News Index
At the same time, coverage of the often violent unrest in the Muslim world fell by almost half, even as democracy movements spread from Egypt to Bahrain and Libya. For the week of February 14-20, two pitched budget battles—one in Washington, the other in Madison, Wisconsin—drove coverage of economic issues to 34% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That marks the most economy-related coverage in a single week since December 6-12, 2010, when it reached 40% of the newshole studied by PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index. Taken together, three storylines—Obama’s $3.73 trillion budget, the deficit and state budget crises highlighted by Wisconsin protests over the governor’s attempt to cut union benefits and bargaining power—accounted for more than 80% of the week’s economic coverage. Meanwhile, protests in the Middle East continued to generate major attention for the fourth week in a row, although that coverage was diminished and the venues shifted. At 22% of the newshole, coverage was down from 40% the previous week and 56% the week before that. The unrest in Egypt—which dominated recent coverage and resulted in President Hosni Mubarak February 11 departure —accounted for less than half of last week’s Mideast coverage. Instead, as the democratization drive in Egypt turned from dramatic protests to a political process, the cameras moved to the streets of Benghazi, Libya and Manama, Bahrain where demonstrations provoked violent reactions from authorities. Coverage of another country in the region, Iran, accounted for an additional 4% last week. Much of that also involved anti-government rallies, including major demonstrations on February 14. But some included assessments of Iran’s nuclear program as well as the sailing of two Iranian ships through the Suez Canal for the first time in more than three decades—a development Israel viewed with alarm. The week’s No. 4 story (3%) was coverage of the Obama Administration itself, including his awarding of the Medal of Freedom to 15 recipients, including former President George H.W. Bush. The week’s fifth-biggest story, at 2%, was continuing coverage of the January 8 Tucson shooting that killed six and seriously wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Some of last week’s coverage included the revelation that one firefighter, since resigned, declined to go to the crime scene that day, reportedly because had some political differences with other firefighters. The Budget Battles One bellwether of the media’s interest in a story is the talk show-driven cable news universe populated by Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. Two weeks ago, events in the Mideast dominated the airwaves on all three channels. Last week, as the protests abroad spread, two of the channels largely switched their attention to economy-related issues. The economy and its various storylines accounted for more than one-third of the time studied on Fox and more than half on MSNBC. Only on CNN, with its greater emphasis on international coverage, did the Mideast remain the No. 1 story, accounting for nearly 40% of its coverage. The budget stories at the heart of the economic coverage were triggered last week by Obama’s unveiling of his $3.73 trillion blueprint, a document that was criticized by “Republicans and Democrats alike…for cutting too little,” in the words of Fox News anchor Shannon Bream.
Some of the criticism stemmed from what was seen as the president’s unwillingness to talk about the hard deficit-reduction choices—entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. The GOP in particular, was critical. “The White House projected Monday that the federal deficit would spike to $1.65 trillion in the current fiscal year…adding pressure on Democrats and Republicans to tackle growing levels of debt,” reported the Wall Street Journal on February 14. “But Mr. Obama's plan is likely to be rewritten by Republicans who control the House, as proposed spending cuts in his budget fall short of the reductions congressional Republicans are seeking.” Some of the coverage also focused on the delicate political game being played by both parties concerning the more painful choices for shrinking the deficit. On the February 15 broadcast of PBS’s NewsHour, anchor Judy Woodruff noted that Obama said “he's not taking on the entitlements, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because he wants to wait until everybody can sit down at the table, Democrats and Republicans, and talk about it like adults.” To which PBS political editor David Chalian added: “I spoke to a Republican aide on Capitol Hill that said, ‘yes, we all have to jump into the pool at the same time.’ But nobody wants to be that first person in, because they're afraid that there will be sort of demagoguing against what they present.” If the nation’s finances triggered some rather careful political sparring in Washington last week, bruising all-out budgetary battles were already in full swing in other parts of the country. Nowhere was this more evident than in Wisconsin, with the eruption of large and emotional protests and some counter protests over Republican Governor Scott Walker’s proposal for public union concessions that would eliminate collective bargaining rights. Unions make up a key pillar of the Democrats’ electoral and fundraising base and some commentators have depicted the Wisconsin battle not only as a crucial test of union muscle, but as a pivotal battle that could determine the broader course of U.S. politics. “We are on the front line for the ideological fight for America,” declared liberal MSNBC host Ed Schultz who hosted his February 18 show from Madison. The unions “aren‘t asking for more money,” he declared. “They‘re fighting to hold on to the American dream…They want the right to negotiate, the right to hang on to their hard-earned money.” From the other side of the political spectrum, the view was different. On his February 17 radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh put the blame for what was happening in Wisconsin squarely on liberals and President Obama. “Look what’s going on in Madison,” he declared. “It’s a perfect example of community organizing. It’s a perfect example of community agitation.” At week’s end, there was no end in sight to the impasse as 14 Democratic state senators continued their self-imposed exile in Illinois in an effort to block consideration of the governor’s proposal. The Mideast: From Egypt to Libya
In the wake of President Hosni Mubarak’s decision to step down on February 11, some of the media attention on Egypt naturally shifted to the more subtle and slowly developing pace of political reform and restructuring. “The army has kept the population on its side during the turmoil and promised to lift a decades-old emergency law, but is under pressure from activists who spearheaded the revolution to act swiftly to advance civil freedoms in the new Egypt,” noted a February 18 story on MSNBC.com. And with the Egyptian storyline shifting from the Tahrir Square to the backrooms, more of the week’s coverage shifted to the street protests spreading to other countries. While about 40% of the Mideast unrest coverage still focused on Egypt last week, another 40% involved the anti-government protests in Bahrain and Libya. Indeed, dramatic events occurred last week in Bahrain, the small Shi’ite dominated Persian Gulf state where demonstrations erupted against the Sunni monarchy. As was the case with Egypt, a good deal of the media narrative focused on the U.S. trying to balance democratic ideals with its strategic interest in a country that acts as headquarters for the U.S. Fifth Fleet. “The free flow of oil, the containment of Iran and the defeat of al Qaeda…those are the stakes in the Persian Gulf,” declared CBS correspondent David Martin last week. Violence also erupted in the North African country of Libya, where dictator Muammar Gaddafi made news by responding forcefully against anti-government protests. But with a government that has traditionally been hostile to the U.S. and inhospitable to foreign reporters, covering the upheaval there was more daunting. “The heart of the revolt in Libya is in the eastern city of Benghazi, where dozens of people have died in recent days and tens of thousands of protesters have taken control of many neighborhoods,” stated the Los Angeles Times on February 20. But as the story notes, the challenge of dislodging Gaddafi is a daunting one given the “police state” he has established there. Coverage of the Islamic Republic of Iran generated another 4% of last week’s coverage. Some of that coverage examined the progress of that nation’s nuclear program as well as its naval foray through the Suez Canal. But most was focused on internal unrest, as the protest movement that emerged in the wake of the disputed June 2009 presidential elections re-established itself. Even so, Anderson Cooper’s February 14 report on CNN suggested some of the difficulties facing demonstrators in that country. “Hundreds of thousands of Iranians reportedly took to the streets today. The Iranian regime doesn't want you to know about it, though, doesn't want you to see the pictures… Iran is more efficient in their crackdown than the Egyptian government was,” Cooper said. “They won't allow foreign reporters in the country. They reportedly shut down train service, cell phones and responded to protesters with tear gas, beatings and arrests.”
Newsmakers of the Week In the week in which he rolled out his budget, Barack Obama generated the most media attention, registering as a prominent newsmaker in 9% of the week’s stories, the same number as the previous week. (To be considered a prominent newsmaker, a figure must be featured in at least 50% of the story). No one else came close to matching the president’s coverage. The next three newsmakers, (all at 1%) were three public officials in very different circumstances. Scandal-plagued Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been in the news for allegations that, among other things, he paid a minor for sex. Scott Brown, the new Republican Senator from Massachusetts, released a memoir that detailed the very difficult childhood he had to surmount to become a lawyer, a Massachusetts state senator and eventually, a U.S. senator. And Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords continued her remarkable progress from brain injury in the wake of the January 8 shootings. The next leading newsmaker, also at 1%, was CBS correspondent Lara Logan, who was sexually assaulted and beaten on February 11 while covering the demonstrations in Cairo. The incident triggered a rash of commentary, not all of it illuminating, about the balance between a reporter’s need to cover a story and the risk of putting oneself in harm’s way. 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. Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
While the mainstream press focused on the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, social media galvanized around a vote in the House of Representatives on whether to extend the Patriot Act. From February 7-11, that was the top story on both blogs (with 17% of the news links) and Twitter (21%), according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. That marks the first time in almost 11 months that any subject was No. 1 on both Twitter and blogs in the same week, and only the fifth time since PEJ began its New Media Index in January 2009. Concern for civil liberties transcended politics here as bloggers and twitterers on both the left and the right cheered the February 8 vote in the House which fell short of the super-majority needed to reauthorize the Patriot Act. (A week later, however, both the House and Senate passed a bill extending the Patriot Act for an additional 90 days.) "The Patriot Act nullifies ALL your inalienable rights and freedoms. End it NOW!" tweeted Eugene Garner. "The bottom line is that the Patriot Act IS a woeful invasion of our civil liberties, specifically the 4th Amendment's protections against search and seizures. This thing needs to fail again and again," determined Gadsden's Snake. Much of the conversation also commended the role played by Tea Party members in the House as 26 Republicans, a number of them from the Tea Party caucus, initially voted alongside most Democrats in opposing the bill. For most online, this action was a victory for the libertarian strain of the Tea Party movement. "The Tea Partiers are doing what they are supposed to do," applauded the Centerist Cynic. "Legislating according to their principles not according to the direction the political wind is blowing or according to who wrote the biggest check to their reelection campaign...So I'd like to say thank you to those 26 Tea Party members. Keep up the good work!" "Been ambivalent toward the Tea Party until they voted to defeat the Patriot Act on principle. I think I can get behind these guys," tweeted bigB_EOD. "Does this mean that my lefty friends are going to thank the Tea Party for something?" asked Michael at Young Hip and Conservative. "Maybe, maybe not." Still some liberal voices, while supporting the Tea Party's opposition to the Patriot Act, did not believe these legislators would continue to defy Republican leaders. "It's only a temporary lapse into normalcy," predicted Jake Today. "They will soon obey their GOP masters, but it was nice to see them vote with the Dems to not renew the Patriot Act. I will be very surprized if the Teabags do not grovel at Boehner's feet within the month--money, power, and reelection will win them over. Too bad."* Other bloggers decided that this vote was a defeat for the House GOP leadership because they were unable to secure the votes need for passage. "In what was officially just the 12th day in session for the new House Republican majority, the wheels have come off the GOP vote-counting machinery," announced David Waldman at Congress Matters. The Rest of the News on Blogs and Twitter The No. 2 story on blogs last week, at 14%, was a column by Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins criticizing the lavishness of the Super Bowl in Dallas, including the high cost of parking and drinks. Bloggers generally agreed with Jenkins' complaints, although there was some dispute about whether the Navy's decision to fly four Navy F-18 jets over the stadium was worth the $450,000 in taxpayers' money. "We made this [Super Bowl] monster. We birthed it, we fed it, we nurtured it as it grew, and now we have to deal with the fact that it's gotten huge and out of control," declared Jimmy at Rantville Reborn. A report that the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 9 percent in January from 9.4 percent in December was the third biggest subject, at 13%. Two stories came next, both at 9%. One was a Los Angeles Times article describing how 24 state senators and representatives in Southern states have converted from Democrat to Republican since the midterm elections last November. The other was a Washington Post story about the controversy over children who unknowingly ran up large bills using applications on the Apple iPad that are free to download initially, but then cost money once the app is launched. On the social networking site Twitter, the second-largest subject last week was the turmoil in Egypt at 11%. In particular, twitterers linked to a Fox News report about President Hosni Mubarak's decision to step down and expressed optimism about the events there.
Fourth, at 9%, was a story about a British woman who died after she allegedly flew to Philadelphia to get silicone injections into her buttocks. And fifth, at 8%, was news that the IRS has reversed its long-held position and will now make breast pumps and other lactation supplies tax deductible. YouTube For the second week in a row, some of the most-watched news clips on YouTube brought home violent images and the dark side of what was happening on the streets of Cairo before Hosni Mubarak resigned on February 11. The No. 2 video, watched more than 1.8 million times last week, was a cell phone video of a diplomatic car that ran through a crowd of protestors, injuring at least 20 people. The identity of the driver is unknown, although the U.S. embassy in Cairo released a statement saying that none of their employees were involved in the incident. (Warning-the video contains graphic images.) The fifth most-viewed video includes footage of a protestor shot and killed in the streets of Alexandria, reportedly by Egyptian police. The identity of the man is still unknown. (Warning- the video contains graphic images.) CNN investigated the incident and produced a report available here.
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.
By the time the week was over, February 7-13, the turmoil in Egypt filled 40% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That is down from the previous week’s level of 56%—when the crisis registered as the biggest international story in the four years PEJ has studied the media agenda through its weekly News Coverage Index. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. In the first half of last week (Monday through Wednesday), coverage of Egypt accounted for 26% of the newshole as the stalemate between President Hosni Mubarak and the protestors seemed to drag on. But from Thursday through Sunday—in the hours leading up to and following Mubarak’s exit—coverage roared back, filling 59% of the newshole—and even more on cable news (93%), network news (69%) and radio news (63%). As it did, the narrative turned from a sense that the power struggle might continue, to certain reports that Mubarak would resign, to his defiant refusal, to a chaotic sense that he was no longer in control of his own destiny. And then the media narrative switched again, this time to speculation about what might happen next in Egypt and the implications for the U.S. and the region. An array of pundits and analysts lined up to somehow try and answer what MSNBC host Chris Matthews called the “many unanswered questions.” An analysis of the coverage suggests that in the climactic final days, a celebratory tone about democracy overwhelmed a fearful one about the implications for security in the Middle East. The evidence also suggests that at least one news outlet, Fox, offered a noticeably different vantage point. The Egyptian protests began in earnest on January 25 and led to the fall of Mubarak on February 11. And in the three weeks from January 24-February 13, the Mideast story accounted for more than one-third (39%) of all the coverage measured by PEJ’s Index. The second biggest story in those three weeks, the U.S. economy, generated less than one-quarter of that coverage, at 9%. Last week, no media sector covered the extraordinary events in Egypt as extensively as cable news —a platform that often devotes more coverage to the biggest story of the week than the media generally—this time 59% of the airtime studied. As is often the case with major breaking events, CNN, which has more foreign bureaus and reporters than any other cable network and whose programs are more oriented to breaking news than to talk, devoted considerably more of its airtime studied last week (83%) to the story than did MSNBC (48%) and Fox (43%). Although no subject generated anywhere near the coverage Egypt did, the economy was the No. 2 story last week, accounting for 10% of the coverage on news from the housing sector and the job market as well as Barack Obama’s efforts to mend fences with business. That was followed, at 3%, by news about the Obama Administration itself, some of which focused on the president’s personal habits. The No. 4 story, at 3%, was coverage of U.S anti-terror efforts in a week in which the Homeland Security secretary raised red flags about the threat level. And the fifth-biggest subject, 2%, was a media story—the sale of the liberal Huffington Post site to AOL. The Drama in Egypt In the first half of the week, coverage of Egypt actually began to diminish significantly as the prospect of extended stalemate loomed. “With rallies in their third week, the question is whether the demonstrators have the stamina and resources to fight on—or whether they'll retreat behind the few concessions Mubarak's regime has thrown at them,” said a story posted on AOL News on February 9. But on February 10, the media and U.S. officials such as CIA Director Leon Panetta began sending strong signals that a Mubarak resignation was imminent—a prediction that was disproven by the Egyptian president’s speech that day. That generated a new theme in the coverage best described by two words—what happened? “The chaos and confusion that so permeated throughout Egypt made its way to the White House today,” reported ABC correspondent Jake Tapper. “They are still trying to make sense of it, just like the crowd in Tahrir Square.” Then, on February 11, Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak had stepped down, and the scenes in Tahrir Square led some journalists to invoke comparisons to the fall of the Berlin Wall. CNN’s Ivan Watson reported that, “Moments ago, the crowd just exploded into cheering and flag waving and chanting the word ‘Freedom!’ And I saw two men drop to their knees and begin praying immediately in the streets…Absolute scenes of rapture.” On MSNBC, correspondent Ron Allen characterized the Egyptian mood under Mubarak as a “feeling of just captivity…of limited hopes and dreams” and described the post-resignation scene as “a huge celebration…It’s like the Fourth of July, it’s New Year’s Eve…” On Fox News the tone was noticeably different, as anchor Megyn Kelly said: “One feels joy for those who are watching on screen left [but] there is concern for the United States of America and Israel at this hour.” She interviewed a former intelligence officer who warned, “this is a very dangerous time for U.S. policy interests…Iran really is in position to be resurgent here.”
In attempting to assess the overall tone
of U.S. coverage in the week’s two most frantic days—Thursday and Friday—there
are some clues to guide us. For example, a search by PEJ found that among some of
the key terms used on cable and network evening news broadcasts on February 10
and 11, positive messages seemed to predominate.
In order to monitor the contours of the coverage, researchers identified a series of significant terms related to the ongoing events in Egypt. Six of them—including “democracy,” “triumph,” “celebrate” and “pluralism”—seemed to have positive connotations. Another six—including “theocracy,” “Muslim Brotherhood,” “extremism” and “radical”—appeared to have more worrisome connotations. PEJ then tracked the use of those terms on 17.5 hours of cable news and network news broadcasts on February 10 and 11. Of the five terms that appeared most frequently on the programs, four of them—“democracy,” “freedom,” “peace” and “celebrate”—had upbeat implications. Only one, the “Muslim Brotherhood,” would seem to indicate concern or negativity. Moreover, the group of positive-leaning terms appeared about three times as often as the more negative ones. At the same time, the search did reveal some differences in the use of key words between the Fox News Channel and its two rivals—CNN and MSNBC. For example, Fox used the term Muslim Brotherhood about five times as frequently as the other two combined and mentioned Israel about twice as often as CNN and MSNBC combined. Fox News host Sean Hannity and his colleague Glenn Beck were among those in the media expressing the most concern about the ouster of Mubarak. On his February 11 program, Hannity declared that “at the end of the day, I think we have weakened America’s influence in the world” and he warned that the Muslim Brotherhood or a Muslim state could emerge.
And once the media documented the sudden
transfer of power in Egypt, that narrative was quickly overtaken by another—one
driven by speculation, prediction and a dose of ideology.
From different points on the political spectrum, commentators offered their assessments of what had happened. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof expressed the hope that the U.S. would rethink its traditional support of Mideast autocrats. “We tie ourselves in knots when we act as if democracy is good for the United States and Israel but not for the Arab world,” he wrote. “For far too long, we’ve treated the Arab world as just an oil field.” But in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jack Kelly, a former deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force who writes a syndicated column, was more concerned about the possibility of an unfriendly government taking power. “Obama administration cluelessness about the [Muslim] brotherhood is dangerously reminiscent of Carter administration policy toward Iran in 1979,” he wrote. By the end of the week, that question of what will happen next in Egypt consumed much of the U.S. media. Appearing on CNN’s Parker Spitzer, Fouad Ajami, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, predicted that, “there will be an Islamic current [to the next government], but it won’t be a theocracy.” On MSNBC’s Hardball, MSNBC commentator and author Richard Wolffe warned that overt U.S. support for any of the factions competing for power would be the “kiss of death.” During a discussion on ABC’s Sunday talk show “This Week,” former State Department official Robert Kagan asserted that the best strategy for the U.S. would be to “press for gradual reforms so that you don’t wind up creating a tinderbox that explodes.” And This Week host Christiane Amanpour—who had landed a coveted interview with Mubarak the week before—seemed to sum up the subtext for the conversation by declaring: “Clearly, everybody is terrified that what’s going to happen in Egypt is another Iran.” That potential scenario is likely to keep the U.S. media focused on Cairo for some time. The Rest of the Week’s News The week’s No. 2 story was the economy, which was dwarfed by coverage of Egypt even as it jumped to 10% of the newshole, up from 5% the previous week. While there were no major developments, the newsmaking events included President Obama’s speech to the U.S Chamber of Commerce and word that more than one-quarter of American homeowners owe more on their mortgage than the value of their houses. From there, it was a significant drop to the third-biggest story, news about the Obama Administration (3%), which included reaction to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s Super Bowl interview with the president and Michelle Obama’s announcement that her husband had kicked the smoking habit. That was followed, (also at 3%) by coverage of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts, a topic driven in part by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s testimony to Congress that in some ways, the terror risk to the U.S. is at its highest level since 9/11. The final story (2%) was a new media merger with troubled online company AOL buying the six-year-old Huffington Post site for $315 million dollars. Not surprisingly, the story got the most coverage (6% of the newshole studied) in the online sector. A substantial chunk of last week’s media commentary expressed caution, if not skepticism, about the deal.
Newsmakers of the Week
Barack Obama was once again the top newsmaker, after having been relegated to the No. 2 position the previous week behind Hosni Mubarak. From February 7-13, Obama was a prominent newsmaker in 9% of the week’s stories, up from 6% the previous week. (To be a prominent newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a story.) Mubarak, who relinquished power on February 11, was a lead newsmaker in 6% of last week’s stories, down moderately from 8% the previous week. The No. 3 newsmaker (2%) was another prominent figure in the Egyptian revolution, Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who became one of the key figures among the protestors. The fourth-leading newsmaker (1%) was Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords who last week spoke her first words since the January 8 Tucson shootings. She was followed (also at 1%) by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose new memoir was just released and Christopher Lee, a married Republican Congressman from New York who resigned quickly after the nation learned of his use of Craigslist—sans shirt—to contact a woman. 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. Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
From January 31-February 4, fully 57% of the news links on blogs were about the unrest in Egypt, marking only the second time in the past nine months that a subject has garnered that much attention, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. (The shootings in Arizona that severely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords also received 57% of the links the week of January 10-14.) Indeed, the Egyptian crisis last week became the third-largest international story tracked by PEJ since it began the NMI in January 2009. The only overseas topics to surpass it were the UK elections in May 2010 and the protests following the disputed Iranian elections in June 2009. Bloggers' interest in the story mirrored that of the mainstream media last week, where it accounted for 56% of the newshole, according to the News Coverage Index. A number of bloggers stepped into the role of news provider as much if not more than news commentator. They relayed up-to-the-minute reporting about the protests, through links to mainstream news outlets or nuggets of information gleaned from a variety of social media. For many who used the blogosphere as a space to discuss the ramifications of events in Egypt, two major questions emerged. Was the potential revolution in Egypt a positive or negative development? And should President Bush or President Obama get the credit or blame for the developments in the region? Disseminating Information about Egypt Some of the blogs that served as aggregators of breaking news directed readers to traditional news sources that offered instant updates. One often linked-to site was the BBC, which delivered new reports every few minutes throughout the day. At times, bloggers would post the link while offering a brief summation or opinion. "Yesterday brought scattered reports that the army may be wavering in support of Mubarak," wrote Lawrence Person at BattleSwarm Blog on January 29. "Today? Not so much. There are sporadic reports of gunfire, and lots of reports that citizens groups are banding together to prevent looting." "I want to be optimistic [about the outcome], but it's difficult," admitted Tamerlane. Some bloggers even worked to mirror in a way the kind of minute-by-minute updates offered by the BBC and other mainstream press online. These blogs don't have reporters in the field and have many fewer readers than most large news sites, but still served as information providers for those that they reached. "For background and informative overviews of events, I recommend reading http://promotingpeace.tumblr.com/post/2969260999 as well as the Wikipedia article on the 2011 Egyptian protests," suggested mekosuchinae before providing a list of suggested Twitter feeds and hash tags to follow. "Thank you thank you thank you for all the links," responded a commenter named tifaria. "The US media is...well, it is what it is, and the coverage has been frustrating to say the least." Morgan deBoer, on the blog Matador Change, linked to traditional news stories and blogs, and pieced together a timeline related to the looting of Egyptian antiquities. "At the time of this posting, sources on Twitter, Aljazeera, Reuters, and Fox News are reporting increased tension in the streets of Cairo and Molotov Cocktails, fire, and gunfire in and around the Egyptian Museum," deBoer wrote. "The army is extinguishing the flames and news of damages has not yet been reported." Blogs as a Forum for Discussion For those who chose to use blogs to voice their opinions about the protests, a major question was whether the unrest was a good thing for U.S. interests and for the people of the region. The verdict was not clear cut. Some were hopeful. "If the events of this January tell us anything it is this: the universal desire for democratic freedoms can be subdued for many years, but never for good. All tyrants eventually fall," predicted Ibn Ibn Battuta. "What gives me hope is that there are young people... who care, who are not afraid, who will be part of movements and notions greater than themselves, and who will proudly, boldly and humbly re-tell the story," described Roxanne Krystalli at Stories of Conflict and Love. Others were fearful. They worried that the outcome would result in a government even more repressive and perhaps more hostile to the U.S. Many pointed to a January 31 Los Angeles Times article indicating that the Egyptian military was preparing to crack down on the protestors. "There is a danger that the protests could lead to less, not greater, liberty in Egypt," warned Conn Carroll at the Foundry, a blog run by The Heritage Foundation. "While many of the groups organizing the protests...do use pro-democracy rhetoric, there are powerful forces in the country that harbor Islamist goals that are incompatible with genuine democracy, including the anti-Western Muslim Brotherhood." Debate over the events, though, took on more of a political tinge when the subject turned to George W. Bush's foreign policy and Barack Obama's handling of the crisis. Some of that argument was spurred by an opinion piece in the Washington Post connecting the protests to George W. Bush's "freedom agenda." Former presidential adviser Elliott Abrams argued in the piece that the protests vindicated Bush's strong encouragement of the spread of democracy in the Middle East and that President Obama's response does not carry this through. Again, bloggers were split. Some agreed with Abrams. "The Bush legacy continues to grow," posted Prairie Pundit. "Let us pray that others in positions to affect policy do the same [as Abrams suggests] and follow through with actions to secure peace and liberty in the Middle East and throughout the world," declared Old Tybee Ranger. Others viewed Abrams' piece as revisionist history. "The United States under Bush was misguided to consider it could impose U.S.-styled democracy on Iraq or anywhere else by intervention and bombs and occupation," wrote Peter Eisner at World Desk. "How much influence can the United States have when it has sunken to classic lows of respect among those who seek freedom in repressive lands? Those levels of trust have started to improve lately under President Obama. But to listen to a voice from the interventionist right criticize a centrist president for caution is more than absurd."* Most of the evaluations of Obama were tied to the news that he would support a role for the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a new Egyptian government as long as the group rejected violence and supported democratic goals. "Considering that the Obama administration has admitted that they support a role for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's government, one is left with the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from such nonsense: Obama must really, really hate Israel to even harbor such a thought," decided Doctor Bulldog & Ronin. "Obama uniformly sides with our enemies but rarely, if ever, with our friends and allies," agreed James Simpson at Free Republic. "His administration is packed with far-left radicals and vicious anti-Semites. And therein lies the rub, because what we are witnessing in reality is this president's un-American, anti-American, treasonous ideology in full play." Criticism of Obama's actions clearly outweighed support in the blogosphere. This seemed to deviate somewhat from general public opinion. According to a recent Gallop poll, 47% of the public approved of how Obama was dealing with the situation in Egypt compared to 32% which disapproved. Egyptian Protests on YouTube The proliferation of eyewitness images of large demonstrations and sporadic violence in the streets of Cairo brought Egypt to the forefront on YouTube as well. Two of the most watched news videos on YouTube last week were dramatic clips of the protests. One video from Russia Today was footage of a violent confrontation between Egyptian police and protestors on January 28. Shot from right alongside the protestors, viewers can see and hear the chaos. The second clip, which was attributed to CBS News but was posted by an unnamed individual, featured protests on the same day, but from high above the ground. In this video, the protestors march to confront the police while chanting, but the more distant view shows no clear acts of violence. The person who posted the video, freedommessenger20, claims the clip shows security forces retreating.
Other Top Stories on Blogs The other major subjects on blogs last week were a mix of journalism, an international conflict, and a unique meteorological tradition. Groundhog Day, February 2, was the second-biggest subject, at 12% of the links. Many bloggers focused on an Associated Press video of the world's most famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil. According to Phil's handlers, the groundhog did not see target="_blank" his shadow when he emerged from the ground, a good omen that spring will arrive early this year. Third, at 7%, was a January 21 opinion column by the Washington Post's Dana Milbank declaring that he was refraining from writing about or mentioning Sarah Palin for the entire month of February. Several conservative bloggers charged Milbank with hypocrisy when a February 1 online post under his name appeared with the sentence, "I survived Day One of my February Sarah Palin moratorium...." (The Post later updated the page to say that the sentence in question was written by an editor and not Milbank, so his moratorium remained intact.) At No. 4, with 5%, was a BBC report about a drone flown by the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah over Israel in response to what it says was a violation of Lebanese airspace by an Israeli aircraft. That was followed (at 4%) by news that Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder was considering legal action against a local weekly publication, the Washington City Paper, for writing a critical story about his tenure as owner of a professional football team that posted a record of 10 wins and 22 losses in the last two years. (Snyder subsequently filed the suit.) On the social networking site Twitter, where the news agenda is often technology heavy, there was a more diverse mix last week with two top stories about health care and one about the death of a well-known composer.
The passing of composer John Barry, best known for his work on movie scores including several of the James Bond films, was No. 2, at 16%. Stories about Facebook constituted the third largest subject (at 11%) including a Wired story about two media artists who imported 250,000 publicly available Facebook profiles to a dating site to demonstrate potential dangers of social media and identity theft. Two stories about health care rounded out the top five topics last week. A BBC story about controversial plans to overhaul England's National Health Service was No. 4, at 6%. And news that a federal judge in Florida ruled that the new health care reform law was unconstitutional finished fifth, at 5%.
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.
From January 31-February 6, the Mideast saga, driven by televised images of the protests and power struggle in Egypt, filled 56% of the newshole studied by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Not only was that easily the biggest overseas story in a single week since PEJ began its News Coverage Index in January 2007. It registered as the fourth-biggest story of any kind—trailing only two weeks in the 2008 presidential campaign and the aftermath of the January 8, 2011 Tucson shooting spree. Until now, the biggest international story of any single week (43%) was the Iraq war from September 9-14, 2007. And most of that was driven by the domestic policy debate over the war—including General David Petraeus’ progress report to Congress and a speech by President George W. Bush. The Haiti earthquake that killed as many as an estimated quarter million people filled 41% of the newshole from January 11-17, 2010. The closest parallel to the Egyptian unrest last week in the last four years were the widespread protests that followed the disputed Iranian elections—and they accounted for only half as much coverage (28%) from June 15-21, 2009 as the Egyptian protests did last week. The biggest week of coverage of the war in Afghanistan in the past four years (27%) occurred from November 30-December 6, 2009 when President Obama announced a surge of 30,000 additional troops. Why has an event that has not involved U.S. troops or directly imperiled U.S. citizens generated significantly more attention than the country’s two wars? One major reason is the number of cameras and journalists (including network anchors) in the country transmitting such riveting scenes as last week’s video of men on camels attacking crowds of protestors in Cairo. Another is the high stakes for the U.S. in one of the world’s most volatile regions as it tries to balance a strategic alliance with President Hosni Mubarak and support of pro-democracy protestors. A third factor may be uncertainty—will Mubarak resign and who will govern after him? And some of last week’s coverage was driven by the fact that the media themselves became part of the story—with journalists being harassed, attacked and detained amid the chaos. Even though the Obama Administration’s handling of the situation to date has not produced a major partisan battle in Washington, the story still devoured 84% of the airtime studied on the ideological cable talk shows—which are often crucial to keeping a story soaring at high altitude. Indeed some of those hosts last week were more willing than many public officials to voice strong opinions on the subject. Every other news event last week was overwhelmed. The No. 2 story, well back at 8%, was the blizzard that pounded the Midwest, making this the second week in a row that bad winter weather was among the top five stories. Next at 7%, was coverage of the health debate, fueled by the news that a Florida judge had ruled the new legislation was unconstitutional. The economy followed, as the No. 4 story at 5%, followed by continuing coverage of the recent Arizona shootings, at 2%. The Protests in Egypt—Week II With coverage of the Mideast unrest nearly tripling—up to 56% from 20% the previous week—it was easily the No. 1 story in all five media sectors studied. Every day seemed to offer a new development that helped fuel coverage.
On February 1, it was the size and intensity
of the demonstrations that drew notice. “Thousands upon thousands of
demonstrators converged Tuesday on Tahrir Square, and spilled over onto the
streets that flow into it,” the Washington Post reported. “And as more
thousands kept pouring in throughout the day, it was clear that a contagion had
set in. This was a place to be, this was a moment not to be afraid of...”
That same day, there was another significant development with President Mubarak announcing, as AFP reported, that “he will not seek re-election in September, but reject[ing] demands that brought a million people on to the streets around the country that he quit immediately.” On February 2, the major news was the sudden and ominous eruption of violence. “Central Cairo dissolved into open street-warfare today,” noted correspondent Jeffrey Brown on the PBS NewsHour. “Supporters of President Hosni Mubarak fought protesters with bricks, firebombs and machetes…Officials reported three people killed and more than 600 injured...” At that point, part of the story became journalists in peril. CNN’s Anderson Cooper told viewers: “We have been advised to actually turn off our lights, get down on the floor and try to barricade ourselves in the area that we're in.” Fox News correspondent Greg Palkot provided his account of how pro-government protestors “hit us with their open hands, their fists, sticks, bars, rocks, whatever was around, especially aiming at our heads. They grabbed us and punched us.” On February 3, came word that, with the security situation deteriorating, network anchors Katie Couric (CBS) and Brian Williams (NBC) had left Cairo where they had been broadcasting. The next day, an Obama press availability seemed to ratchet the pressure up on old ally Mubarak, when the U.S. president said that it’s “clear that there needs to be a transition process [in Egypt] that begins now.” By the weekend, the story shifted again, this time toward efforts at substantive meetings between Egyptian opposition figures and representatives of the government. But part of the media narrative also purveyed a growing sense that, despite the momentum of the protestors, an early or clear outcome was far from certain. “The quick ouster of Tunisia's president fed expectations that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak could fall just as fast, but the crackdown on anti-government protesters and journalists in Egypt last week was a sobering reminder that regime change is rarely easy and the path of mass movements hard to predict,” stated a January 6 Washington Post story. Generally, international topics get relatively limited attention from the cable talkers. So do issues that don’t produce partisan Beltway battle lines. But in this case the talk culture was consumed with the story. And while much of official Washington was more muted, or even quietly supportive of the president, TV hosts were engaged in a more ideological critique.
CNN’s Eliot Spitzer sparred with a radical Islamic
activist, telling Imam Anjem Chourdary that the Mideast protestors want jobs and freedom, “but they are not embracing your
form of theocracy in any way, shape, or form.”
On MSNBC, liberal Rachel Maddow criticized the U.S. track record: although America says it “is willing to support regime change in Egypt [it] is only in the context of the fact that the United States has made the Mubarak presidency possible in so many ways over the past 30 years. Will the Arab world ever care what we have to say anymore about strongmen given our record of propping them up?” On the other side of the spectrum, conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity warned that the Obama Administration’s support for the pro-democracy protestors could usher in the ascent of the Muslim Brotherhood. That “could mean another Iranian-style theocracy,” Hannity added. “I don’t sense the president has an awareness of just how dangerous this group can be.” With reporters in the field covering the situation on the ground and commentators in the studio chewing over events each night last week, there was no respite in the coverage. For the first half of the week (Monday through Wednesday), the story accounted for 56% of the overall newshole. From Thursday through Sunday, it filled 57%. The Rest of the Week’s News The week’s No. 2 story, at 8%, was the winter wallop that hit the Midwest particularly hard, dumping nearly two feet of snow in Chicago and closing schools there for the first time in 12 years. As is often the case, dramatic weather stories get the most play on broadcast news and last week, they accounted for 21% of the airtime studied on the network newscasts and morning shows. The health care debate, driven by Federal Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling in Florida against the new health care law, was next at 7%. This topic was particularly popular among the radio talk show hosts, who devoted 32% of the airtime studied to health care last week. That stands in contrast to the cable talkers who were absorbed with the Middle East and only devoted 7% of their airtime to health care. Coverage of the economy, at only 5% of the newshole, plunged from 13% the previous week. The biggest storyline focused on new numbers showing the unemployment rate dropping to 9% even as the economy added a disappointing 36,000 jobs. The aftermath of the Arizona shootings, which had riveted the country, fell to just 2% of coverage studied. Last week’s major newsmaker was the decision by Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly, to return to the space program.
Newsmakers
of the Week
From January 31-February 6, beleaguered Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was the most dominant figure in the news. He was a prominent newsmaker in 8% of all the week’s stories, a major jump from the previous week when he registered at 1%. (To be a dominant newsmaker, a figure must be included in at least 50% of a story.) Barack Obama, normally the top newsmaker, was No. 2 last week, at 6%. The next two newsmakers were Mark Kelly (2%) and his wife, Gabrielle Giffords (1%). They were followed in the No. 5 slot by Judge Roger Vinson (also at 1%), who ruled the new health care law unconstitutional last week. 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. Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
Last week was one of those that highlighted the divergent news agendas of the mainstream and online media. While two stories—unrest in the Middle East and President Obama’s State of the Union address—dominated coverage in the traditional press, bloggers and Twitter users opted for very different topics. In the blogosphere, the No. 1 linked-to story from January 24-28 was Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ failure to report his wife’s earnings over a five-year period, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Drawing 14% of the links, bloggers were highly critical of Thomas, accusing him of a double standard after the watchdog group Common Cause charged that he had failed to report his wife’s earnings of $680,000 from the conservative Heritage Foundation. Even though Thomas later admitted the error and amended his financial statements, critics took joy in needling the controversial judge. Another major story, with 11% of the links, involved U.S. economics. Most of the attention focused on a Washington Post report claiming Obama was unlikely to support his deficit commission’s controversial proposals regarding Social Security—such as raising the retirement age or reducing the program’s benefits. Bloggers gave more of a mixed verdict here. Many supported Obama’s view for both political and policy reasons. Others, however, criticized Obama for being unwilling to take important steps to secure the country’s economic future. Also at 11% was a Los Angeles Times story about two teenagers found dead in an apartment alongside an empty can of the caffeinated alcohol drink known as Four Loko, which has been banned in some states. Although it was not immediately clear if the drink was the cause of the deaths, concerns about its safety were enough to raise questions about the role it may have played. At No. 4, with 10%, was a BBC story about a polar bear that swam for more than nine days in search of sea ice. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey suggested that this journey provided more evidence of global climate change. The fifth story (at 9%), was another BBC report, this one about the firing of British sports announcer Andy Gray due to allegations of sexist and improper behavior. The turmoil in Egypt did not register as a major social media topic in the sample studied by PEJ last week. It did, however, rank as the seventh-biggest story among users of Twitter, a platform that has been extensively used to share information about such events as the 2009 protests in Iran and the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Despite attempts by the Egyptian government to block access to Twitter within their country, users posted images, links, and other pieces of information about the uprising from the outside. In the blogosphere, interest in the situation in Egypt seemed to pick up by the weekend, a period not included in this report.
Other stories linked-to on Twitter last week involved the web and technology, including disagreement over the value of news and information online. The No. 1 story (14% of the news links) was a TechCrunch piece by Paul Carr defending AOL against criticism in a recent New Yorker story that the company relies too heavily on technology and not enough on journalists, resulting in poor news quality and selection. Carr wrote that AOL’s news judgment is no different than other major internet news sources because most consumers want dumbed-down content about salacious subjects.
The second-largest subject (at 13%) was a follow-up to a story that was popular the previous week. On January 21, Google announced that the removal of the RSS reader option from Gmail was a mistake. That came after users voiced their displeasure with the action, and Google’s subsequent response proved to be another example of the impact that an explosion of opinion online can have on a major company. At No. 3 (12%) was news that a team of British engineers are planning to send a mobile phone into space to see if today's products are able to function in such an environment. A TechCrunch report about Obama’s decision to appoint General Electric’s chief executive, Jeff Immelt, as chairman of his panel of economic advisors was the fourth subject at 11%. The author, Lora Kolodny, wondered if Immelt’s support for carbon cap-and-trade was a positive sign for proponents of green technology. And the arrest of five men between the ages of 15 and 26 for launching web attacks in support of WikiLeaks against companies such as PayPal, Mastercard and Amazon was fifth at 10%. Thomas and Disclosure News that Clarence Thomas had failed to include more than half a million dollars of his wife’s income on financial disclosure statements brought charges of hypocrisy. “Judicial dirtbaggery at its finest and more evidence that highly ranked government officials play by a separate rule book,” complained Jim at Zwinglius Redivivus. “A book that, were you and I to live by, we would find ourselves in serious hot water.” “Thomas has argued in the past that he believes the requirement to disclose large political contributions are unconstitutional,” pointed out Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger. “It looks like he has decided that his personal beliefs are more important than federal law, and he's going to hide some of his family finances regardless of what the law says.”* Some wondered if this error was intentional. “I actually didn't know that ‘the Supreme Court is 'the only judicial body in the country that is not governed by a set of judicial ethical rules. It appears that they could use one,” wrote microdot at the Brain Police. “I mean it's difficult to see how this could possibly be an inadvertent omission by Clarence Thomas. Seriously, did he forget Ginni was his wife?” And a few bloggers used the opportunity to criticize the conservative Thomas, with references to his highly charged confirmation hearings. “Thomas has never been one to honor ethics,” asserted David M. Pittle at Marine Progressive. “He harassed women, took bribes of gifts from corporate sources…and now has failed to report income from a source that clearly biases his decisions.” “My accountant says if you make less than $150,000 a year you can forget about filing taxes this year. Amateur porn enthusiast and professional legal guy Clarence Thomas says it's o.k.,” declared Kirby at I Make No Promises. “And really, who knows more about the law than a Supreme Court Justice? No one, that's who.” Social Security A passionate online discussion was sparked by a Washington Post article—leading up to Obama’s January 25 State of the Union address—predicting that Obama would not endorse his deficit commission’s recommendations to either raise the retirement age or reduce Social Security benefits. Some bloggers applauded Obama’s reported reluctance to alter the program because it was good policy. “At a time when people are hurting economically, when food prices are rising, housing prices continue to tank and gas prices going through the roof, lowering social security benefits shouldn’t be an option. It really shouldn’t EVER be an option,” declared Mountain Sage. “The government needs to take its greedy paws out of the social security piggy bank and make sure it’s solvent.” Others supported it for political reasons. “Preserving Social Security is one of those rare instances where the right thing to do and the popular thing to do intersect, even 60% of Republicans don't want to see cuts,” wrote Desperado at The Daily Hurricane. “Making that contrast clear also has strong political advantages for a president with an eye on re-election.” Critics, however, argued that Obama was ignoring economic realities and afraid to make tough choices. “President Obama claims to be worried about the deficit, but when faced with a serious opportunity to do something about, kicks the can down the road,” stated Where Are My Keys? “Very soon, someone has to give this Country a dose of ‘tough love’, for the good of its citizens. At this point in his Presidency, Obama is choosing not to be that guy. He's instead making the choice to play politics, and trying and get re-elected.” “This is the public policy equivalent of a gangrene patient opting to not take antibiotics and other nutritional improvements,” analogized Not a Potted Plant. “Social Security won't get better on its own. The budget won't get better on its own. We have to cut, something, at some point. The sooner we do it, the less painful it's going to be.” YouTube The most viewed news clip on YouTube last week was the most recent episode of the first-person YouTube series The Philip Defranco show. The weblogs, known for their jump cuts and close-up view of its host, consist of Defranco’s take on current events including politics and pop culture. The second most viewed video was a segment from the June 9, 2010, edition of Glenn Beck’s Fox News Channel show. The 22-second clip includes Beck’s discussion of radicals when he says, “They believe and have called for a revolution. You're going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you."
The clip has been spread widely across the web in the wake of the January 8 shootings in Arizona which severely injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, killed six others and sparked a national conversation about vitriolic political rhetoric. Some liberals have decried the language used by conservative talk-show hosts such as Beck and see this statement as an example of what they call “hate speech.” (A transcript of the entire show is available here.) Beck and his supporters claim that the clip has been taken out of context and that he was warning against radical leftists who have called for a violent revolution.
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.
By the time it was over, events in the Middle East—most notably the Egyptian uprising against President Hosni Mubarak—was the No. 1 story from January 24-30. They accounted for 20% of the week’s coverage according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Coverage of the State of the Union speech, and the reaction to it, trailed closely behind, filling 17% of the coverage studied by PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index. That was not what President Obama had planned. In the first three days of the week, his address accounted for much more of the media narrative (28%) than it would by week’s end. Much of the coverage of the speech featured post-mortems and an emerging consensus that it was centrist, careful and politically sound. (One poll, from CNN/Opinion Research, had 84% of the public offering either a very or somewhat a positive response.) Coverage of the rapidly spiraling events in the Mideast began slowly, but picked up momentum as crowds of Egyptian protestors swelled in defiance of the government. As the week went on, coverage turned more U.S.-centric, as pundits and analysts debated the potential impact the instability in Egypt would have here as well as the wise course of action for the Obama Administration. While attention to the Mideast upheaval in Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen and Egypt accounted for only 8% of the overall coverage early in the week, from January 27 through January 30 it skyrocketed to 36%. A third story generated significant attention last week as well—the U.S. economy, at 13% of the newshole. That narrative was fueled by a disquieting estimate from the Congressional Budget Office that the budget deficit in 2011 would reach $1.5 trillion. The week’s No. 4 story (at 4%) was a major midweek winter storm that roared along the East Coast, stranding rush-hour commuters in Washington and dumping another accumulation on already shell-shocked Boston. The fifth-biggest story is one rapidly moving off the media radar screen. The aftermath of the January 8 Tucson shootings that killed six and seriously wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords accounted for just 4% of the coverage last week. That is down dramatically from 17% the previous week and from a stratospheric 57% the week prior to that. The Week Part I—State of the Union The run-up to Obama’s January 25 speech—delivered in a political landscape dramatically altered by the mid-term elections—included previews of both the president’s remarks and the reaction of his political foes. On the January 25 Early Show, for example, CBS correspondent Chip Reid reported that the president will “call for new spending on education, roads, bridges, and the environment. The president will call them investments, but Republicans will say it is exactly the kind of government spending they were elected to cut.” After the hour-long speech—in which Obama hammered away at the U.S. “winning the future” with a forward-looking economy centered on technology, research and education—many of the media reviews were respectful while suggesting the speech itself was more strategic than artful.
A January 26 story on the AOL News site declared that the State of the Union “neither soared nor stumbled…But it did succeed in presenting the president as the centrist he is, picking up on some Republican ideas while giving what in long stretches sounded like a U.S. Chamber of Commerce speech encouraging major investment in clean technology.” The speech left columnists on the New York Times Op Ed Pages debating how centrist the President really was. Conservative columnist David Brooks characterized the address as “modest more than moderate. The three things the president emphasized were all worthy, important policies that have significant bipartisan support: spending for basic research, education reform and infrastructure spending.” His liberal colleague Gail Collins, somewhat grudgingly asserted, “Never have I beheld so much reasonable moderation.” A day later, however, coverage of the speech had plummeted. On Thursday January 27, it accounted for less than 5% of the day’s coverage. And some of that focused on Sarah Palin’s critique of the address and in particular, Obama’s invoking of the phrase “Sputnik moment” to describe the country’s current challenges. (The Soviets’ 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite at the height of the Cold War triggered a space race and a major technological push by the U.S.)
Palin took issue with the use of Sputnik asserting that USSR “also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.” Some commentators, noting that the collapse did not occur until 34 years later, questioned Palin’s reading of history. That included CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien, who said, “If she literally means that Sputnik bankrupted the Soviet Union and led to the collapse, then, well, that makes no sense at all, because Sputnik went up, if you will remember, October 4, 1957. The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991.” The Week Part II – Egypt Explodes The Obama speech disappeared from coverage in part because attention to the turmoil in the Middle East increased dramatically. Unrest in the region accounted for only about 1% of the newshole studied on Monday January 24, but coverage grew with each successive day until the story accounted for about a quarter of the newshole on January 27 and nearly half of the newshole on Friday January 28. From the entire week of January 24-30, the unrest was the No. 1 story in three out of the five media sectors that PEJ studies. It generated the most coverage on cable news (36% of airtime studied for the week overall), with the screen often filled with scenes of street protests and scattered violence in Egypt. It was a moment reminiscent of an earlier era of cable news, where breaking events from distant lands were the news. Last week’s Mideast narrative began, as it turns out, with stories about other hotspots in the volatile region. On January 24, some coverage focused on unrest in Tunisia, where an uprising had forced the ouster of President Zine el Abidine ben Ali on January 14. Indeed, events in Tunisia were seen as the kindling that helped spark the populist fire in Egypt.
Another story that day was Al Jazeera’s unearthing of documents indicating that the Palestinians were prepared to make major concessions to the Israelis during unsuccessful 2008 peace talks. But by mid-week, the narrative shifted definitively to Egypt—a strategically crucial country whose unpopular President, Hosni Mubarak, has presided over a tepid peace with Israel and functioned as a significant regional ally of the U.S. On January 26, the New York Times reported on a government crackdown on the growing protests with the announcement of “a new ban on public gatherings [while] sending police equipped with clubs, tear gas and armored carriers against small groups that defiantly gathered in Cairo to oppose the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak. The Associated Press, citing unnamed Egyptian security officials, reported that 860 protesters had been arrested since major protests began Tuesday morning.” While events on the streets of Egypt were still unfolding and volatile, the narrative in the American news media was already turning inward. By Thursday, the conversation began to gravitate to the implications of the situation for the U.S. as the administration struggled to find a balance between support for pro-democracy protestors and it strategic relationship with the Mubarak government. Mideast analyst Graeme Bannerman, tried to summarize the conundrum facing the United States during the January 27 PBS NewsHour when he stated, “if you have truly popular governments in [that region], you're likely to elect people who are much less sympathetic to the United States, which creates a whole series of political problems for us...Now, do we want reform in Egypt? Absolutely. That's in our interest…But how you get there is very difficult.” The next night on MSNBC’s Hardball, political commentator Howard Fineman put it in more political terms in the wake of a White House warning to Egypt about using force against peaceful protestors. That message might have reflected the President’s values, Fineman speculated. “Now, the question is going to be, if we end up with the [Islamist] Muslim Brotherhood in charge of Egypt, then the president is going to be called to account for the commitment he made.” By the weekend, the U.S. media were conveying a stronger sense that the protests might ultimately doom the current government. “Mubarak’s Grip Tested,” blared the page 1 headline in the January 30 Washington Post, which reported that Egyptian soldiers sent to the streets had actually “flashed peace signs and smiled approvingly as demonstrators chanted ‘Down with Mubarak!’” The Rest of the Week’s News Coverage of the state of the U.S. economy surged, jumping to 13% from 8% the previous week. The leading storyline, accounting for about one-third of the economic coverage, involved the national debt and budget deficit. And the big newsmaker there was the CBO estimate of the $1.5 trillion deficit in 2011. The fourth-biggest story (at 4%) was the winter storm that hit the East Coast last week—an event that generated the most coverage (7%) in online news. That was followed, also at 4%, by the aftermath of the Tucson shootings. What coverage there was last week focused largely on alleged shooter Jared Loughner’s not guilty plea in federal court and Gabrielle Giffords’ transfer to a rehabilitation center, another sign of her improving condition. But after the shooting saga overwhelmingly dominated the news from January 10-16 and still registered as the top story from January 17-23, last week’s lack of coverage suggests the story has now moved to the media back burner. But even as the media lost interest in the Arizona story, the public remained very engaged. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, significantly more respondents said they were following the shooting saga “very closely” than were devoting that level of attention to events in Egypt.
Newsmakers of the Week As is typically the case, President Obama topped the headlines from January 24-30, appearing as a dominant newsmaker in 14% of the week’s stories. That represents the most coverage of the president so far in 2011 and a substantial jump from 8% the previous week. (To be a dominant newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a story. Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was the No. 2 newsmaker, registering in 4% of the stories. Emanuel’s bid to become Chicago’s next mayor was kept alive last week by an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that he qualified as a legal resident of that city. Tucson shooting Jared Loughner, with his not guilty plea, emerged as the No. 3 newsmaker (2%) while his victim, Congresswoman Giffords, was next, also at 2%. Former South African President Nelson Mandela, 92, who was hospitalized and released later in the week following a respiratory infection, was the fifth-biggest newsmaker, at 1%.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 a snowstorm that disrupted PEJ’s satellite reception, some television programs from the evening of Wednesday, January 26, were not included in this week’s sample. Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
For the week of January 17-21, fully 17% of the news links on blogs went to a Washington Post op-ed by Republican Senator John McCain commending President Obama for his speech at the January 12 memorial service for those killed and injured in the Arizona shootings according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
In a conversation dominated by liberals and moderates, those bloggers overwhelmingly praised McCain’s piece for showing what a reasonable discourse that reached across political lines would look like. Many also expressed surprise and respect for McCain, who they felt reverted to an earlier phase of his career when he was known for his independence and willingness to compromise. The other major political subject that gained substantial interest in the blogosphere last week (the No. 3 story at 15%), was a piece by conservative columnist George Will, which suggested confrontation more than cooperation. In it, Will asserted that Congress has bequeathed much of its lawmaking power to the Presidency and to other government agencies in recent years. The new 112th Congress, Will believes, needs to reassert its position and stand up to Obama’s agenda. Conservative bloggers strongly backed Will’s column, although there was some skepticism about whether the Republicans in Congress would be willing to take on the President in this way. Will’s work has become a popular catalyst for conversation online recently. Last week marks the fourth time in the last two months when one of his columns has been among the top five subjects linked-to on blogs in the PEJ analysis. This trend suggests that even though newspaper circulation is declining, well-known columnists can still be influential in political conversations in both the traditional and online media. Two other top stories on blogs last week involved major domestic issues. The fourth-biggest story was health care at 14%, a subject that has not been among the top topics online in almost four months. Most of the attention focused on a new government study written about in a Washington Post story showing that as many as 129 million Americans under the age of 65 have preexisting medical problems that are red flags for health insurers. The economy was the fifth-largest subject at 8% as bloggers linked to reports about the size of the U.S. government’s debt, now at $14 trillion, and global efforts to slow down rising food costs. The No. 2 story last week, at 16%, was back by popular demand. Bloggers linked to the same BBC interview with Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer that made the list of top stories the previous week. Bloggers focused on Ballmer’s hint that Microsoft will support the use of Kinect motion controllers with PCs sometime soon.
On Twitter, Apple was once again the leading subject; 8% of the links from the social networking site focused on the subject. The attention was split between two stories regarding the business aspects of the company. One was the impact of CEO Steve Jobs’ indefinite leave of absence for medical reasons; the other was a report about sales of the iPad, which surpassed the expectations of business analysts.
The introduction of the logo for HTML5, the newest revision of the web programming language, was the second-largest subject with 9% of the links. And another technology story came next: The outcry over Google’s decision to replace the link to its RSS reader product on the top of its Gmail homepage was the No. 3 story, also at 9%. That was followed (at 8%) by a blog post from Greenpeace’s Dr. Paul Johnston arguing for more action on climate change and the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions in light of recent dramatic weather events. The fifth-biggest news story on twitter last week (at 7%) was a CNN report about one of the largest single-day operations taken against the Mafia stretching across Italy, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island, resulting in the arrests of 127 people accused of organized crime activities. McCain’s Praise for Obama After John McCain wrote a column commending his 2008 presidential rival’s speech at the Tucson memorial, many liberal and moderate bloggers thought it represented the less ideological McCain who had been known as a maverick before growing more vocally conservative in recent years. “These words echo the moderate, sane McCain of the distant past, a time before he became the angry ‘Gran Torino’ guy capable of only shouting ‘get off my lawn!’” wrote EJ Perkins at The Portal. “Is the senior senator from Arizona finally walking back from the brink of political oblivion? I hope so.” “In the blogosphere you’re apt to be scorned if you choose a reflective approach over snarky expressions of distilled cynicism in your posts, but once in awhile we need to rise above our prejudices and give credit where it’s due,” admitted Virginia Bergman at Katalusis. “I appreciated President Obama’s speech in Tucson the other day, and I likewise offer a pat on the back to John McCain for his response in today’s Washington Post.” “McCain indicated that he knew the President to be both a patriot and a legitimate leader,” posted Sharon Dooley at Politics Plus. “On the other hand, Sarah Palin, in a message that was tone deaf to the pain of a nation, chose the day of mourning to appear in a slickly scripted taped video to address the criticism she had received…Ultimately, she waited too long to speak out and sent the wrong message.” Others expressed a guarded optimism that we might see a change in tone in Washington. “I thought McCain showed a lot of class here,” lauded J.S. at The Adventures of Steanso. “I also hope that there's some substance to the idea that these shootings could represent some sort of a turning point. I'm not saying I think it's likely, but I remain sort of hopeful.” Although in the minority, there were a few conservatives who viewed McCain’s actions much differently. “Barf Alert: McCain Says Obama is a Patriot,” read the headline of a post on The Freedom Fighter’s Journal. George Will and the New Congress While McCain and some bloggers were interested in finding common ground, George Will and his online supporters were focused on a very different tack. To them, a key priority was having the newly empowered Republicans in Congress challenge executive authority. Debby Durkee at Politically Empowered, for example, strongly supported Will’s thesis. “The executive branch has, through the years, increased its power because of a lazy Congress unwilling to do the hard work of writing laws and performing the necessary oversight of the executive branch…Your representatives need to be reminded that the people’s power rests with the legislature, and we fully intend to keep it.” Some, however, weren’t sure if Republicans were up for the task. “Will’s point is clear and good,” agreed Clifton Chadwick. “The big worry is whether the Republicans understand it and have the cojones to do what they must do. Frankly, I am nervous.” “The country is watching to see if this Congress has the seriousness of conviction to follow through on the rhetoric upon which they were elected,” added Fred Unger at Emerging Consensus. Not surprisingly, liberals did not share Will’s perspective. “You almost want to crack George's cranium open just to see what's going on in there,” wrote A Spork in the Drawer after criticizing Will’s historical descriptions of progressives. “One has to wonder if he's deliberately dishonest or genuinely believes what he says. Actually, given George's long record of dishonesty…it's safe to conclude that George Will knows what he's doing.” YouTube The most viewed news video on YouTube last week was of the dangerous January floods throughout large portions of Australia. According to reports, more than 17,000 homes lost electricity and the total cost of the damage could reach $2 billion. Taken on January 10 from the second floor of an office building in Toowoomba, the footage illustrates the scope of the flood waters and the extent of the damage. Cars are swept up in the powerful current while streets and buildings are flooded. The text that accompanies the YouTube video makes an appeal for donations to various relief efforts. This video is a good example of how the power of images spread throughout the internet can deliver the impact of tragedies to places far from the event, even without coverage from 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.
From January 17-23, the rampage that killed six and wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others filled 17% of the newshole studied by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That is down more than two-thirds from the 57% the story generated the previous week when the country was still reeling from the shock of events, according to PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index. Even so, that decline in week-to-week coverage was not as large as it has been with some other major news events. The mass shooting that claimed 32 victims at Virginia Tech in April 2007, for example, accounted for 51% of the newshole in the first week and plunged to only 7% the next. One reason the Tucson story may be more lasting is the recovery of Giffords herself. Another may be that the incident has triggered a discussion about the tone of public discourse—a debate political pundits are eager to have. Last week’s coverage of the Tucson tragedy indeed was focused largely on those two storylines— the Congresswoman’s continuing recovery and the continuing debate over vitriolic rhetoric in public life. That stands in contrast to the previous week (January 10-16) when a series of storylines—ranging from the rhetoric debate and President Obama’s speech to coverage of vigils and the alleged shooter Jared Loughner—all commanded significant attention. The week’s No. 4 story, the debate over health care reform (8% of the newshole), also featured a connection to the Tucson saga. As the Republican-controlled House held what appears to be a largely symbolic vote to repeal the Obama-backed law, coverage focused on whether the events in Arizona would soften the tone of debate over the issue. The second-biggest story last week, at 11%, was the Washington summitry between Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao. Many of the media post-mortems concluded that the meeting did not produce dramatic breakthroughs but may have helped smooth over rough spots in relations between the two nations. The No. 3, story, at 8%, was the U.S. economy, a subject that has seen diminished coverage in recent weeks given the media attention devoted to the new Congress and the Giffords shooting. Rounding out the roster of top stories was news of the Obama administration itself (3%), with coverage driven by a recent rise in the president’s job approval ratings. The Tucson Tragedy Four of the five media sectors last week focused on the Arizona shootings ahead of any other subject last week—newspapers (13% of the newshole studied), online (14%), network news (20%) and cable news (21%). It was the No. 2 story in the radio sector, at 17%.
About three-quarters of last week’s shooting coverage was devoted to just two storylines. The status of Giffords’ recovery filled 38% and the polarized debate over political rhetoric accounted for one-third (33%) of the coverage studied. For some in the media, there was continued reflection over the burst of initial coverage that in some cases, linked conservative rhetoric to the shootings. In his column, New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane wrote that, “the intense focus on political conflict—not just by The Times—detracted from what has emerged as the salient story line, that of a mentally ill individual with lawful access to a gun.” Brisbane’s critique was picked up by the Fox News Channel and Sean Hannity. Sarah Palin continued to be a major newsmaker in the Arizona coverage, this time due largely to a January 17 appearance on Hannity’s Fox News Channel show. Palin defended her use of the term “blood libel” to describe efforts to link her rhetoric to the violence and declared, “I am not going to sit down and I’m not going to shut up.” She also said she and her children had received death threats themselves. And in many quarters of the ideological media, the battle over the impact of harsh words continued almost unabated last week, despite Obama’s call for more civility during his January 12 speech. On MSNBC’s liberal prime-time block, host Chris Matthews criticized conservative language, declaring on January 18 that, “Long before Tucson, we warned about all the loose talk about guns and hatred directed toward public officials… We‘ll show you what we said… and remind all if Jared Loughner didn’t connect the dots between hateful rhetoric and a politician, who’s so sure someone else won’t.”
On The good news last week came on the medical front where the steadily progressing Giffords took a major step forward on January 21, leaving the hospital in Tucson on her way to a rehab hospital in Houston, Texas. The most dramatic of those words came from Giffords’ husband Mark Kelly. “I'm extremely hopeful that Gabby's going to make a full recovery," Kelly said, quoted in USA Today on January 21 and throughout much of the media. "I am extremely confident she will be…back at work very soon.” The Rest of the Week’s News The state visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao was the No. 2 story last week (11%). Coverage was remarkably consistent across all five media sectors where it ranged from 9% in network news to 12% on cable news. Given recent strains in the Sino-U.S. relationship, a substantial portion of the coverage was devoted to summing up both the symbolism and substance of what was accomplished. “Chinese President Hu Jintao's just-concluded summit with President Obama was a win both for the Communist Party and for Hu himself,” Washington Post reported the January 21. The meeting sent “a not-so-subtle message that China is now the United States' equal on the world stage. For the Obama administration, the meeting went smoothly and yielded some progress on difficult issues.” Next, at 8%, came news about the U.S. economy, which last week focused most prominently on problems facing cash-strapped state governments across the country, a storyline that accounted for about one-third of the overall economic coverage. Also at 8% was the renewed debate over health care reform, a topic that generated the most attention in the two sectors with political talk shows—cable (15%) and radio, where it was No. 1, at 18%. The big newsmaker was the vote—which passed 245-189 along almost strict party lines—to repeal the current health care law. The Republican effort to reverse what they call “Obamacare” is widely seen as legislatively doomed by the Democratic-led Senate and Obama’s veto pen. But last week’s vote, which had been postponed in the wake of the Tucson shootings, was seen as a test of recent calls for more civility in policy debates. A Los Angeles Times story on the House floor debate last week reported that both sides had indeed taken “pains to control the heated rhetoric that accompanied passage of the law last year.” The fifth-biggest story, at 3%, focused on the White House and included some good news for Obama—some rising job approval numbers, which reached 54% in a Washington Post/ABC poll released last week.
Newsmakers of the Week Last week was a rare one in which the president was not the dominant newsmaker. Instead, recovering Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords topped the list from January 17-23, appearing as a prominent newsmaker in 9% of all the week’s stories—down slightly from 10% the previous week. Giffords husband, Mark Kelly was the No. 4 newsmaker, registering in 3% of the week’s stories. (To register as a dominant newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a story.) The second-leading newsmaker was President Obama, at 8%, up moderately from 6% the week before. And another world leader and one former leader rounded out the list of top five newsmakers. The No. 3 newsmaker, at 5%, was Chinese leader Hu Jintao while the fifth-biggest newsmaker (2%) was former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier. A quarter century after he fled that country amid an uprising, Duvalier returned unexpectedly to earthquake-ravaged Haiti on January 16, where he now faces corruption charges. 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. Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
From January 10-14, the tragic event received 57% of the news links on blogs, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. (In a clear indication of the international flavor of blogging, the last time a subject attracted more interest was May 10-14, 2010, when the UK elections generated 61% of the links.) The shooting story was also a major event in the mainstream media last week, where it filled a whopping 57% of the newshole. Earlier this week, PEJ produced a detailed look at both the mainstream media coverage of the event as well as the subjects and tone of the discussion on blogs and Twitter. To help examine the conversation about the shootings in social media, that report employed Crimson Hexagon, a technology that analyzes online media by identifying statistical patterns in the words used to express opinions on different topics. Among the key findings:
Other Top Stories among Bloggers While the events in Arizona far outpaced all other subjects, the next largest stories in the blogosphere were a mix of politics, celebrity, and technology. The No. 2 subject, with 15% of the week's links, was the violence in Zimbabwe that was blamed on followers of President Robert Mugabe. According to the BBC, the situation reached a crisis point amid escalating political violence. A video of a BBC interview with Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer was the third biggest story at 10%. The major piece of news from the interview was the hint that Microsoft will support the use of Kinect motion controllers with PCs in the near future. The news that soccer star David Beckham and his equally famous wife Victoria are expecting their fourth child was the fourth story last week, at 5%. And an interactive Los Angeles Times web page where visitors could try their own hand at trying to balance California's state budget was fifth, at 3%. The Business of Technology is Tops on Twitter On Twitter, last week, there was significant activity related to the shootings in Arizona as users shared their thoughts and spotlighted new developments. (See PEJ's analysis here). But the subject did not register as one of the top five stories in PEJ's NMI. This is because the NMI is based on a measurement of links to news stories as identified in the tracking site Tweetmeme, and most tweets about the shooting did not include links to news reports, but were rather an expression of ideas or retweets from other sources. The subjects on Twitter that generated the most news links last week were largely focused on the business aspects of technology as a number of these stories received virtually equal attention.
Business stories about Twitter itself were No. 2, also at 12%, including a report that the company's new CEO Dick Costolo has nailed down a long-term vision for the site and a story that the company was considering a move of their headquarters to Brisbane, California. Financial problems for MySpace, which have led to a 47% reduction in staffing, were the third- largest subject, also at 12%. That was followed (12%) by an opinion piece by Wired's Ryan Singel applauding Twitter's response to a court order from the U.S. government in the investigation into the WikiLeaks scandal. Twitter challenged the court order and, in doing so, stood up for the user according to Singel. Stories about Apple were fifth, at 10%, led by a piece by Mashable's Ben Parr predicting that even though Verizon is about to end AT&T's exclusive deal with the iPhone, it will not be the major blow to AT&T's business that many are predicting. YouTube Four of the five top news videos on YouTube last week were the same as the previous week. To see the list and view the BBC's footage of polar bears playing with spy cameras, click here.
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. |
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After several weeks of being overshadowed by Mideast turmoil, domestic policy and politics returned to the news with a vengeance last week.
In a very rare confluence of events, the same subject led the conversation on both blogs and Twitter last week. And voices from both ends of the political spectrum were actually in agreement.
The third story, at 10%, was a Wired 
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The top story (at 23%) was an 
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registered as the biggest international story in the past four years—surpassing
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