in Japan.

"We're on the 7th floor of the Kyodo building. It's still shaking," she added five minutes later.

"Anyone hurt in that one?" asked Matt Alt, an American writer and translator living in Japan, following an aftershock.

"Running cars on road in path of flood. This is beyond words," tweeted TokyoReporter, an unnamed journalist and photographer living in Tokyo. Within an hour, TokyoReporter posted several more tweets such as "And we are shaking again in Tokyo, not too bad tho. Real worries w/ Tsunami."

Within hours, a number of official and independent sources used Twitter to relay important information. The U.S. State Department, for example, used the site to publish emergency numbers and tell Japanese residents in America how to contact families in the region. In Japan itself, where an estimated 10 million people are active users of Twitter, people used the site to exchange information about family and friends, discuss rolling power failures, and share other tips.

"Just fyi for anyone who needs, there are public emergency toilets in Shiba Park," wrote AP reporter Hosaka three hours after the initial quake hit.

By 9:00 am ET, one of the most popular links tweeted around the world was Google Person Finder, a place where people around the world could post or find information about the whereabouts of individuals.

Users could convey any information they had, such as this note written by Andrew Meyerhoff three days after the quake: "[Dr.] Judith [Ann Johnson] contacted me last night. She is very genki, alive and well, and safe in Iizuka. No worries, Steve!"

As the details of the disaster became clearer and official news sources were able to provide detailed reporting, Twitter offered users opportunities to get breaking information from a variety of sources in real-time.

A number of observers outside of Japan tried to make sense of breaking information they gleaned from other sources. Julian Dierkes, a sociologist living in Canada, followed a number of news outlets including NHK.

"Can't tell whether nuclear power plant shutdowns are routine safety precaution or sign of trouble, no specifics on this in news," Dierkes wrote in the hours following the quake.

For those on the west coast of the U.S., Twitter was a way to track the approaching tsunami created by the quake. Many twitterers linked to a bulletin by the National Weather Service Forecast Office warning about the potential impact.

News outlets, such as a local NBC affiliate in Seattle called King 5 News, also posted a number of updates.

"NWS tsunami watch issued for the S. Washington and N. and Central Oregon coasts," the station posted about an hour after the quake hit.

And is often the case with Twitter, informal patterns quickly turned into formal designations, especially in regard to hashtags, symbols used to mark keywords or topics. Within hours, thousands of users were including tags such as #earthquake, #JPQuake and #savejapan in their messages.

For those who were not directly impacted by the catastrophe, Twitter became a way to share methods for donating money to help the recovery-a process reminiscent of the effort during the 2010 Haiti quake. According to the New York Times, the American Red Cross raised $34 million in the five days after the incident, in part because of the Twitter messages.

Many people tweeted the message, "Text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 to Japan's emergency relief."

Finally, Twitter served as a platform for people to share their condolences and prayers for those affected-many of whom used the hashtag #prayforjapan.

"As I lay my head down to sleep tonight, I will say a prayer for the victims of the Japan disaster," shared Natisha Patel.

YouTube

Demonstrating the international influence on YouTube and social media in general, the most viewed news video last week was a news story in Spanish that received almost no attention in the U.S. press.

During a March 1 soccer match in Colombia, a defender named Luis Moreno kicked an owl (the mascot of the opposing team) that had landed on the playing field. The bird went into shock and died several hours later.

Moreno, who is from Panama, was fined and suspended for 2 games because of the incident, and was reviled throughout much of Colombia.

The television story about the event was viewed more than 1.5 million times. 

It was a dramatic week. Forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi won key victories in the Libyan civil war. After weeks of protests, Wisconsin Republicans found a way to suddenly pass a measure curtailing collective bargaining rights. And passions were stirred by a U.S. House hearing on radical Islam.

But on Friday March 11,  the devastating 8.9 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan commanded virtually wall-to-wall coverage, accounting for more than half (52%) of the overall newshole studied by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. And as is often the case with dramatic breaking news, the disaster was first and foremost, a television story—accounting for more than three-quarters of the airtime examined on both broadcast and cable news on March 11.

Even though it happened on a Friday, the events in Japan registered as the No. 3 story for the week of March 7-13, accounting for 12% of the overall newshole in the News Coverage Index. Given the many dimensions to the story—including growing concern over radiation from damaged nuclear plants—there is a strong likelihood it will continue to dominate the news for the foreseeable future.

The week’s No. 1 story, for the sixth time in seven weeks, was the violence in the Middle East, driven by the fighting in Libya and more calls for the West to impose a no-fly zone. But at 21% of the newshole, that represents the lowest level of Mideast coverage in seven weeks. A week earlier it was 32%. A related story, the rise in U.S. oil and gas prices, was the week’s fifth-biggest, at 3%.

The No. 2 story, as it has been for the past three weeks, was the economy, at 19% of the newshole. And once again, coverage was driven by the confrontation between the unions and the governor in Wisconsin over collective bargaining rights—a battle won, at least temporarily, by the governor last week. Coverage was down only slightly from the previous week, when it was 20%.

In another week, the fourth-biggest story—the March 10 Islamic terrorism hearings chaired by Republican Congressman Peter King that produced a sharp partisan divide—might have generated more media attention. But at only 5% of the newshole, they turned out to be more of an afterthought than main event.

Catastrophe in Japan

News of the earthquake that struck Japan on March 11 at 2:46 p.m. local time greeted Americans as they awoke that Friday. By day’s end, concerns about Japan’s nuclear infrastructure were already seeping into storylines.

On the CBS Early Show, viewers saw scenes of homes and boats being tossed atop rampaging waters, buildings rattling and fires raging.  Interviewed via Skype, Tokyo resident Matt Alt described his experience as “a terrifying sensation…like a sustained case of vertigo. The entire floor was shaking, almost like a carnival ride”—even though Tokyo suffered far less damage than Japan’s northeast coast.

The media Friday quickly picked up on the possibility of disaster on U.S. shores. CBS morning anchor Erica Hill relayed a warning to American citizens that the deadly tsunami was “now rolling toward Hawaii and the west coast of the United States.” The waves damaged the harbor in Crescent City California and killed one person, but concerns about any major damage to the U.S. soon disappeared from the media narrative.

Throughout the day, grim images of the destruction in Japan filled the television screens and by evening, when it was time to take a deeper assessment of the situation, the nuclear threat began looming.

That night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow interviewed Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who expressed support for a plan to implement controlled venting of radioactive steam at the damaged nuclear facilities in Fukushima in the hope it would prevent a larger problem.

In the event of a “catastrophic rupture of the containment [or] a large-scale core melt…we could be facing something like Chernobyl as opposed to something like Three Mile Island,” Lyman added. 

By Sunday, the prospect of a major nuclear accident had become a bigger part of the narrative. 

“Japanese officials struggled on Sunday to contain a widening nuclear crisis in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and tsunami, saying they presumed that partial meltdowns had occurred at two crippled reactors and that they were facing serious cooling problems at three more,” reported the New York Times. “The emergency appeared to be the worst involving a nuclear plant since the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago.”

As the week ended, the news from Japan seemed divided among three major storylines—the rescue and recovery mission, assessing the damage and impact and the still unfolding story at the nuclear power plants.

Gaddafi Gains in Libya

Coverage of the situation in the Middle East, most notably Libya, topped the news agenda last week. But perhaps due in part to the earthquake, coverage (21%) was down by more than a third from the week before. In the last seven weeks, Mideast unrest has filled 32% of the newshole.

Last week, events in the region generated the most coverage (26%) in the online sector.

The media narrative last week focused on fighting that seemed to be turning toward Gaddafi’s forces. That theme was bolstered by the March 10 testimony of U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “Under current conditions, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi appears likely to survive the revolt against him because of superior equipment, the head of the U.S. intelligence community told Congress in a blunt assessment,” stated a CNN.com story.

That was strong stuff, given that President Obama, Clapper’s boss, has insisted that Gaddafi should leave. Indeed, part of the media narrative was that the politics of this for the United States had gotten more daunting. “Nearly three weeks after Libya erupted in what may now turn into a protracted civil war, the politics of military intervention to speed the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi grow more complicated by the day—for both the White House and Republicans,” a New York Times story concluded.

But over the weekend, more pressure for military intervention was brought to bear on the western powers from the region itself.

“The Arab League, in an emergency meeting in Cairo, has voted to ask the UN to impose a no-fly zone over Libya,” said a story posted on Yahoo! News. “While the U.N., NATO, and the European Union have so far resisted efforts to intervene in the Libyan civil war, one of the excuses the Obama administration has been making for not intervening is that it might anger Arab countries. But now it seems the Obama administration is risking angering Arab countries by not intervening.”

Drama in Wisconsin

The standoff between labor unions and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker drove coverage of the U.S. economy for the fourth consecutive week. The subject generated the most attention (32%) in the radio sector.

The big news was that Republicans in the state found a way to pass the measure constraining union bargaining rights.

The AP reported on March 10 that Wisconsin lawmakers used a legislative loophole that “strip[ped] nearly all collective bargaining rights from public workers” despite the fact that 14 Democratic senators who fled the state had been able to prevent a vote on the governor’s “budget repair bill.”

“Republicans…took all the spending measures out of Walker's proposal and a special committee of lawmakers from both the Senate and Assembly approved the revised bill a short time later,” the story explained.

The unfolding situation had liberal talk hosts on the attack against Walker. “This is an indication that the people of Wisconsin need to put the pedal to the medal and repeal this guy, because he doesn’t represent the values of the people of Wisconsin,” declared liberal radio talker Jeff Santos last week.

The Terrorism Hearings

In a week with fewer dramatic events, contentious Congressional hearings on Islamic terrorism— that supporters defend as vital to national security and detractors decry as a form of McCarthyism—might be a natural newsmaker.

But last week, those hearings accounted for only 5% of the overall newshole, attracting the most coverage (8%) in the cable news sector.

An AP story succinctly summed up the opposing forces and themes prevalent during the hearings. “Republican Rep. Peter King declared U.S. Muslims are doing too little to help fight terror in America. Democrats warned of inflaming anti-Muslim sentiment and energizing al-Qaida.”

The coverage seemed to suggest two parts of the country talking past each other. “Framed by photos of the burning World Trade Center and Pentagon, the families of two young men blamed the Islamic community for inspiring young men to commit terrorism. On the other side, one of the two Muslims in Congress wept while discussing a Muslim firefighter who died in the attacks.”

The tenor of the hearings led the Washington Post to run a post-mortem story headlined: “Plenty of drama, less substance.”

Newsmakers of the Week 

No one really dominated coverage from March 7-13. President Barack Obama was the No. 1 newsmaker, registering as a prominent figure in 5% of the week’s stories.  (To be a prominent newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a story.)

Muammar Gaddafi, who had supplanted the president as the top newsmaker for the previous two weeks, was No. 2 last week, at 3%. But that was down from 6% the week before and 11% the week prior to that.

For the third week in a row the No. 3 newsmaker (also at 3%) was Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. He was followed by Rep. Peter King (2%), who chaired and convened the terrorism hearings last week.

For the second straight week, troubled actor Charlie Sheen made the roster of top newsmakers, registering in 2% of last week stories as he filed a $100 million lawsuit against Warner Brothers and the executive producer of Two and a Half Men, the CBS sitcom he was recently fired from.

About the NCI

PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index examines the news agenda of 52 different outlets from five sectors of the media: print, online, network TV, cable and radio. (See List of Outlets.) The weekly study, which includes some 1,000 stories, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of that media narrative and differences among news platforms. The percentages are based on "newshole," or the space devoted to each subject in print and online and time on radio and TV. (See Our Methodology.) In addition, these reports also include a rundown of the week’s leading newsmakers, a designation given to people who account for at least 50% of a given story.

For the second time in three weeks, the blogosphere jumped into the national debate over the federal budget, the deficit and jobs. However, while the previous conversation focused mostly on President Obama's budget proposals, last week the attention was mostly on Republican plans to cut the budget.

For the week of February 28-March 4, fully 37% of the news links on blogs were about the budget, easily making it the No. 1 subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

In recent weeks, there has been a clear delineation in the old and new media news agendas. The blogosphere has not matched the mainstream media's interest in the Mideast turmoil, which has been the dominant story there. Instead, bloggers have been more focused on hot-button domestic issues such as the budget, the Patriot Act, and the labor standoff in Wisconsin.

Last week, the debate over the budget featured a number of liberal voices objecting to the GOP plans for cuts, which contrasted with two weeks prior when conservative commentators led the conversation criticizing Obama's $3.73 trillion budget proposal.

In the current debate, many critics of the GOP focused on an independent analysis from Moody economist Mark Zandi who predicted the Republican plan to cut $61 billion from the budget over the next seven months would result in a loss of 700,000 jobs throughout the country. If the GOP's aim was to create jobs, these critics suggested, their budget-cutting goals would have an unintended negative effect.

A few conservatives disagreed with Zandi's analysis, citing his involvement in the 2009 stimulus package as evidence of a tilted perspective.  

With budgetary disagreements raising the prospect of a possible government shutdown, a Washington Post column by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was also part of the budget conversation last week. Gingrich, who played a central role in the 1995 government shutdown, implored Republicans to stick to their principles and not be afraid of a shutdown since, according to his assessment, the 1995 maneuver was a success. Bloggers, for the most part, disagreed with Gingrich's recounting of events.

Two very different stories tied for the No. 2 subject on blogs last week, each with 10% of the links.

One was the passing of Frank W. Buckles, the last remaining American World War I veteran, at the age of 110. Although the story generated modest attention in the mainstream media, bloggers expressed admiration for Buckles' life story and his death became the impetus for many to reflect on the extinction of eyewitnesses to momentous historical events.

The other story tied for second was news that Fox News suspended the contracts of their political contributors Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum because both men were considering runs for the presidency in 2012. A number of bloggers asked why the same action had not been taken in regard to two other Fox contributors, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee.

A story about a call by House Democrats for Republican leaders to investigate a Washington law firm and three technology contractors was next, at 7%. The companies in question were shown in hacked emails to be contemplating a "disinformation campaign" against opponents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful trade association that has supported many Republican candidates in recent elections.

Also at 7% was the 8-1 Supreme Court ruling protecting the First Amendment right of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church to conduct anti-gay protests at military funerals. (The same Church was also a subject of the second most-watched news video on YouTube last week.)

Twitter

The lead news subjects on Twitter last week were a mix of technology, pop culture, and the Libyan revolts.

Facebook was the No. 1 subject, with 19% of the week's links. Most of the attention was focused on a change in Facebook's commands. The company merged two of its buttons-the "Like" button and the "Share" button into one. Now when users "Like" a post, that post automatically appears on their profile page. And "Share" no longer exists.

Apple was the second-largest subject with 17%. Tweeters focused on stories involving the company's popular iPhone and iPad products, including a report about the burgeoning trade-in activity for the original iPad, thus suggesting that the demand for the iPad 2 could surpass all expectations.

Stories about the Oscar awards were No. 3, at 10%. They included a Mashable analysis of the activity on social media during the event and a report on how the movie The Social Network, which told the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, fared at the awards.

That was followed, also at 10%, by stories about Libya including an interview where Muammar Gaddafi told the BBC that he is loved by all his people and denied there have been any protests in Tripoli. Twitterers were surprised by Gaddafi's defiance which some said seemed to border on delusional.

And stories about a March 22 event where Samsung is likely to announce the new version of its Galaxy Tab tablet were fifth, at 6%.

The Budget and Jobs

For liberals looking to criticize the GOP's efforts to cut $61 billion from the federal budget over the next seven months and terminate dozens of programs, the release of an analysis by Moody's Analytics' chief economist Mark Zandi gave them some ammunition.

According to Zandi, who advised John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign and also helped create the 2009 stimulus package supported by Obama, the Republican plan would reduce economic growth by 0.5 percentage points this year, and by 0.2 percentage points in 2012, resulting in the loss of 700,000 jobs.

"Republicans rode into the House majority chanting ‘where are the jobs?' but multiple independent analyses have now found that the vision they have for the federal budget would make unemployment substantially worse," assessed Timsomor at Debates the Matter.  

"Republicans want to lay off 700,000 workers," argued RES17 at Exposing the Man. "That is why you should never vote for Republicans. They fight a fire by dumping gasoline on it. When that fails their solution is to dump even more gasoline."

Some thought that maybe the Republicans had an ulterior political motive behind the cutting.

"Seven hundred thousand jobs can easily be the difference between Obama winning a close election thanks to a steadily recovering economy...and Obama losing because the economy seems to have effectively stalled with unemployment at 8.4 percent," predicted Jon Walker at Firedoglake. "It is no wonder that Republicans always seem to undergo a sudden anti-deficit revival that necessitates immediate cuts whenever a Democrat is in the White House."

"Of course, if their plan is to make matters worse and make Obama look terrible for the next two years so that maybe a Republican will win in 2012, then they probably consider their cuts and any resulting job losses a ‘success,'" speculated Under the Mountain Bunker & Coffee Shop.

While few conservatives discussed the report, those that did disputed the findings.

"I don't believe the Moody's number...Zandi was largely responsible for crafting the 2009 ‘stimulus' that didn't stimulate. He therefore has shown the lack of efficacy in his policy pronouncements," pronounced Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker.

"How can the Zandi [study] claim that the spending cuts in the House budget will harm the economy if they came out before the GAO study identifying wasteful government spending?" asked An Ol' Broad's Ramblings. "What if all, half, or just some of the spending cuts in the House budget are simply cuts to government waste? Surely these facts would change the outcome... right?"

Some in the blogosphere discussed the government shutdown that could transpire if Congress does not agree to a budget deal. In particular, many took notice of a Washington Post column by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who played a central role in the government shutdown that occurred in 1995.

Gingrich, who is considering a Republican bid for the presidency, claimed that despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, the 1995 shutdown was a principled stand in favor of spending cuts, and was both a political and policy success. Republicans today, he added, should not be afraid to face another government shutdown to make a similar point.

Most bloggers weren't buying Gingrich's telling of history.

"It absolutely isn't true that, as Gingrich now wants us to believe, spending cuts were the reason congressional Republicans shut the government in 1995 and 1996," contradicted Stan Collendar at Capital Gains and Games. "The big issue then was tax cuts rather than spending cuts...Gingrich is also wrong about the shutdown being good for Republicans. The reaction was so bad that it was, in fact, the beginning of the end for Newt as speaker."

"One salient fact blows away Mr. Gingrich and his nonsensical article. The re-election of Bill Clinton," surmised Norman Rogers at An American Lion. "Thanks again, Newt. You could have held the Speaker's gavel for twenty years. Unfortunately, your own hubris and insecurity doomed those of us who wanted you to change Washington to four more years of horror."

A few bloggers, however, were supportive of Gingrich's advice.

"Many have talked the talk but Gingrich has walked the walk," declared Tucker Scofield at The DC Post. "House Republicans would do well to listen to the voice of experience and stick to their guns. They weren't elected in November's landslide by being ‘Progressive Lite'; they won because they differentiated themselves as principled men and women of action who recognized that the time to act is now."*

The Last WWI Vet

Bloggers who noted the passing of Frank W. Buckles, the last remaining American veteran from World War I, praised the man's life and were attracted to his life story.

"...today's young men could learn much from his long and storied life," suggested My Daily Kona.

But for most, the news of Buckles' death was a reflective moment to discuss the fading of historical events into distant memory.

"What's significant here is what Mr. Buckles' death represents. The passing into history of a significant chapter of our past," wrote P_John at Umbral Tabard. "Close to 5 million Americans served in World War I. They're gone now. We've lost something. I wonder if we'll notice."

"There is something terribly final about the death of the last human being to personally experience a war," suggested Webner's House. "With the severing of the last human links to the fighting, World War I moves from the realm of personal experience to the exclusive province of historians...Eventually a war in which millions of people participated and millions died...will become as abstract, dusty, and inexplicable as the Hundred Years' War, the War of Jenkins' Ear, or the War of Austrian Succession."

YouTube

The February 21 earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand, and killed at least 65 people was a popular subject on YouTube last week. Three of the most viewed news videos were of the devastation caused by the quake.

The top video, viewed more than 2.5 million times, was raw footage posted by TV New Zealand and showed people reacting in the moments after the event, along with the destruction to buildings and infrastructure.

The fourth video was aerial footage, also of the aftermath, posted by Russia Today. The overhead view gives yet a different perspective of the scope of the damage.

Finally, the No. 5 video was taken by an individual on the ground almost immediately after quake occurred. The person who posted the video can be heard talking about the events he just viewed. At one point he intones, "It's terrifying."

Taken together, these three different videos from three different perspectives of the New Zealand disaster give a strong impression of the scale of the damage to that country.

PEJ's New Media Index is a companion to its weekly News Coverage Index. Blogs and other new media are an important part of creating today's news information narrative and in shaping the way Americans interact with the news. The expansion of online blogs and other social media sites has allowed news-consumers and others outside the mainstream press to have more of a role in agenda setting, dissemination and interpretation. PEJ aims to find out what subjects in the national news the online sites focus on, and how that compared with the narrative in the traditional press.

A prominent Web tracking site Icerocket, which monitors millions of blogs, uses the links to articles embedded on these sites as a proxy for determining what these subjects are. Using this tracking process as a base, PEJ staff compiles the lists of links weekday each day. They capture the top five linked-to stories on each list (25 stories each week), and reads, watches or listens to these posts and conducts a content analysis of their subject matter, just as it does for the mainstream press in its weekly News Coverage Index. It follows the same coding methodology as that of the NCI. Note: When the NMI was launched in January 2009, another web-tracking site Technorati was similarly monitoring blogs and social media. PEJ originally captured both Technorati's and Icerocket's daily aggregation. In recent months, though, this component of Technorati's site has been down with no indication of when it might resume. 

The priorities of the bloggers are measured in terms of percentage of links. Each time a news blog or social media Web page adds a link to its site directing its readers to a news story, it suggests that the author of the blog places at least some importance on the content of that article. The user may or may not agree with the contents of the article, but they feel it is important enough to draw the reader's attention to it. PEJ measures the topics that are of most interest to bloggers by compiling the quantitative information on links and analyzing the results.

For the examination of the links from Twitter, PEJ staff monitors the tracking site Tweetmeme. Similar to Icerocket, Tweetmeme measures the number of times a link to a particular story or blog post is tweeted and retweeted. Then, as we do with Icerocket, PEJ captures the five most popular linked-to pages each weekday under the heading of "news" as determined by Tweetmeme's method of categorization. And as with the other data provided in the NMI, the top stories are determined in terms of percentage of links. (One minor difference is that Tweetmeme offers the top links over the prior 24 hours while the list used on Icerocket offers the top links over the previous 48 hours.)

The Project also tracks the most popular news videos on YouTube each week.  

*For the sake of authenticity, PEJ has a policy of not correcting misspellings or grammatical errors that appear in direct quotes from blog postings.

Note: PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index includes Sunday newspapers while the New Media Index is Monday through Friday.

For the past six weeks, the U.S. mainstream news media have been consumed by two stories.

From January 24 (when Egyptian protests erupted) through March 6, Mideast turmoil (34%) and the U.S. economy (18%) have made up more than half of the coverage in the mainstream media studied by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. 

During that time, no other subject has filled more than 3% of the newshole, according to PEJ’s News Coverage Index.

The last time we saw two stories command the news agenda for a lengthy period was the eight weeks from September 6, 2010 to October 31, 2010 when the midterm elections filled 28% of the newshole, the economy accounted for another 12% and no other story registered at more than 3%.

Last week, from February 28-March 6, the continuing unrest in the Middle East accounted for nearly a third (32%) of the newshole studied. Almost 90% of that coverage involved the fighting in Libya as forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi unleashed counterattacks against anti-government rebels. And Gaddafi’s ability to cling to power in the face of widespread resistance became a significant storyline as the media began to address the difficult and potentially divisive issue of whether the U.S. ought to intervene more directly in the fighting.

This marks the fifth time in the past six weeks that the situation in the Mideast has been the No. 1 story.

Economy-related coverage filled 20% of the newshole studied last week. For the third consecutive week, the leading storyline was the standoff between the governor and unions in Wisconsin, although the coverage expanded to look at other states engaged in similar budgetary conflicts. Some good news on the jobs front—the unemployment rate falling under 9%—also generated attention late in the week.

Far behind, the third-biggest story (at 3%) was the matter of a potential federal government shutdown. Last week’s newsmaker was Congress’ decision to pass a two-week funding extension that at least temporarily avoided that shutdown.

The fourth-biggest story involved a celebrity run amok. Attention to actor Charlie Sheen—who last week embarked on an aggressive media tour that seemed to only further raise further doubts about his well-being—accounted for 2% of the newshole

Coverage of the No. 5 story, health care (2%), was driven by President Obama’s offer to allow states to opt out of some provisions of the controversial new health care reform law if they could achieve the desired results on their own—a move that in another time might have been a much bigger story.

The Shifting Storyline in Libya

Two weeks ago, the U.S. media were busy profiling the mercurial Gaddafi while raising doubts about America’s ability to influence the situation inside Libya. Last week, the narrative changed as Gaddafi violently clung to power and the subject of possible U.S. intervention—most notably the establishment of a no-fly zone—became more urgent.

The week began with one signal of growing U.S. involvement, as reported in this February 28  Wall Street Journal story:  “The Pentagon is repositioning warships and planes in the waters off Libya to be ready to enforce a no-fly zone or deliver humanitarian aid, military officials said Monday. By shifting Naval and air forces in the Mediterranean, the U.S. is preparing the groundwork for possible intervention in the civil war that has engulfed Libya.”

A good deal of last week’s coverage focused on a growing discussion about that no-fly zone, which would keep Gaddafi from using air power against opposition forces, but could embroil the U.S. in another military situation. CNN International anchor Michael Holmes expressed some skepticism on March 1, noting that while a no-fly zone “does put pressure on [Gaddafi], it’s a complicated thing to set up…The NATO forces wouldn’t want to do it without a UN resolution, for starters.”

The next day, a story on NPR’s “All Things Considered” noted that Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and White House press secretary Jay Carney had all addressed the issue. The report said Gates warned that “any military action against Libya must be weighed carefully because it could have broad consequences,” but also included Carney’s sentiments that “pretty much all options are under review.”

All of this came amid a growing consensus that there will be no quick and easy conclusion to the fighting in Libya—which could conceivably exert additional pressure for outside intervention.

“Gaddafi may prove harder to dislodge than previously thought,” the New York Times reported on March 1. “The regime of the Libyan leader…has been badly undermined, but he retains enough support among critical tribes and institutions, including parts of the army and the air force, to retain power in the capital, Tripoli, for some time to come, say experts on Libya and its military.”

One other aspect of the situation that got media attention last week was the growing humanitarian crisis created by the fighting.

“The violence in Libya was threatening to turn into a humanitarian crisis…as thousands of people fleeing into Tunisia overwhelmed relief efforts, creating a bottleneck of evacuees stranded on the Libyan side of the border,” reported the Washington Post. “U.N. officials moved to erect a tent city to shelter the more than 15,000 people arriving each day, largely Egyptian migrant workers but also Libyans as well as oil workers and menial laborers from Chad, Sudan and nations as distant as Bangladesh and China.” 

And late in the week, there was news that the U.S. was helping fly refugees who had fled Libya back to their home countries—perhaps one more signal that a full-blown political and media debate over America’s role in the crisis is in the offing.

The Rest of the Week’s News

The economy was the No. 1 story in one media sector, radio news—at 28% of the airtime studied—thanks in part to the talk show hosts.  

The continuing faceoff between Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the unions over his efforts to curtail collective bargaining rights was once again a major storyline. And radio talkers argued about whether the governor or the unions were to blame.

On his show, liberal pro-union host Ed Schultz asserted that, “the public is speaking, through all of the polls out there, that the governor is on the wrong side.” But turning to the 14 Democratic Wisconsin state senators who fled the state to prevent a vote on the matter, Schultz also asked: “How long can they hold out?”

Some of the coverage also looked beyond Wisconsin, including a Washington Post article noting that the tactic used by that state’s Democratic senators was being replicated elsewhere.

“The strategy was used to great effect this week, when two Maryland delegates did not show up at a committee meeting about a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage,” the story stated. “And Democrats in Indiana who are upset about a [union] issue also have decamped to Illinois, holing up at a Comfort Suites in Urbana. They work out of the breakfast nook, subsist on Subway sandwiches and donated chili dinners, and make frequent visits to the coin-op laundry.” 

Another economic newsmaker last week was some good news on the job front.

“Employers in February hired at the fastest pace in almost a year and the unemployment rate fell to 8.9% — a nearly two-year low,” the AP reported. “Private employers added 222,000 jobs last month…That shows companies are feeling more confident in the economy and about their own financial prospects. And it bolstered hopes that businesses will shift into a more aggressive hiring mode and boost the economic recovery.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the biggest domestic story involved the skirmishing over whether to shut down the federal government. Yet that accounted for only about one-seventh the coverage of the economic news. In a classic case of good news equaling no (or little) news, the move to extend government funding for two weeks accounted for only 3% of the week’s coverage. Had a stalemate led to a government shutdown, one can only imagine how big a story that would have been.

One newsmaker who made himself into a big story was troubled ex-sitcom star Charlie Sheen, who, among other things, has lost his job and custody of his children. His eagerness to talk to the media about his situation—often in quasi-incomprehensible language—accounted for 2% of last week’s newshole.  He thus becomes only one of a handful of entertainment celebrities—including Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson—to emerge as one of the leading mainstream media stories since in the News Coverage Index began in 2007. However, coverage of the deaths of Smith and Jackson, as well as the subsequent legal battles involved, generated considerably more attention than Sheen’s travails.

The No. 5 story may have gotten lost in the rush of news from Libya and Wisconsin. Obama’s move to allow states to opt out of several provisions on the year-old federal health care law might normally have triggered a robust ideological debate in the two sectors that feature the talk shows—cable and radio. Instead, that story accounted for only 2% of the newshole in cable and 3% in radio.

Newsmakers of the Week

For the second straight week, Muammar Gaddafi was the most prominent person in the news, registering as a dominant newsmaker in 6% of the stories from February 28-March 6.  In doing so, he barely edged out President Obama, also at 6%. Two Mideast figures—Gaddafi and former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—have been the top newsmakers in three out of the six weeks that the unrest in the region has been a major story in the U.S. mainstream media.

The ubiquitous Charlie Sheen was next, a prominent newsmaker in 2% of the week’s stories. He was tied with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—who also made the list of top newsmakers the previous week.

The week’s fifth major newsmaker was former Republican House Speaker and presumed 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (1% of the week’s stories).  Last week, Gingrich inched closer to a run by establishing an exploratory operation.

About the NCI

PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index examines the news agenda of 52 different outlets from five sectors of the media: print, online, network TV, cable and radio. (See List of Outlets.) The weekly study, which includes some 1,000 stories, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of that media narrative and differences among news platforms. The percentages are based on "newshole," or the space devoted to each subject in print and online and time on radio and TV. (See Our Methodology.) In addition, these reports also include a rundown of the week’s leading newsmakers, a designation given to people who account for at least 50% of a given story.

For the second straight week, social and mainstream media shared similar news agendas as the labor stalemate in Wisconsin and the violent unrest in Libya garnered the most attention. But while the traditional press focused more on the events in the Middle East, bloggers spent more time debating the standoff in Wisconsin between unions and the governor over his effort to curtail collective bargaining rights.

From February 21-25, one quarter (25%) of the news links on blogs were about the political turmoil in Wisconsin, making it the No. 1 subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. In the mainstream press, the economy, dominated by the Wisconsin situation, was the second-biggest subject-filling 24% of the newshole.

On blogs, a passionate debate raged that was clearly split along ideological lines. Conservatives applauded Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for standing up to unions, which they viewed as special interest groups with too much political clout. Liberals derided Walker for the same actions, while defending unions as an important force in strengthening the middle class. Both sides had significant representation in the online discussion.

For some, President Obama became the issue after he injected himself into the debate by claiming that Walker was conducting an "assault" on unions. Most bloggers condemned the President for his stance on the issue, although he did have a few supporters.

The second-largest story on blogs, with 12%, was the unrest in Libya-a subject which was also popular on Twitter as the No. 2 story there, with 13% of the links. The week before, the turmoil in neighboring Egypt was the No. 2 story on blogs, with 21% of the links.

On both social media platforms last week, most of the activity involved passing along breaking news from Libya. However, there were some expressions of support for the protestors while a few bloggers pondered the uncertain road ahead. (In the mainstream media, events in the Middle East were the No. 1 story last week, at 35% of the newshole.)

The No. 3 story on blogs, also at 12%, was a BBC report about American scientists who claim that monkeys have the ability to express self-doubt and uncertainty. The scientists concluded that the way the monkeys played a certain computer game revealed a self-awareness in their thinking, which was previously thought to only be a human trait.

The fourth subject (8%) included reports that the Obama Administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act-a law which bars the government from acknowledging same-sex marriages. The announcement marks a shift in the administration's stance on gay rights. Most of the opinion online supported Obama's decision, although some bloggers expressed concern that the President was overstepping his role by deciding which laws should and should not be enforced.

A Los Angeles Times op-ed column about the myth of "greedy geezers" who are supposedly bankrupting the nation was the fifth-largest subject, with 7% of the week's links. According to the author, Susan Jacobs, many Americans buy into the perception, which she says is false, that most senior citizens are wealthy enough not to need Social Security and Medicare, and are "fleecing" younger American workers.

Twitter

On the social networking platform Twitter, aside from the attention to the upheaval in Libya, technology news once again led the way-albeit with a philanthropic twist.

The top subject last week on Twitter, with 18% of the links, was Apple. Several stories about the company's products were highlighted, including a Mashable story featuring outstanding paintings created on the iPad and iPhone, and another Mashable piece listing free iPhone apps that can help one manage their own finances. 

The unrest in Libya was second at 13%, followed by a story (at 7%) about a man named Carlos Garcia who started a project called Living Philanthropic through which he donated small amounts of money to various charities each day for an entire year.

Google was No. 4, at 6%, as Twitterers linked to a story about the company's donation of $2.7 million to the Vienna-based International Press Institute to foster innovation in journalism. This gift is part of Google's 2010 commitment to donate $5 million to nonprofit organizations working on furthering digital journalism.

And a conflict between Twitter and a company called UberMedia over social media apps that had been shut down due to privacy concerns was the fifth biggest subject, also at 6%.

Standoff in Wisconsin

The political stalemate in Wisconsin triggered a larger debate among bloggers about the value of labor unions-which are a crucial element of the Democratic Party's financial, organizational and electoral base.

Many conservatives agreed with a Los Angeles Times column by Jonah Goldberg who argued that while there may have been some value to private-sector unions at one time, public unions have no such worth. Instead, he wrote, they are a "50-year mistake" that should be eradicated because their political power goes against the public interest.

"The public unions may profess that their ‘democratic' or ‘Egyptian-style' campaign of protests concerns their collective bargaining 'privilege' (it's not a ‘right'), but a deeper look at the issue shows that the ‘bargain' between union and government is yet again a collective rip-off of the private taxpayer," assessed An Ebb and Flow.

"Weakening public unions will make Wisconsin leaner, more competitive, and less budget-constrained into the future," predicted Chops at Global Review. "Public unionization is an anti-competitive practice aimed at shifting wealth from all taxpayers to a particular interest group; weakening or ending it will improve and cheapen government services."

The 14 Democratic state senators who left Wisconsin in order to prevent the passage of a bill that would remove collective bargaining rights from public employees also came under fire.

"Democratic lawmakers are forcing a government shutdown by turning tail and heading out of state rather than, you know, doing the job they have been paid to do by the taxpayers of their state," derided Dean at Beers with Demo. "Elections do have consequenses and for the citizens of Wisconsin...these consequenses mean, instead of having to face some legislative unpleasantries, certain lawmakers behave like abject cowards and abdicate their duties and responsibilities to the people they serve."*

To others, though, Walker's actions represented an assault on unions and the middle class that needed to be thwarted.

"Governor Walker's attack on human rights is unlike anything I've seen in the U.S. during my adult lifetime," concluded David Yamada at Minding the Workplace. "He is using the state's budget woes as a pretext to justify denying workers the right to bargain over their compensation and benefits. Hard bargaining at the negotiation table in the midst of tough economic times is one thing, but moving to deny workers a collective voice is pure thuggery."

"When the government makes bad decisions, people must stand-up," declared New World. "Gov. Scott Walker (R) is making a bad decision and the people know it...Gov. Walker has shown-like many elected officials-where his true allegiance resides-with the corporation."

For many, the conflict became as much about Obama as anything else when he voiced support for unions and opposition to Walker. Most of those critiques were quite negative.

"The proper role of a chief executive isn't to pick sides," posted For Attribution. "It's to promote the advancement of everyone. Obama...would do well to remember that [he has] a responsibility to help all Americans get ahead, not just those who carry union cards in their wallets."

"It is now obvious that the President of the United States is actively involved in encouraging civil unrest in Wisconsin," charged The War on Socialism. "Mr. Obama has demonstrated what many of us already knew: he has no respect for federalism or the rights of states to govern themselves as they see fit. He acts more like a third world dictator than the President of the United States."

While lesser in number, Obama did have a few supporters online.

"It is nice to see that Obama is throwing some Democratic support for the Wisconsin people," praised Montag at The Burned Over District.

Libya

Most of the social media activity related to Libya last week involved conveying breaking news and information. For example, a number of Tweets highlighted a February 24 BBC report about the shrinking territory controlled by Gaddafi as he struggled to hold on to power.

It was also clear that almost all of social media users were cheering for the protestors and hoping for significant change. When Peru became the first country to suspend diplomatic relations with Libya over the use of force against civilians, it was praised.

"Thank you Peru for cutting ties with Libya over violence," tweeted Giv Parvaneh.

"Viva el Perú..." added David RL.

On blogs that addressed the situation, most of the discussion involved the difficult questions and uncertainty facing Libya in the coming months. The cautious tone resembled the attitude many bloggers took the previous week when discussing events in Egypt.

"I feel that the people in the country have a right to show what kind of country they really want...and that they should be able to have votes to choose their president," wrote Arya Ashoori. "We don't know what will happen if Kadafi goes and if the country will get worse or better. There is so much knowledge being withheld and sometimes or most of the time we don't know if we are getting the right information."

"...as this wave goes forward, it will most assuredly get bloodier. The remaining heads of these countries who stand to fall will not respect basic, peaceful calls for change," predicted a commentator named Bob915 at The Political Wire. "One can only hope it will succeed."   

YouTube

For the fourth week in a row, protests in the Middle East were among the most popular news videos on YouTube.

Last week, a first-person video-apparently from Bahrain-was the No. 2 video. According to the description that accompanies the video, the scene is of protestors marching in the streets before several of them are shot by members of the Bahraini army. The video is available here. (Warning-the video contains graphic images)

The popularity of this video, along with the others from previous weeks, demonstrates how websites like YouTube relay images of events around the world and provide users with opportunities to view raw footage that would likely not be shown on traditional media.

The New Media Index is a weekly report that captures the leading commentary of blogs and social media sites focused on news and compares those subjects to that of the mainstream press.

PEJ's New Media Index is a companion to its weekly News Coverage Index. Blogs and other new media are an important part of creating today's news information narrative and in shaping the way Americans interact with the news. The expansion of online blogs and other social media sites has allowed news-consumers and others outside the mainstream press to have more of a role in agenda setting, dissemination and interpretation. PEJ aims to find out what subjects in the national news the online sites focus on, and how that compared with the narrative in the traditional press.

A prominent Web tracking site Icerocket, which monitors millions of blogs, uses the links to articles embedded on these sites as a proxy for determining what these subjects are. Using this tracking process as a base, PEJ staff compiles the lists of links weekday each day. They capture the top five linked-to stories on each list (25 stories each week), and reads, watches or listens to these posts and conducts a content analysis of their subject matter, just as it does for the mainstream press in its weekly News Coverage Index. It follows the same coding methodology as that of the NCI. Note: When the NMI was launched in January 2009, another web-tracking site Technorati was similarly monitoring blogs and social media. PEJ originally captured both Technorati's and Icerocket's daily aggregation. In recent months, though, this component of Technorati's site has been down with no indication of when it might resume. 

The priorities of the bloggers are measured in terms of percentage of links. Each time a news blog or social media Web page adds a link to its site directing its readers to a news story, it suggests that the author of the blog places at least some importance on the content of that article. The user may or may not agree with the contents of the article, but they feel it is important enough to draw the reader's attention to it. PEJ measures the topics that are of most interest to bloggers by compiling the quantitative information on links and analyzing the results.

For the examination of the links from Twitter, PEJ staff monitors the tracking site Tweetmeme. Similar to Icerocket, Tweetmeme measures the number of times a link to a particular story or blog post is tweeted and retweeted. Then, as we do with Icerocket, PEJ captures the five most popular linked-to pages each weekday under the heading of "news" as determined by Tweetmeme's method of categorization. And as with the other data provided in the NMI, the top stories are determined in terms of percentage of links. (One minor difference is that Tweetmeme offers the top links over the prior 24 hours while the list used on Icerocket offers the top links over the previous 48 hours.)

The Project also tracks the most popular news videos on YouTube each week.

*For the sake of authenticity, PEJ has a policy of not correcting misspellings or grammatical errors that appear in direct quotes from blog postings.

Note: PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index includes Sunday newspapers while the New Media Index is Monday through Friday.

With Libya engulfed in civil war, the continuing turmoil in the Mideast returned to the top of the mainstream news agenda. 

From February 21-27, events in the Middle East, dominated by the precarious situation in Libya, accounted for 35% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Up from 22% the previous week, this marks the fourth time in the last five weeks the Mideast has ranked as the No. 1 story in PEJ’s News Coverage Index.

A closely related topic—the rise in oil and gas prices attributed to the Libyan instability—filled another 2% of the newshole.

The oft-heard criticism that an insular U.S. media pay too little attention to international events is belied by the intensity of sustained coverage since protests erupted in Egypt on January 25. In the five weeks from January 24-February 27, unrest in the Mideast has accounted for 35% of the newshole, double that of the next biggest story, the economy, at 17%.

To put that in context, that exceeds the biggest month of coverage of the BP oil spill (34% in May-June 2010) and just narrowly trails the biggest month of the 2010 midterm elections (37% from early October to Election Day on Nov 2).

Indeed, the 35% of the newshole devoted to the Mideast in the past five weeks easily exceeds any month of coverage of the Iraq war, the most dominant international story tracked since PEJ began the News Coverage Index in January 2007.

Moreover, the press has followed the current unrest from hot spot to hot spot. Three weeks ago, the situation in Egypt accounted for virtually all of the Mideast coverage. Two weeks ago, after President Hosni Mubarak resigned, media attention to Bahrain spiked, accounting for about one-third of the Mideast coverage. And last week, about 90% of the attention to the region was devoted to the revolt against Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi—whose insistence on staying in power appears to be setting up a showdown in the capital of Tripoli.

The week’s No. 2 story was also sizable by traditional standards of the press agenda. The economy filled 24% of the newshole studied. About three-quarters of that was focused on state budget battles, currently playing out most dramatically in Wisconsin, which seemed to portend historic implications about the future of the labor union movement in America.

That economic coverage, however, is down from the previous week when the subject filled 34% of the newshole studied and was divided between two major storylines—the Wisconsin situation and reaction to President Obama’s $3.73 trillion budget. In the most recent week, media attention to the budget debate died down substantially.

With two subjects filling nearly 60% of the airtime on TV and radio and space on front pages and the top of news sites, there was a substantial drop off in coverage to the third-biggest story of last week (4%), the devastating earthquake in Christchurch New Zealand that reportedly killed about 150 people.

There was also perhaps less coverage than there might otherwise have been of the No. 4 story (also 4%), the debate over same-sex marriage. The big newsmaker was the Obama Administration’s decision that it would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court—a reversal of previous policy.

The fifth-biggest story last week (3%) was a hijacking by Somali pirates that culminated in the deaths of four Americans aboard a yacht.

Civil War in Libya

The Mideast was the No. 1 story last week in three of the five major media sectors, generating the most attention on broadcast network news (39%). And three basic Libya storylines emerged in the media.

One was an attempt to craft a portrait of the 68-year-old Gaddafi, a volatile dictator who in recent years has transformed himself from an enemy of the U.S. to something of an ally of convenience by offering help in the war on terrorism.

Gaddafi indeed was the week’s most No. 1 newsmaker, appearing as a prominent newsmaker in 11% of all stories. President Obama by contrast, was a dominant newsmaker in 6 % of the week’s stories. (To register as a dominant newsmaker, a person must be featured in at least 50% of a story.)

In a February 21 report on NBC, anchor Brian Williams called Gaddafi “a sometimes cartoonish, often outlandish” figure. Citing recently released Wikileaks documents as her source, correspondent Andrea Mitchell noted that he “fears flying over water, prefers staying on the ground floor and almost never travels without his trusted Ukrainian nurse.”

The media had a field day with the Wikileaks dump, apparently timed to satisfy the curiosity about Libya. The documents detailed the partying lifestyle of some of Gaddafi’s eight children, including bashes featuring pop stars Mariah Carey, Usher and Beyonce.

Some press accounts luxuriated in Gaddafi’s mercurial record, which evinced no guiding ideology other than survival. A February 22 profile in the Los Angeles Times reported he “has cast a curious political shadow across North Africa and the Middle East throughout a 41-year rule in which he has veered from terrorist plotter to oil-rich opportunist. Switching over the decades from flowing desert robes to military regalia and a chest full of medals, he has championed nationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism and Jamahiriya, or a ‘republic ruled by the masses.’ Not known for brevity, Kadafi, now 68, has elaborated his ideologies in circuitous, numbing speeches.”

Another storyline involved an analysis over the role the U.S. should, or could play, in responding to the Libyan situation. And much of the mainstream coverage concluded the White House had limited power to affect events there.

“As Libya's government brutally cracked down on demonstrators Monday, the Obama administration confronted a cold truth: It had almost none of the leverage it has exercised in recent days to help defuse other crises in the region,” said a February 22 Washington Post story.

Two days later, on ABC’s Good Morning America, correspondent Jake Tapper said the administration was considering enlisting international cooperation on “multi-lateral sanctions” against Gaddafi. But he also reported that the dictator’s unpredictability was causing the White House to keep its words and deeds measured.

“After watching Kadafi’s unhinged rambling speech the other night [in which he talked of dying as a “martyr”] officials became concerned that this was a guy who might…burn the house down with him,” said Tapper. “It’s almost as if President Obama is a law enforcement negotiator talking to a hostage taker.”

But by the weekend, after a boat carrying a reported 167 American citizens safely sailed from Libya, Obama’s language toughened as he called for Gaddafi to step down.

The third major Libyan storyline last week involved the fighting on the ground and the prospects for Gaddafi to stay in power despite losing a large chunk of his country to rebels.

On February 24, CNN host and foreign policy analyst Fareed Zakaria declared: “It seems impossible to imagine that he's going to be able to survive...The real question, as I've always felt, is at some point is somebody in the army or the intelligence service going to turn on him…This could draw on for weeks and weeks, but the outcome is inevitable.”

By the end of the week, it seemed clear that Gaddafi opponents were gearing up to try and drive him from power. “Opposition forces that now control huge swaths of eastern Libya are calling for a fresh push today to oust Col. Moammar Gadhafi from the capital Tripoli and the few towns he still controls around it,” reported a story the AOL News site.   

On February 26, the New York Times reported on signs that Gaddafi was losing his grip on power in Tripoli.  An attempt  “to prove that he was firmly in control of Libya appeared to backfire…as foreign journalists he invited to the capital discovered blocks of the city in open defiance of his authority,” the story stated.  “When government-picked drivers escorted journalists on tours of the city on Saturday morning, the extent of the unrest was unmistakable. Workers were still hastily painting over graffiti calling Colonel Qaddafi a “bloodsucker” and demanding his ouster.”

The Wisconsin Stalemate

Even though the Mideast was the week’s top story, it is notable that the economy—and particularly the continuing union standoff in Wisconsin—generated the most attention and was the No. 1 subject on cable news, filling 37% of the airtime studied.

Madison Wisconsin has turned into a major economic and political battleground, with union protestors and Democrats opposing Republican Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to curtail collective bargaining rights.

Week in and week out, our studies find that the conversation on cable tends to follow the most polarizing domestic issues, particularly on the two channels whose prime-time lineup is filled with ideological hosts. Fitting the pattern, CNN devoted most of its airtime last week to the Mideast, but on Fox and NBC, coverage of Wisconsin dominated.

Some predictable partisan fights occurred on cable. On February 21, conservative Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly put the blame directly on unions. Citing a poll showing that more Americans agreed with Walker than the unions, O’Reilly declared that, “The very essence of union-generated benefits is what is bankrupting Wisconsin and other states around the country.”

One night later, on MSNBC, Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein argued that by going after unions, Republicans are shooting for political re-alignment. They see “the opportunity in the large new majorities they have to do more than just balance the budget,” Klein said. “They see an opportunity to reshape the balance of power in the states.”

One unusual media sidebar emerged last week after a staffer at an online outlet recorded a prank phone call to Governor Walker, pretending to be wealthy conservative activist David Koch and discussing anti-union strategy. That earned the paper, the Buffalo Beast, a rebuke from the Society of Professional Journalists. The call was celebrated in some other quarters of the media, however. The media bistro website, called it—perhaps with hyperbolic search engine optimization in mind—the “prank of the century.”

The Rest of the Week’s News

Like many such disasters with potent visuals and strong human interest aspects, the third biggest story of the week, the deadly earthquake in New Zealand, generated the most attention in the broadcast news sector, accounting for 10% of the airtime studied.

Coverage of the same-sex marriage issue, driven by the Obama Administration’s change of heart on its legal strategy, came next, also at 4%. While the move was seen as a victory for gay rights groups and a setback for social conservatives, the issue did not become a major hot button issue last week in the sectors with talk shows—cable (3% of the airtime) and radio (6%). In a less busy news week, it may well have triggered a most robust talk show debate. Some political scientists, citing polling data, believe that it is no longer such a potent wedge issue. Last week, for whatever reasons, it was not major news.

The fifth-biggest story, 3%, was the latest episode involving Somali pirates who killed four Americans aboard a yacht. Some of that coverage focused on trying to reconstruct the sequence of events that quickly turned from negotiations to violence.

Newsmakers of the Week

After Gaddafi and Obama, the third-biggest newsmaker of the week was the man at the center of the Wisconsin showdown, Governor Scott Walker, who registered as a dominant newsmaker in 3% of the week’s stories.

The next biggest newsmakers (both at 1%) were former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, (1%) who was elected mayor of Chicago, and Khalid Aldaswari, a 20-year-old Saudi charged with planning attacks in the U.S.—including one that may have targeted the home of former President George W. Bush.

About the NCI

PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index examines the news agenda of 52 different outlets from five sectors of the media: print, online, network TV, cable and radio. (See List of Outlets.) The weekly study, which includes some 1,000 stories, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of that media narrative and differences among news platforms. The percentages are based on "newshole," or the space devoted to each subject in print and online and time on radio and TV. (See Our Methodology.) In addition, these reports also include a rundown of the week’s leading newsmakers, a designation given to people who account for at least 50% of a given story.

Though it doesn't often happen, the social and mainstream media were in sync last week as bloggers focused on two primary topics- the U.S. budget and Mideast unrest.

For the week of February 14-18, 22% of the news links on blogs were about President Obama's $3.73 trillion budget proposal, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. That subject, along with the state budget strife in Wisconsin, topped the mainstream agenda as well last week.

The president's budget proposal included a projected $1.6 trillion deficit, which was a concern for bloggers on both sides of the political aisle. However, conservatives and liberals linked to dueling columns from the Washington Post to support their differing views of the economic debate.

Conservatives highlighted a Post editorial criticizing Obama for refusing to include tough choices about entitlement reform in his proposal. Liberals focused on a piece by Dana Milbank in which he accused House Speaker John Boehner of hypocrisy for saying that jobs are his party's first priority, but appearing indifferent to layoffs that could occur if the GOP's budget cuts were passed.

The second story on blogs, at 21%, was the situation in Egypt following the protests and the February 11 resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. Two weeks earlier, the upheaval in Egypt had dominated the blogosphere, accounting for 57% of that week's links.

Turmoil in another Mideast country also made the list of top subjects, as another 6% of the links went to a report about anti-government protests in Iran that drew inspiration from the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. In the mainstream press, coverage of Iran and unrest elsewhere in the region accounted for 26% of the newshole.

While there was widespread support for Egypt's pro-democracy movement throughout social media, last week, bloggers turned their attention to the difficult questions facing the country as it transitions to whatever form the new government will take. Additionally, a few bloggers took a more activist role by participating in an online campaign to encourage the world community to freeze Mubarak's assets.

The No. 3 story on blogs, at 10%, involved Wal-Mart and the city of Washington, D.C. A Washington Post article on a new store being built in the Northeast part of the city quoted residents about both their hopes and fears of having a Wal-Mart in their community.

Rounding out the roster of top subjects last week (at 6%) was a summary of the recent Conservative Political Action Conference where Washington Post writer Chris Cillizza declared which politicians came out of the conference as winners (such as Mitt Romney and Mitch Daniels) and which were losers (such as Ron Paul and Rick Santorum).

Twitter

On Twitter last week, the list of top subjects was dominated by web-based technology news.

The top subject, with 16% of the links, was Twitter itself, although with a British-twist. Most of the attention was to a list in the British Independent of the 100 most influential and elite people on Twitter in the UK. Among others, the list includes politicians, actors, musicians, journalists, and scientists. Comedian Eddie Izzard was ranked No. 3 while broadcaster and Larry King replacement Piers Morgan was tied for No. 62.

News that Coupa-a firm that has developed a cloud spend management platform that helps companies keep track of costs-has raised $12 million in funding was the No. 2 subject, at 14%.

Stories about Watson, the IBM supercomputer that defeated two humans at Jeopardy, were third at 10%. Watson, who was represented on screen by an avatar, won the three-day competition by amassing a total of $77,147.  His two human opponents trailed far behind-at $24,000 and $21,600.

Fourth, at 7%, was a preview of an announcement by the FBI that it would be seeking better technology and more authority to improve its Internet wiretapping capability. Because of the increase in email and social networks, the organization has been unable to conduct certain types of surveillance that have been possible on cellular and traditional telephones.

And fifth, also at 7%, was a story about Banksy, the world's most famous graffiti artist. Last week, the appearance of graffiti on two buildings in Los Angeles led people to believe he was in that city to promote his documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, which is nominated for an Academy Award.

Budgets, Deficits and Jobs

When President Obama rolled out his budget proposal that includes a deficit projection of $1.6 trillion, a number of bloggers zeroed in on that number.

"if you want to get a picture of how fast the federal government is growing, i would point out that obama's supposedly cut-down and austere budget clocks in at $3.7 trillion. it has doubled since 2001. keep doubling every decade and this thing will eat the world," warned Captain Capitulation at Eye of the Storm.  "this is a pretty good measure of the scope and power of the federal government."* 

Many conservatives agreed with a Washington Post editorial criticizing Obama for refusing to make hard choices about entitlement spending, such as Medicare and Social Security.

"The most egregious abdication of President Obama's fiscal leadership lies in the question, ‘where are the entitlement cuts?'" asked Dennis Gallagher at Political Policy. "The answer is simple; there are none...It [Obama's budget] places the carnage of his fiscal carelessness to be laid at the threshold of future generations as a burden on their quality of life. It also abdicates and passes the buck to his opposing party to have the courage he lacks to right America's fiscal ship."

"If a motto summed up the Obama presidency, it might be, ‘Life is short. Eat dessert first,'" wrote Hans Bader at the San Francisco Examiner. "His policies are all about self-indulgence in the present, to be paid for with either long-run economic decline, or painful sacrifices by future generations."

Liberal bloggers, however, focused on a different subject-the Republican budget proposals and specifically the priorities of House Speaker John Boehner. Some linked to a column by Washington Post writer Dana Milbank taking Boehner to task for pronouncing that unemployment is his first priority, but then proposing cuts to the national budget that could result in the loss of up to a million jobs, according to the liberal Center for American Progress.

"If Boehner really does care about middle class federal workers losing their jobs, then he may want to reconsider the draconian cuts his party is pushing," suggested fishalert at Support Our Country.

"It appears that the Republicans are willing to bet that causing substantial job losses is worth the gamble that the electorate will forget about the jobs, jobs, jobs baloney and blame Obama for not meeting his stimulus goal of 8% unemployment," summarized Popular Street Views. "They are betting that the public's concern about the national debt will supercede the pain that the massive budget cuts of discretionary spending will have on a great segment of the population.  As Speaker Boehner stated, 'So be it'."

"I love how the GOP is rational, self-interested, and ultimately incredibly destructive from an economic perspective," added Edward at The Dredwerkz.

Egypt

While bloggers commenting on Egypt continued to voice support for the protest movement, last week many of them turned their attention to the uncertainty of the transition to a new government. Some linked to a Washington Post report about the desire for Egyptians to recover substantial assets that Mubarak and his cronies allegedly stole during three decades of rule. Others highlighted a different Post article about pockets of tension that have arisen in Cairo as some protestors continue to demonstrate and the military attempts to restore normalcy.

Many bloggers saw these stories as evidence of the tough road ahead.

"Now the hard part begins," posted Jake Today. "Since there have been no political parties, no elections, just 30 years of emergency rule political suppression by the Mubarak dictatorship it will be damned hard to quickly create a democratic government ...Good luck."

"Many people are hailing the overturn of the Egyptian government as a great day for freedom. In the sense that a mob was able to successfully throw off an undesirable dictator, it can be said that some Egyptian citizens were exercising freedom of choice," described FORDMW at Mind & Market. "However, this by no means suggests that the future of Egypt will be supportive of freedom in the classic liberal sense."

Some directed their outrage at the fortune Mubarak supposedly amassed before departing.

"Mubarak went into office with very little and left a billionaire. This to many, indicates the pilfering of the national treasury for personal enrichment. Mubarak's accounts in Britain are candidates for seizure, with further asset searches being conducted," wrote Aisha. "Why oh why, when people go into office, they do not resist the temptation of taking the People's money. It happens all over the world and there needs to be greater international accountability."

A few bloggers participated in an online campaign conducted by Avaaz.org, an advocacy group that uses technology to organize people for action on global and regional issues. In this instance, Avaaz was sponsoring an online petition calling on world leaders to immediately freeze Mubarak's assets "so they can be investigated and returned to the Egyptian people." According to the site, more than 500,000 people have signed the petition.

"I don't normally send a message asking you to respond by email for any organization," explained Journeys and Star Gazing. "However, I'm doing so now because it sickens me that a dictator who has been receiving billions of dollars of aid from the USA has used it to line his own pockets rather than help his own people."

YouTube

The list of the most viewed news videos on YouTube last week was practically the same as the list the previous week, with four out the top five videos remaining the same.

The only new clip to crack the list, and the fourth most viewed of the week, was an 18-second video that highlights the basic gawker appeal of some YouTube entries. Shot from inside a car in an unknown location, the video shows a large truck with snow on its roof passing under a bridge. The pile of snow flies off the truck and then hits the car behind it. Not only is it unclear where the incident took place, but it is also unknown whether anyone was injured as a result.

The New Media Index is a weekly report that captures the leading commentary of blogs and social media sites focused on news and compares those subjects to that of the mainstream press.

PEJ's New Media Index is a companion to its weekly News Coverage Index. Blogs and other new media are an important part of creating today's news information narrative and in shaping the way Americans interact with the news. The expansion of online blogs and other social media sites has allowed news-consumers and others outside the mainstream press to have more of a role in agenda setting, dissemination and interpretation. PEJ aims to find out what subjects in the national news the online sites focus on, and how that compared with the narrative in the traditional press.

A prominent Web tracking site Icerocket, which monitors millions of blogs, uses the links to articles embedded on these sites as a proxy for determining what these subjects are. Using this tracking process as a base, PEJ staff compiles the lists of links weekday each day. They capture the top five linked-to stories on each list (25 stories each week), and reads, watches or listens to these posts and conducts a content analysis of their subject matter, just as it does for the mainstream press in its weekly News Coverage Index. It follows the same coding methodology as that of the NCI. Note: When the NMI was launched in January 2009, another web-tracking site Technorati was similarly monitoring blogs and social media. PEJ originally captured both Technorati's and Icerocket's daily aggregation. In recent months, though, this component of Technorati's site has been down with no indication of when it might resume. 

The priorities of the bloggers are measured in terms of percentage of links. Each time a news blog or social media Web page adds a link to its site directing its readers to a news story, it suggests that the author of the blog places at least some importance on the content of that article. The user may or may not agree with the contents of the article, but they feel it is important enough to draw the reader's attention to it. PEJ measures the topics that are of most interest to bloggers by compiling the quantitative information on links and analyzing the results.

For the examination of the links from Twitter, PEJ staff monitors the tracking site Tweetmeme. Similar to Icerocket, Tweetmeme measures the number of times a link to a particular story or blog post is tweeted and retweeted. Then, as we do with Icerocket, PEJ captures the five most popular linked-to pages each weekday under the heading of "news" as determined by Tweetmeme's method of categorization. And as with the other data provided in the NMI, the top stories are determined in terms of percentage of links. (One minor difference is that Tweetmeme offers the top links over the prior 24 hours while the list used on Icerocket offers the top links over the previous 48 hours.)

The Project also tracks the most popular news videos on YouTube each week.

*For the sake of authenticity, PEJ has a policy of not correcting misspellings or grammatical errors that appear in direct quotes from blog postings.

Note: PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index includes Sunday newspapers while the New Media Index is Monday through Friday.