News Index
For the week of July 4-8, fully 53% of the news links on Twitter were about the scandal, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. This was more attention in a single week than any topic on Twitter in the past 10 months. And it registered the sixth-biggest subject overall since PEJ began monitoring Twitter in July 2009. The episode unfolded when employees of Murdoch's News of the World tabloid were accused of hacking the cell phones of a number of people including the victims of terrorist attacks, dead soldiers, and a 13-year-old girl who was abducted and killed. Amid a political outcry and the launching of investigations, Murdoch quickly shuttered that paper and on July 13 with the scandal widening, his News Corp. dropped its $12 billion bid to take over British Sky Broadcasting. Twitter users followed a number of different aspects of the story last week, from the accusations that the tabloid hacked the phones of the families of victims of the July 7, 2005 subway attacks in London to the word that the News of the World was closing in response to the scandal. As with most subjects on Twitter, the majority of posts simply linked to a relevant news article without comment. However, a number of people added remarks criticizing the paper and the Murdoch news empire in general. "How about people boycott the NOTW [News of the World] indefinitely?" tweeted Ian Roullier. "It's not like anyone will learn any less by not having it in their lives." The tabloid controversy registered as the No. 3 story in the mainstream press last week (6% of the newshole according to PEJ's News Coverage Index). But that was far from the intensity seen on Twitter.
In the blogosphere, the No. 1 subject last week-at almost a
quarter of the news links on blogs, 24%-was the Iraq war. Bloggers focused on a
report
that the White House was preparing to keep as many as 10,000 troops in that
country after the end of the year in order to prevent violence that might
result from a complete withdrawal. Previously, President Obama said he would
abide by a 2008 agreement that only about 200 troops would remain in Iraq after
2011 as advisors. Iraq has been of significant interest to bloggers in recent weeks, even as it has fallen under the radar of most other media. Last week marked the second time in less than a month that the war was the top subject on blogs. From June 13-17, the outrage over the discovery that billions of dollars intended for the country's post-war reconstruction were missing was the leading subject, generating a whopping 54% of the links. This past week, bloggers disagreed about whether the decision to keep troops in Iraq was the correct move. But most of the comments came from conservatives who criticized President Obama for breaking his pledge to withdraw all troops by the end of 2011. News of the World Hacking Scandal On Wednesday, July 6, the day before the six-year anniversary of the 7/7 terrorist attacks in Great Britain, the BBC reported that the News of the World tabloid may have hacked phones belonging to bombing victims. This news, coming on the heels of the revelation that News of the World hacked the phone of murdered 13-year-old Milly Dowler, resulted in an overwhelming response on Twitter. Users overwhelmingly disparaged the actions attributed to the paper. "NotW phonehacking scandal continues: 7/7 victims said to have been targeted...Really, where do they draw the line?" wondered Tiffany Phan.* "Soon nothing will surprise me by what NOTW have done and that's a very bad place to be," admitted Emma Haslem." "In the most foetid nook of the ninth circle of Hell, there's a chemical toilet reserved for an editor's head," added Chris Miller. After the British paper The Independent summarized the growing crisis facing the tabloid and Rupert Murdoch's entire media empire, Twitterers turned their ire toward the prominent mogul himself. "Looks like Mr Murdoch is not having a great time!" cheered Clayton J. White. "Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Murdoch!" applauded Mad Masked Maiden. "Wrong to enjoy and exploit another families misery. But since the #NoW has done it 2 so many, I'm making an exception," wrote Spencer G. And the news that the paper was closing did not pacify these social media users. "News of the World to close amid hacking scandal...good riddance to bad rubbish!" wished Donna Abberley. "If those allegations of hacking are true, this is just a disgrace to #journalism," pronounced Micha Tobia. A number of people also linked to a Reuters column that quoted a lawyer, Mark Stephens, speculating that if Murdoch's tabloid is shut down, the company may not be obligated to retain documents related to criminal claims-even in cases that have already begun. If the tabloid is liquidated, Stephens claimed, it might be a victory for Murdoch because his company could destroy evidence that might further incriminate them. This possibility led to even more outrage. "Genius! By killing #NOTW Murdoch can legally destroy evidence of other potential crimes," responded Aymeric Beep. "Wow. Is the whole NOTW closure just a way to destroy the evidence? Orchestrated 'win' for us actually a win for Murdoch?" wondered Neville Doyle. Finally, a significant amount of attention was paid to a CNET story where Kevin Mitnick, a security consultant who previously spent time in jail for hacking, demonstrated how easy it is to hack someone's phone, an activity known as "phreaking." This tech-angle of the News of the World story led tweeters to warn others that this could happen to them. "Do you phreak? That's what they call hacking into cell phones. Why is it so easy?" questioned Celeste Headlee. "Hacking legend Kevin Mitnick's suggestion: change your mobile phone settings to require a PIN when checking voice mail," conveyed FC Research. "Are your security policies keeping up with the latest threats?...Phreaking can be prevented with simple security steps," warned Jeff Kramer. Rest of the News on Twitter Last week was an unusual one on Twitter. Instead of technology which often dominates, the top four stories dealt with international affairs-including the British tabloid episode. The No. 2 story was another British-focused issue, albeit one of a much different tone. The debate over the costs of social services in England received 8% of the news links. Users highlighted two specific BBC articles, one about a report by Labour MP Graham Allen which concluded that unless more money is spent to help children from deprived backgrounds, society will suffer "immense penalties." The other covered an independent report recommending individuals not have to pay more than £35,000 in their lifetime for social care, support given to the elderly and people with disabilities. Any costs over that amount, the report suggests, should be covered by the government. The No. 3 story (4%) was a Time magazine article about how Chilean President Sebastián Piñera-best known for his role in the rescue of 33 trapped miners last October-has lost popularity in recent months due largely to problems with the nation's education system. The execution of Mexican national Humberto Leal in Texas, despite attempts by the White House and Mexican authorities to get a last-minute reprieve, was the fourth-biggest story, at 3%. Leal had been convicted of raping and killing a girl in 1995. Only the No. 5 story, a report about how Facebook and Microsoft are working together to compete with Google (3%), involved social media and technology. Iraq A Los Angeles Times report indicating that the White House is preparing to keep as many as 10,000 troops in Iraq beyond the end of the year generated a strong reaction in the blogosphere. Some felt that a continued presence there was the right thing. "Frankly, I've always felt that keeping a permanent force in Iraq made sense and would protect US interests in the region," wrote Silvio Canto Jr. Others, even some who admitted to supporting the Iraq War when it began in 2003, questioned the current mission. "What we have today is a war-torn country that we are rebuilding. What we have is a country that we are pushing democracy on," explained Josh Arrowood. "Our foreign policy needs to be built completely on what is best for the United States...I am not sure leaving troops indefinitely and rebuilding does that." Most of the commentary, however, came from bloggers who chided the president for breaking a campaign pledge. "Obama promised to remove ALL troops from Iraq by the end of 2011?" wrote Gregor Mendel. "It was just another convenient lie...I think it shows just how much of a rookie Obama was and is. Experienced people would never make such a stupid and rash statement. But you fools did elect him." "Why would anyone believe anything he said?" asked Bill Roberts at Daily Brisk. "Every statement Obama makes has an expiration date," concluded Rob Port at Say Anything Blog. The Rest of the Week on Blogs Beyond the debate over troop strength in Iraq, bloggers focused on a variety of domestic issues last week. A government warning about the threat of terrorists surgically implanting explosives into people in an attempt to circumvent TSA screening procedures was the second-largest story, at 11%. Bloggers mocked the news as a ridiculous example of overreach by security officials. "Granny, if you thought your diaper was a problem, just wait," warned MaxRedline. "This is an agency that needs to be eliminated-they aren't pro-active, they're reactive. And to the detriment of all." "My country has gone absolutely, spectacularly, stark-raving mad, assaulting law-abiding travelers under the guise of protecting them," agreed Jennifer Abel at Ravings of a Feral Genius. The financial troubles facing the campaign of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich were third, at 8%. Fourth, at 6%, was the cleanup of an Exxon Mobile oil spill in Montana's Yellowstone River. And news that the Secret Service will investigate the hacking of Fox News' Twitter account that resulted in false postings that President Obama had been assassinated was fifth, at 4%. YouTube
The video, posted by Russia Today, shows a giant wall of dust which dramatically reduced visibility and grounded a number of airplanes. While sandstorms are not uncommon in Arizona this time of year, the size of this particular one was highly unusual. The No. 2 video featured the dramatic conclusion of the Casey Anthony murder trial, which was the second-largest news story in the mainstream media last week. The ABC News footage focused on Casey and her reaction while the verdicts were read by the trial clerk. Anthony was found not guilty on the most serious charge, first degree murder, which surprised many observers.
About the New Media Index 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.
Paul Hitlin and Sovini Tan, PEJ
Fueled by coverage of the high-stakes deficit negotiations, the economy accounted for 24% of the newshole last week, making it the No. 1 story from July 4-10, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That coverage was up from 19% the previous week and marked the third week in a row that the impasse over the deficit and debt ceiling has made the economy the No. 1 story. Last week, the deficit debate accounted for about two-thirds of the overall economy coverage and by week’s end, a flurry of optimism about a deal was replaced in the media narrative by the prospect of more deadlock. The murder trial of Casey Anthony, the Florida woman accused of killing her two-year-old daughter, made headlines last week with a not-guilty verdict that surprised many and provoked outbursts of public anger. The case was the No. 2 story, at 17% of the newshole. The dramatic conclusion of the trial, the ensuing analysis and finally, the sentencing, were given heavy play on television news. The case was the No. 1 story on both network news (18%) and cable news (38%), and proved to be a major boon for CNN’s sibling channel HLN, whose ratings spiked 1,700 percent on the afternoon of the trial’s conclusion. The intense interest in the Anthony case last week drove it far past other trials in terms of coverage of a verdict. Since January 2007 when PEJ began monitoring news, the next biggest verdict story was the conviction of presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the week of March 4-9, which accounted for 13% of the newshole. Libby was found guilty of lying to the FBI about his involvement in releasing classified information about covert CIA agent Valerie Wilson, aka Valerie Plame, to The New York Times. In a rare event, the media themselves became a major news subject last week when the British tabloid News of the World—part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire—became embroiled in a phone hacking scandal that included murder victims and the families of dead soldiers. It was the No. 3 story, at 6% of the newshole, as Murdoch shut down the News of the World amid speculation that fallout from the case could spread. The final launch of space shuttle Atlantis from the Kennedy Space, which prompted some nostalgia laden coverage, was No. 4 at 5%. The presidential campaign, which had been a mainstay of the news agenda for weeks, dropped to just 3% last week from 13% the previous week, registering as the No. 5 story. Most of the coverage was focused on the field of GOP hopefuls. Hopes for a Big Deficit Deal Drive Economic Coverage With the August 2 debt default deadline looming, coverage of attempts in Washington to solve the nation’s debt crisis intensified last week as the story followed a roller coaster trajectory of hope followed by deadlock.
The story was dominant news on the radio, accounting for
43% of the airtime studied. It was also the No. 1 story in newspapers (20%) and
online (17%). Both cable and network TV, which focused more heavily on the
Anthony trial, each had the economy as their No. 2 story.
Hope was in the air that perhaps this time, President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner could produce a major deficit-reducing solution—the so-called big deal—through a combination of tax loophole closures and changes to entitlement programs. But even before the compromise plan fell apart over the weekend, partisan voices in the mainstream media voiced their concerns. “Mr. President, let’s talk tonight. You can’t negotiate with these people. They’re not honest brokers. The Bush tax cuts are a big part of the reason why we’re in this financial hole,” pleaded liberal commentator Ed Schultz on his July 7 MSNBC program. “This is always the problem when we’re dealing with Democrats that are dishonest in their negotiations. They always promise the moon,” cautioned conservative Sean Hannity on his July 8 radio talk program.
The media portrayed the Obama and Boehner camps as serious
about the prospect of reaching agreement, despite howls of protest from their
respective bases. According to the Wall Street Journal on July 7, “President
Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner have upped the ante ahead of a
high-profile summit on deficit reduction Thursday, suggesting in talks that
they might tackle longtime taboos, including tax increases and Social Security
changes.” According to the Washington Post on July 10, Boehner “told Obama that their plan to ‘go big,’ in the speaker’s words, and forge a compromise that would save more than $4 trillion over the next decade had fallen victim to the toughest ideological issues: how to raise taxes and cut spending on popular health and retirement programs.” Casey Anthony Trial The denouement of a trial that had been closely followed by many for three years finally occurred on Tuesday, July 5. The not-guilty verdict for defendant Casey Anthony, who was cleared of murder, manslaughter and child negligence charges in the death of her young daughter Caylee, came as a shock to many in the media, and helped sustain high levels of coverage throughout the week. While the amount of attention peaked on Tuesday, it had not dropped significantly as late as Thursday.
CNN reporter Martin Savidge described what it was like being
in the courtroom when the verdict came down.
“We knew it was going to be extremely dramatic,” said Savidge, who described a pensive defense team, huddled around Anthony as if in anticipation of a guilty verdict. “But then comes the verdict, and it was a total shock… And that’s when you saw a complete turnaround, you no longer saw the trembling Casey, you saw a jubilant team. They came together as one, piling on, hugging one another and sobbing. Not elation, sobbing.” Some in the media did not hesitate to share their opinions about the defendant. Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly called Anthony “vile” on his July 5 program. On the same day HLN’s Nancy Grace, who perhaps more than anyone helped raise the case to national prominence, said that in response to the verdict, “devil is dancing.” Coverage continued to feed off the case with the July 7 sentencing—four years in prison, but most of it applied as credits for the time Anthony has already served—leaving analysts with more fodder to process on the air. As the public’s anger at the verdict made its way into the media narrative, CNN’s Anderson Cooper closed out the week on his July 8 program by imagining Anthony’s future. “A little more than a week from now, Casey Anthony will be getting out of jail. She’ll be walking free into a world in which millions of people know her name and know her story—people who believe rightly or wrongly how her murder trial should have ended instead of how it actually ended.” In that same program, one analyst offered that perhaps only plastic surgery and hair coloring could help Anthony hide from an angry public. The Rest of the Week’s News A media scandal, simmering for years, finally erupted last week when The News of the World—a British tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation—was found to have hacked into the mobile phone of a young murder victim back in 2006. The story quickly expanded as the scandal’s roots were revealed to run deep, exposing cozy relationships between the newspaper, British police, and the government. British police now have a list of some 4,000 potential News of the World targets that include celebrities, members of the royal family, politicians and other crime victims. The story garnered the most attention in the more internationally oriented online news sector, where it accounted for10% of the newshole. The launch of the space shuttle Atlantis last week went off without a hitch. And it was the momentous nature of the event that raised it to rank as the No. 4 news story last week. Many stories reflected on the bittersweet feeling of ending 30 years of space shuttle missions from NASA’s Kennedy Space Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Finally, several Republican candidates for president campaigned in key electoral states, attracting some media attention for their activities. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in particular drew notice for his criticism of Obama’s stewardship of the faltering economy. Newsmakers of the Week
Casey Anthony, the defendant in the high-profile murder
case, easily generated the most attention in the media last week. She was a
dominant newsmaker in 12% of all stories studied by PEJ from July 4-10. (To
register as a dominant newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a
story.)
Despite hosting his first ever “Twitter” town hall and leading a bipartisan debt summit, President Obama was relegated to No. 2 lead newsmaker status behind Anthony (8%), the same level of coverage as the week before. At No. 3 (2%) was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund head once favored to become France’s next president. Even as the woman who had accused Strauss-Kahn of rape was losing credibility due to inconsistencies in her story, a French writer filed assault charges against him on July 5, raising new uncertainties about his fate. At No. 4 and 5 (1% each) were the new British royal couple Prince William and Kate Middleton, whose travels throughout North America included numerous photo opportunities. 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 900 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. Jesse Holcomb of PEJ
From June 26 to July 1, fully one-third (33%) of the news links on blogs were about Bachmann, making her the No. 1 subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. And in a rare case of the same subject interesting both bloggers and Tweeters, the Minnesota Congresswoman was the No. 5 story on Twitter. Bachmann was also a major newsmaker in the mainstream press last week, where much of the coverage discussed her emergence as a significant force in the GOP field. But bloggers and Twitter users eschewed that horserace angle and instead largely criticized her for what they saw as gaffes and hypocrisy. The two main storylines that grabbed the attention of bloggers were Bachmann receiving government aid despite her condemnation of government handouts and the candidate's confusion of John Wayne, the actor, with John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer. Other stories that were popular on blogs for the week included a piece about San Francisco weighing the decision to ban the sale of pets in second place (17%). An article critical of former vice-president Al Gore's failure to advance the green movement was in third, at 14%. Wrapping up the top five stories on blogs were two economic topics. The fourth-biggest was about California Democrats passing an austerity budget for the state (12%). The No. 5 story was about austerity measures in financially troubled Greece and public workers on strike in the UK (10%). The economy in Britain was also one of the top stories on Twitter for the week, in fourth place with 9% of news links. Google's new Tool is the Talk of Twitter On Twitter the new Google+ social networking tool took top billing, with 35% of news links for the week. Tweeters were mostly excited about the new Facebook competitor, especially when it came to the issue of privacy. A June 28 Wired article about how Google+ has better privacy features than Facebook triggered several tweets. "OK meet you all over at Google+ (shhh! don't tell facebook)," wrote Tony Blass. Other tweets linked to a lengthy Wired article about Google+, and tweeters alerted their followers that it was a hefty piece. "a long & fantastic read on the Google+ team, project & changing company culture," wrote Jenn Van Grove.
Most of the Twitter users who responded in this discussion agreed about the real dangers of global warming. In third place, with 9% of links, were stories about a British government hacking of al Qaeda's website, replacing bomb instructions with cupcake recipes. The fourth-biggest topic (9%) was about the British economy, with a government official (Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith) urging Britons to hire unemployed Britons rather than relying on foreign workers. And at No. 5 (6%), was the story about Michele Bachmann's husband getting $137,000 in Medicaid funds. Michele Bachmann Coming off a strong debate performance on June 13 and with polls showing her among the GOP frontrunners in Iowa, Michele Bachmann's candidacy seems to have some momentum behind it. But social media users were not impressed last week. The majority of the response came from bloggers, many of them liberal, who wrote that she was both hypocritical and gaffe prone. One of the points of contention was that despite her stated aversion to government handouts, her family personally benefited from both farm subsidies and Medicaid funding. The mental health clinic run by her husband collected Medicaid payments of more than $137,000 since 2005, on top of $24,000 in federal and state funds that the clinic received under a state grant to train employees. In addition, her family farm-in which Michelle is a partner-received almost $260,000 in federal farm subsidies. "[Michele Bachmann], the Tea Party darling was shown to have suckled at the teat of the government sow," wrote Diane of Cab Drollery. "Bachmann possess the horrible quality of not being able to admit when she makes a mistake. I think that arrogance will be her downfall as much as her verbal/mental stumbles," wrote Rob Kotaska on My Three Percent is Swimming.* "What we have a problem with is Michele Bachmann constantly dissing Medicaid for adding to the welfare rolls, then finding out some of those Medicaid dollars...end up nipping and tucking and botoxing the quintessential nipped, tucked, botoxed, faux-thirty trophy Legislator who struts onto Fox News and tells Bill O'Reilly, ‘I don't need government to be successful,'" wrote wonkronk. "We already know Bachmann isn't the brightest flower on the Iowa prairie. I say cut her some slack -- and save the ammo for the serious candidates," wrote EJ Perkins at The Portal. And Twitter users agreed, tweeting their distaste of Bachmann's husband receiving $137,000 in Medicaid funds. "Reminds me of Paladino, Trump, etc..." wrote Brian Fessler. "Michelle Bachmann says she hates federal assistance. But I've got 137,000 (dollars her husband's clinic received) reasons she doesn't," wrote CJ Werelman. There were some conservatives who weighed in, saying that it was not unreasonable for her to be accepting government aid and that the media was attacking her. "Accusing Bachmann of confusing Good John with Bad John smacks of a media-driven contrivance. That said, when I saw the images of John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy side by side in the Los Angeles Times today, I couldn't help but laugh," wrote Richard Cross at Cross Purposes, "I question whether Bachmann is qualified to be president, but I think this kind of orgiastic feeding frenzy on the part of the media will help her by making her a sympathetic character, if not a martyr, among conservatives." YouTube On YouTube, a supposed UFO sighting over London drew the most attention last week, generating two of the five most popular news-related videos. The No. 1 and No. 3 videos are the same footage, bouncy clips showing white lights hovering in the skies over London on May 24, which attracted a small crowd of onlookers.
About the New Media Index 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 Emily Guskin and Sovini Tan, PEJ
From June 27-July 3, the economy accounted for 19% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That marked the second week in a row that economic coverage—driven by the partisan differences stalling deficit reduction talks—has been the No. 1 story. That was followed, at 13%, by the presidential campaign, which was fueled by GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann’s official announcement of her candidacy. Bachmann was the major player in last week’s campaign coverage, appearing as a prominent newsmaker in more than 40% of the stories about the race. (To register as a prominent newsmaker, someone must appear in at least 50% of a story.) And in recent weeks, the media narrative has helped elevate Bachmann from the ranks of the long shots to a significant figure in the Republican field. Last week’s coverage of the economy and election reinforced a trend that emerged in PEJ’s News Coverage Index in late spring. After the first part of the year was marked by major media attention to such international events as the earthquake in Japan, the turmoil in the Middle East and the killing of Osama bin Laden, the press has pivoted to a domestic, and largely Beltway-centric, media agenda. Indeed in the past six weeks, the No. 1 story (the economy at 15%) and the No. 2 story (the election at 11%) have become the staples of the news diet. In another sign of that turn homeward, last week marked the first time in more than five months that events related to the Middle East did not make the list of top five stories. The conflict in Afghanistan was the week’s No. 3 story (at 5%), but that actually served to illustrate how difficult it is to sustain significant coverage of the war. Only one week earlier—with President Obama announcing plans to bring home 30,000 troops by next year—coverage reached its peak for the year, at 14%. Only one week later, it dropped by nearly two-thirds. The fourth-biggest story, also at 5%, was the case involving former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, which took a dramatic turn last week with reports that the woman accusing him of sexual assault had significant credibility problems that undermined the case. Rounding out the roster of top five stories (4%) was the U.S. Supreme Court, with coverage driven by the 7-2 decision—one that reached across ideological lines—striking down a California law that had banned the sale of violent video games to children. Not everyone was pleased with the ruling. “Gamer ruling a win for violence,” was the headline atop one Chicago Tribune column. Obama Fuels Debt Battle Coverage The U.S. economy was the top story in four media sectors last week, generating the most attention (23%) on cable news. The majority of last week’s economic coverage, about 60%, focused on the continuing impasse over the country’s debt limit. And the catalyst for much of that coverage was a June 29 press conference in which an unusually aggressive Obama went after the Republicans on the deficit. “He accused Republicans—no fewer than six times—of favoring corporate-jet owners over average folks in the party's refusal to consider tax increases as part of a deficit deal,” reported the Washington Post the next day. “And, showing a combative side that Americans rarely see, he said that Republicans ‘need to do their job.’” If the president’s rhetoric got harsher, that tone was also picked up by the cable commentators who weighed in on the issue from their sides of the partisan divide. On Fox News, conservative commentator Monica Crowley, substituting for Sean Hannity, assailed Obama for singling out the nation’s wealthiest citizens. “There he goes again, stoking class warfare to score political points,” she asserted. “Does this president not get America…that all of us actually aspire to be the rich?” On the other side of the ideological spectrum, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell took aim at the Republicans’ unwillingness to raise taxes. “The current [GOP] position on tax revenues including the refusal to close tax loopholes is too extreme even for Republicans formerly thought of as conservative,” he said, segueing into remarks by debt commission co-chairman and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, who suggested that top wage earners need to pay more of their share of taxes. The next biggest economic storyline, accounting for about one-fifth of last week’s coverage, was the impact of the economy on state and local governments. The major news here was the government shutdown in Minnesota caused by an impasse over that state’s budget. Bachmann is the Catalyst for Campaign News Even as the economy was the top story in the media overall last week, it was the presidential election that finished No. 1 on the radio and cable talk shows—accounting for 32% of the airtime studied by PEJ.
And much of that focused on Michele Bachmann, who formally announced her candidacy last week, but who had been prominent in the election coverage since what was widely hailed as a strong debate performance on June 13. A few months ago, it was Donald Trump who seemed to be the star in the media coverage of the GOP hopefuls. But much of that attention—focused largely on Trump’s questions about Obama’s citizenship and his unorthodox policy pronouncements—seemed to convey his candidacy as quixotic. The response to Bachmann’s announcement last week was not all positive, as the media reported on some of her controversial positions and verbal gaffes. But in general, it conveyed the sense that she was emerging as a more serious force in the campaign than perhaps previously thought. A June 27 New York Times story noted that “Mrs. Bachmann, who has gone from a little-known member of Congress to a nationally known figure in the Tea Party movement, suddenly faces higher expectations in Iowa. Her high name recognition helped propel her into a statistical tie with Mitt Romney in a weekend Iowa Poll by The Des Moines Register.” That same evening, a report on the CBS newscast stated that “her early rise in the polls suggests she’s striking a chord with people who are sick of Washington.”
And several days later, in a segment on the PBS NewsHour, liberal commentator Mark Shields acknowledged Bachmann’s strong performance out of the starting blocks. “She has had a…. great introduction,” he ventured. “I think she's a natural candidate...She has got a natural identification with much of the Iowa Republican Party, which is, culturally and religiously, a conservative party, a party….where Mike Huckabee did very well in 2008, won the caucuses over Mitt Romney.” The Rest of the Week’s News Coverage of Afghanistan fell to 5% last week as the focus of attention shifted from Washington—where Obama laid out his troop withdrawal plan—to events in the war zone. Last week’s biggest news was an attack on Kabul’s well fortified Intercontinental Hotel that left about 20 people dead, including the attackers. A number of news reports stressed that the attack raised new questions about the ability of Afghan forces to maintain security as NATO and U.S. troops withdraw. Also at 5% was the plot twist in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn story after the case against him was imperiled by credibility problems with the New York hotel worker accusing him of rape. For much of the media, including the New York tabloids that had a field day with the story, the turn of events might have proved a cautionary tale about a rush to judgment and a premature conviction in the court of public opinion. But a Washington Post story suggested that that kind of a message was not being heeded in media circles. “Now that the district attorney’s investigation has yielded information about their star witness’s past that deeply erodes her credibility and seems likely to kill the case, Strauss-Kahn’s camp would like to see the New York media display some compunction,” the story noted, before adding: “That is not how it works.” The Supreme Court ruling that violent video games were protected by the First Amendment was the key storyline in the No. 5 story, at 4%. Coverage of the High Court generated the most attention in the radio news sector, accounting for 10% of the airtime studied.
Newsmakers of the Week Given his prominent role in the debate over deficit reduction last week, President Obama once again led the competition for media exposure. He appeared as a dominant newsmaker in 8% of the week’s stories, down from 11% the week before. Someone hoping to take Obama’s job, Michele Bachmann, was the No. 2 newsmaker, registering in 4% of the stories. Bachmann was followed by two men who had very different experiences with the criminal justice system last week. Dominique Strauss-Kahn (3%) saw the case against him appear to collapse while former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (2%) was convicted on a series of corruption charges last week, including trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat once filled by Barack Obama. The fifth-leading newsmaker last week was also a defendant in a major criminal case. Casey Anthony, on trial for killing her two-year-old daughter, was a dominant newsmaker in 2% of the stories from June 27-July 3. She was acquitted of that murder on July 5. 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 900 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
And by a margin of almost 3-to-1, the reaction was negative. In a broader examination of more than 11,000 blog posts, utilizing computer technology from Crimson Hexagon, 36% of bloggers' assessments were negative compared to just 13% that were positive. About half (51%) of the conversation was neutral. These responses were more critical than public sentiment overall. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and The Washington Post following the speech found that a plurality (44%) of Americans think Obama will remove troops from Afghanistan at about the right pace. A number of bloggers, including liberals who tend to support the President, wanted Obama to withdraw all troops from the country and declare an end to what they see is an unwinnable war. A different cohort argued that Obama was not committed to doing what is best for American interests-winning the war. Instead, they suggested Obama's plan to pull out troops goes against the wishes of top military commanders and puts at risk any progress that has been made. A small minority of bloggers supported Obama's plan and suggested he had found a centrist strategy that would lead to the end of the war without having the country result in chaos. These are the results of a special edition of the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, utilizing our regular weekly analysis coupled with computer technology from Crimson Hexagon. This additional analysis examines the tone of the online conversation in reaction to Obama's plan. (Note: the blog posts examined were from June 23-28, the six days following Obama's speech, and do not correspond completely with the typical Monday through Friday week of the NMI.) The War in Afghanistan The past week marks the first time in nine months that the Afghanistan War has led the conversation on blogs. The inspiration largely stemmed from strong disapproval of Obama's withdrawal plan, which came in all forms. The most common criticism was that we should instead pull fully out of the war, ending our presence there altogether. "i disliked obama's speech tonight for the same reasons many people did--i don't want the US staying in afghanistan, policing the world," wrote Karen Lindsey at Anything & Everything.* "Given the heavy dependence of foreign spending and the continued power of the opium trade, is there any doubt that the minute we dismount from Afghanistan -whether it is in a year or in a decade-things will revert to the pre-2002 status quo?" asked Marc Eisner at Pileus the day before Obama officially announced his strategy. "My recommendation for the President: Announce an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan to be completed by year's end (if not sooner)." "Incremental and gradual drawdowns of troops over many years is not the correct response to a failed war," declared Jim Wallis at Sojourners. "We needed a pivot to a new policy last night - but we didn't get it." Some who were against war also expressed waning support for Obama. "I'd love to be singing the man's praises," asserted John Aravosis at AMERICA blog. "I did, after all, help elect him. But there are some problems in the way he governs, and he needs to address them, or I fear he may not be governing after 2012." Others, primarily on the conservative side, faulted Obama for not doing enough to "win" the war and going against the recommendations of two high-ranking military commanders. "So place your bets on how long it will be before Mullah Omar's back in town," objected Mark Steyn at the National Review after he declared that Obama's timetable gave the Taliban a chance to rebuild. "And then ask yourself if America will have anything to show for its decade in Afghanistan that it wouldn't have had if it had just quit two weeks after toppling the Taliban in the fall of 2001 and left the mullahs, warlords, poppy barons, and pederasts to have at each other without the distraction of extravagant NATO reconstruction projects littering their beautiful land of charmingly unspoilt rubble." "While the President is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, heeding wise counsel from his most senior military commanders is part of fulfilling that role," wrote Ericka Anderson at the blog for the Heritage Foundation. "The President is under political pressure from his liberal base to withdraw troops and wind down the Afghan war as next year's election inches closer. His announcement last week reveals he is basing the Afghan troop decision more on the domestic political calendar than the goal of achieving U.S. objectives there." There were some, though, that felt Obama should have stood up more to the military generals. "What we are witnessing is one more example of failure of leadership, failure to stand up to the people Obama is supposed to be commanding," concluded Rob Kall at OpEdNews. "Instead, he is, as people now expect him to do, ‘listening to the Generals.' That's not what Obama was elected to do. He was elected to make hard decisions." While in the distinct minority, a few people applauded Obama's decision. "Thank you, President Obama, for announcing that we will be getting out of Afghanistan," cheered Foster Dickson at Pack Mule for the New School. "It's pretty hard for ordinary people to wrap our heads around $113,000,000,000, which is what our nation will spend in Afghanistan in 2011." A number of bloggers reprinted the text of a June 26 piece by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne who defended Obama's attempt at taking a practical, middle road. "Prudence went on vacation during the administration of the second President Bush, but it's back as the hallmark of President Obama's approach to foreign policy," Dionne wrote. "The administration is stuck making a case whose only virtue is that it might turn out to be right. The United States has done what it could to improve the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. We have to decide whether this commitment will end or whether there will be an endless series of ‘fighting seasons' in which we need to give it one more try." The Rest of the Week on Blogs Elsewhere in the blogosphere, the top stories were a mix of domestic spending issues, global warming, and the release of a renowned artist from prison.
For a state that is facing dramatic budget problems, bloggers agreed that this expense was untenable. "This budget item is sadly impressive," wrote inner monologue is on speaker. "Unsustainable. California spends more on incarceration than education." "There's no question that California's death penalty is dysfunctional and that the only thing it's killing is our economy," added James Clark, a field worker for the ACLU, on The Huffington Post. "The experts know it, the voters know it, and our elected leaders need to acknowledge it." An Associated Press story about Al Gore's criticism of President Obama for his lack of leadership on the issue of global warming was third, at 10%. "Obama has never presented to the American people the magnitude of the climate crisis," Gore wrote in an essay that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. "He has not defended the science against the ongoing withering and dishonest attacks. Nor has he provided a presidential venue for the scientific community...to bring the reality of the science before the public." China's release of Ai Weiwei, a dissident artist and activist, from prison on bail after being held for two months without formal charges was the No. 4 story at 9%. Weiwei had attracted international attention for his criticism of the Chinese authorities and had been the subject of a segment on PBS' Frontline in April. And a Los Angeles Times story about State Controller John Chiang's decision to deny state lawmakers pay for failing to produce a balanced spending plan was the fifth-biggest story at 8%. On Twitter, the two largest stories involved the issue of online hacking and security. Stories about a security breach regarding Dropbox, one of the most popular web sites to share and sync files, were the top subject with 28% of the links. The site admitted that a bug resulted in unfettered access to all of its 25 million customers' online storage lockers on Sunday, June 19, for a period of four hours.
"For four hours on Sunday, anyone could get in any of Dropbox's 25 million accounts using any password," retweeted a number of Twitterers while linking to the Wired story on the event. A worldwide hacking group known as LulzSec, which claimed responsibility for hacking large organizations around the world including the U.S. Senate and companies such as Sony, was the second-largest subject at 13%. Many Tweets linked to a story by the British Sun newspaper that announced a "nerdy teenager" named Ryan Cleary was arrested in Essex for supposedly running the operation. A study by German college students that suggested that the brains of people who live in urban areas are more susceptible to stress than those that live in rural areas was third, at 8%. At No. 4, with 5%, was a gruesome story about the arrest of a California mother after investigators discovered her baby likely died from burns suffered in a microwave oven. And a report by Britain's newspaper The Independent about accusations that the government of Bahrain systematically tortured patients in hospitals that were suspected of participating in anti-government demonstrations was the fifth story, also at 5%. YouTube On the video sharing site YouTube, the June 15 riots in Vancouver, British Columbia, following the loss of the city's hockey team, the Canucks, in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals drew significant attention last week. Four of the top five videos focused on the chaotic events. The top video, posted by Russia Today, shows angry fans setting cars and garbage on fire, smashing windows, and throwing beer bottles at the plastic shields of Vancouver police. The No. 3 video shows rioters smashing a mini car and a man attempting to intervene while repeatedly saying, "This is our city." The fourth video, titled "Global News - Vancouver riot participant apologizes," is no longer available because the uploader has closed his/her YouTube account. And the No. 5 video is footage that aired on CBC News showing a car on fire with voice-over comments on the frenzied situation.
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. About This Report This special edition of the NMI adds software technology from Crimson Hexagon to PEJ's ongoing tracking of most linked-to news stories in social media. Using this software, the Project can examine a much larger mix of social media conversation. According to Crimson Hexagon: "Our technology analyzes the entire social internet (blog posts, forum messages, Tweets, etc.) by identifying statistical patterns in the words used to express opinions on different topics." Information on the tool itself can be found at http://www.crimsonhexagon.com/ and the in depth methodologies can be found here http://www.crimsonhexagon.com/products/whitepapers/. The time frame for the analysis is June 23-28, 2011, which is different than the normal NMI week, Monday through Friday. For the analysis of blogs, PEJ used the following keywords in a Boolean search to narrow the universe to relevant posts: Obama AND Afghanistan By Paul Hitlin and Sovini Tan, with additional research by Tricia Sartor.
Last week was one such week. The war in that country accounted for 14% of the newshole in the U.S. mainstream media between June 20 and June 26, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. It was the fourth biggest week of coverage for Afghanistan since PEJ began its weekly News Coverage Index monitoring the news agenda in January 2007, and easily the biggest week of coverage so far of 2011. The last time the conflict in Afghanistan ranked among the top stories in any week was March 28-April 3, when it was No. 5 at 3% of the newshole (a Rolling Stone expose of an Army platoon drove much of the coverage that week). Since January, the war has accounted for only 2% of the newshole overall. Last week’s coverage overwhelmingly focused on President Barack Obama’s announcement that the U.S. will bring home 30,000 troops by September of 2012 (about 85% of the Afghanistan coverage dealt with U.S. policy over there). That echoes a theme found throughout much of the media’s treatment of the Afghanistan war over the years: that more than violence or events on the ground, it is policy decisions and deliberations in Washington that create spikes in otherwise limited coverage. In the week of November 30-December 6, 2009, coverage peaked at 27% of the newshole with Obama's announcement that he would be sending in an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan—a surge that was book-ended by last week's drawdown announcement. In the week of June 21-27, 2010, when the war in Afghanistan accounted for 25% of the newshole, the focus was on another Rolling Stone report that brought attention to tensions between the Obama administration and Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S. forces there, about war strategy. A look at all the Afghanistan coverage in the year 2011 so far, more than half—53%—is focused on the U.S. strategy and policy making process. While Afghanistan coverage spiked higher than usual last week, coverage of the economy accounted for even more newshole—at 16%—than the war. That made it the No. 1 story, driven in large part by the intense debate in Washington over the nation’s debt limit. At No. 3 was the presidential election, at 9%. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman drew media attention when he officially entered the race. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann drew some attention of her own by promoting her impending official entrance on Monday June 27. Conflict in the Middle East continued to be among the top stories at No. 4 (6%). Last week, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s speech promising reforms made that country a particular focus of the regional coverage. And the arrest late in the week of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger—a legendary Boston mob figure who had been on the run for more than 15 years—captivated news outlets to such an extent that it was the No. 5 story of the week at 5% of the newshole. Beginning of the End in Afghanistan At the heart of last week’s news coverage of the war in Afghanistan was Barack Obama’s televised address to the nation on Wednesday, June 22.
A Pew Research Center poll on June 21 revealed that, for the first time, a majority of Americans (56%) say that U.S. troops should return home as soon as possible. The media captured that national mood in last week’s coverage of Obama’s announcement by articulating the uncertainty, fatigue and lack of appetite for the war. Few news reports portrayed a robustly positive reception of Obama’s plan. A USA Today article published the day after the speech (June 23) captured the sense of malaise in the president’s address: “President Obama heralded the beginning of the end of the nation’s 10-year war in Afghanistan on Wednesday, citing success in the battle against al-Qaeda and the Taliban but offering no guarantee that the nation’s heavy investment in lives and treasure will leave behind a stable and secure nation.” On the liberal side of the cable dial, there was a sense of disappointment that Obama’s announced drawdown levels of 10,000 this year and 20,000 in 2012 were not enough, leaving 50,000 U.S. troops in the country for a longer period. “Does the president care that the public is almost uniformly in favor of getting U.S. troops out and fast?” asked MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in her 9 p.m. program the night of the speech. “Those numbers are much higher than they once were. But he’s not changing his plan. Does he care about public opinion on this? And if he doesn’t, why doesn’t he?” Even some conservative fatigue for the war could be felt last week. On the June 20 broadcast of NBC’s Today Show, chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd remarked that the war “has become a surprisingly divisive issue in the Republican party,” citing GOP contender Mitt Romney’s statement that “our troops shouldn’t go off and fight a war of independence for another nation” in direct reference to Afghanistan.
On the Fox News Channel, host Bill O’Reilly commented on June 23 that “the apathy of the American people about the theater [in Afghanistan], it’s almost like Iraq. They don’t want to hear about it anymore.” His conservative guest Laura Ingraham responded: “They don’t want to hear about it and a lot of them don’t want to pay for it anymore. They love our troops, they support our troops, but we’re out of dough; we’re tapped out.” Though the president cast the decision in terms of success by the U.S. military effort, and the drawdown was in fact bigger than some had expected, the overall reaction was more mission creep than mission accomplished. According to the New York Times on June 23, “The withdrawal of the entire surge force by the end of next summer will significantly change the way that the United States wages war in Afghanistan, analysts said, suggesting that the administration may have concluded it can no longer achieve its loftiest ambitions there.” The Rest of the Week’s News The national debt was the chief focus of last week’s top story, the economy, as the bipartisan debt panel organized by vice president Joe Biden fell apart. About a third of the economy coverage focused on the departure of House Republicans Eric Cantor and John Kyl, who cited disagreements over process and over substance. Overall attention to the economy was up slightly from the week before, when it accounted for 14% of the newshole. Much of the election-related media attention last week fell on Jon Huntsman, the former Republican governor of Utah who served as President Obama’s ambassador to China. Huntsman announced his candidacy for president last week, leaving journalists to decipher where exactly, given his various credentials, he falls on the partisan spectrum. At 9%, coverage was down from 15% the week before, when the GOP candidates debated in New Hampshire. Unrest in the Middle East measured as the No. 3 story last week (6%), and as in weeks past, much of the media attention dwelt on Syria and Libya. The arrest of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger became a late-week news sensation, dominating front pages and newscasts to such an extent that it filled 5% of the newshole for the week. Bulger, a mobster from Boston wanted on 19 murders, and was regarded with reverence and contempt by locals who knew him or knew of him, according to the press. A Los Angeles Times article June 26 reported that, “In Bulger’s former neighborhood, horror at the crimes prosecutors accuse him of committing is mixed with a certain respect for his ability to evade justice for so long, and for the way he provided for loyalists.” Newsmakers of the Week
After weeks of heavy press attention to New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, Barack Obama resumed his familiar spot as the top lead newsmaker of the week during June 20-26, the focus of 11% of stories studied. (To register as a dominant newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a story.) Behind Obama was ‘Whitey’ Bulger, the focus of 4% of stories, whose life of crime was detailed in all of its drama after his late-week arrest. At No. 3 last week was GOP presidential candidate Huntsman, who formally entered the crowded Republican field of candidates for the 2012 election. He was the focus of 3% of stories last week. Michelle Obama, was the No. 4 lead newsmaker (2%) as she traveled in South Africa last week with her two daughters. The last time the first lady ranked as one of the top newsmakers was the week of April 18-24, when the plane she was traveling came closer than it should have to a military jet. Finally, at No. 5, was Casey Anthony, the woman charged with the murder of her two-year-old daughter. The trial, which had long been a staple of cable TV courtroom drama, neared its end last week as jurors were set to begin deliberations. Anthony was the focus of 1% of stories. About the NCI PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index examines the news agenda of 52 different outlets from five sectors of the media: print, online, network TV, cable and radio. (See List of Outlets.) The weekly study, which includes some 1,000 stories, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of that media narrative and differences among news platforms. The percentages are based on "newshole," or the space devoted to each subject in print and online and time on radio and TV. (See Our Methodology.) In addition, these reports also include a rundown of the week’s leading newsmakers, a designation given to people who account for at least 50% of a given story. Jesse Holcomb of PEJ
For the week of June 13-17, 54% of the news links on blogs were about the lost Iraq money, more than four times the next biggest subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The only other time that Iraq has showed up among leading blog topics since the NMI began in January 2009 was the week of September 6-10, 2010. Interestingly, it was the same basic subject, the high cost of the Iraq War that triggered bloggers' interest then, as they linked to an article that revised upward a previous estimate that the conflict would cost $3 billion. It seems somewhat ironic that at a time when the debate over U.S. policy is focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Libya, the story that sent bloggers to their keyboards last week was about the missing $6.6 billion in cash sent by cargo plane between March 2003 and May 2004 intended for reconstruction and other projects in Iraq. That revelation got minimal attention in the mainstream press last week, accounting for less than 1% of the newshole according to PEJ's News Coverage Index. The Los Angeles Times story reported that this represented the "biggest international cash airlift of all time." The story added that federal auditors think the cash may have been stolen, leaving the Pentagon embarrassed and Congress not exactly thrilled. Among bloggers, the emotion was outright anger as liberals seethed over the mismanagement of the money, often blaming the Bush Administration for its handling of the war in Iraq. "Ah how the ghost of the lawbreaking, illegitimate and incompetent Bush administration continues to haunt this nation!" wrote Mike Villwock at Big Dumb Guy. The No. 2 subject on blogs, with 13% of news links, had to do with the Los Angeles Unified School district. Bloggers linked to two different stories. One that focused on how the district voted to remove flavored milk from its menus in order to make school food healthier and combat childhood obesity. The other was an op-ed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the problems facing L.A. schools and his efforts to improve teacher quality through reform. In third place, with 6% of links, was a story about the June 10 release of 25,000 of Sarah Palin's emails from her tenure as Alaska governor. That subject generated commentary from both liberal and conservative bloggers who used the occasion to assail or support the politically polarizing Palin. The fourth-biggest story (5%) was about violence breaking out in Athens, Greece in response to a package of budget cuts and tax increases. Next came two stories focused on the Republican candidates in the 2012 presidential election (4%). One was a Los Angeles Times article about the GOP candidates making a rightward shift and the other was a 2008 New York Times op-ed written by Mitt Romney arguing that the U.S. should let Detroit go bankrupt. Bloggers pointed out that Romney recently claimed credit for the auto industry's turnaround, and his 2008 op-ed disagrees with his assertion. That marks the second time that bloggers have cited that 2008 op-ed and criticized Romney for hypocrisy in recent weeks. That subject also accounted for 6% of the links the week of May 23-27.
At No. 1, with 17% of news links, was a live feed of the lunar eclipse from Wired magazine. (After the eclipse, Wired provided a YouTube video of the event.) Twitter users were excited about the lunar eclipse and how they could view it live online from anywhere in the world-or at least anywhere with an internet connection. "I love technology... watching the #eclipse taking place now on other side of the world. you can too!" wrote Melissa Morgenweck. "Are we too techno needy? Why watch online when you can see it live?" asked Richard Lord.* In second place were several stories about global warming (14%). One was about a British government advisor in charge of overhauling school syllabi in England saying that climate change should not be included in the national curriculum. The other was a letter from scientists saying that climate change is a fact and that they would more actively promote that view in the coming weeks. The No. 3 subject was continued unrest in Bahrain (12%). That included two stories focused on Ayat a-Gormezi, a jailed poet who has become the symbol of Bahrain's resistance. Another was about the government of Bahrain saying it has commissioned a UK-based law firm to file a suit against The Independent for its reporting on the crackdown on protests in the country. Many of the tweets linking to these articles came from within Bahrain and included calls to free the young poet, often with a hash tag: "Free #Ayat NOW!" In fourth place, with 9% of links, were several articles about Facebook: its' losing U.S. users, developing an iPad app and prepping for a mobile platform. And the fifth story on Twitter, with 8% of links, was an article about a double murder suspect who is alleged to have killed his girlfriend and child with a shotgun. The reason it was popular on Twitter, though, is because the Daily Mirror accidentally accompanied the article with a drawing of Superman. (Screen grab credit Tyler B. Peters). Tweeters generally declared this a #fail. The Missing $6.6 Billion The news of the missing billions sent to Iraq touched a nerve among liberal bloggers last week, many of whom used the occasion to launch broader criticisms of the war itself and the George W. Bush Administration that launched it. "Yes, the US Govt mislaid 66 Thousand Million dollars, big news...BUT, it gets MUCH WORSE!" wrote Scott Bennett at The Big Wide West, "In addition to the 6.6B USD lost, there's the estimated 823B USD for which we CAN account. That is the total cost of military operations so far in Iraq." "Now the Republicans want Americans to believe they are the party of fiscal responsibility. That idea is more than laughable -- it is completely insane," wrote Ted McLauglin at jobsanger "I see the Pentagon's finally admitting what we knew to be true ages ago," wrote Phoenix Woman at Mercury Rising, "I wonder how much went for black ops, how much went for brides, and how much simply went into the back pockets of the young College Republican and AEI sheltered-workshop kiddie types Paul Bremer picked to run the Coalition Provisional Authority?" "Here's a thought: the next time you hear some Republican carrying on about waste, fraud, and abuse in the government, ask them about the missing $6 billion that the Bush administration airlifted to Baghdad without getting a receipt," wrote Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof. "...it's hard to name a worse run operation than Dick Cheney's Iraqi debacle," wrote Taylor Marsh. "This is something I've said from the beginning would happen," wrote Kansas Mediocrity, "This truly is a repeat of what happened in VietNam...Whenever we send money overseas to further our interests, especially in open war, it will always end up in the hands of the people we supposedly are fighting. That's just the way it works." "Glad I am not a US tax payer," noted Alex, a Londoner, at The Financial Crimes. At least one blogger commented on what he cited as misguided media priorities. "Missing Iraq money may have been stolen," wrote Red Eye, "but that's OK, destroying Anthony Weiners marriage and career is more important to the American people who don't have jobs and are about to lose their homes, praying they don't get sick because they don't have health insurance because they have no jobs." YouTube On YouTube, a news video that highlighted both the power and unintended consequences of social media drew the most attention last week. The video, from the Polish television channel Polsat, featured the fallout from a 16 year-old girl's Facebook gaffe in Hamburg, Germany. About 1,600 Facebook users crowded the streets of her Hamburg neighborhood on June 3 after the 16-year old, Thessa, accidentally made her birthday party invitation public on the social networking site. The police in Hamburg intervened by blockading the house and clearing the "guests" from the area.
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 Emily Guskin and Sovini Tan, PEJ
The race for the White House led the news agenda, accounting for 15% of the newshole from June 13-19, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That was nearly double the coverage (8%) one week earlier and topped the previous high of 12% (May 30-June 5) when former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney entered the race and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin embarked on a highly publicized bus tour. Last week’s debate at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire was not the first of this election cycle, but in some ways, the media treated it like it was. Last month’s kickoff debate in South Carolina was attended by mostly long-shot candidates, and was overwhelmed by the avalanche of media attention to the death of Osama bin Laden which had occurred just four days earlier. That week (May 2-8), the campaign accounted for just 3% of the newshole. This time around, the stars of the media narrative seemed to be Romney, a leading contender for the nomination, and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who used the debate to formally announce her candidacy. Both Romney and Bachmann were declared the winners of the debate in many press post-mortems. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, however, was not so fortunate. But the focus of the event—and coverage of it—was Barack Obama, whose health care overhaul and economic policies became the primary target for a slate of contenders more concerned at this early stage with establishing familiarity with voters rather than attacking each other. Lately, there has been enough bad news on the economic front to help provide ammunition for those GOP attacks. And last week, the gloomy news again seemed to exceed the good tidings. Overall, attention to jobs, the foreign and domestic debt crises and other woes accounted for 14% of the coverage, making the economy the No. 2 story. These two intertwined subjects—the presidential campaign and the economy—have accounted for a quarter of the mainstream news agenda in the past four weeks—with the economy ranking No. 1 at 14%, and the campaign coming next at 11%. Embattled New York Rep. Anthony Weiner stayed in the news as he gave in to mounting pressure and announced his resignation on June 16 following several weeks of unwelcome attention to his sexual behavior online. It was the No. 3 story at 10% of the newshole last week—still a drop-off from 17% the previous week. At No. 4 last week was unrest in the Middle East (6%), dominated by coverage of the continuing violence in Libya and Syria. News outlets turned to the congressional debate over the legality of a continued U.S. military role in Libya, while government crackdowns in Syria caused massive refugee resettlements in nearby Turkey. A return to the topic of global terrorism in the wake of Osama bin Laden accounted for 4% of the newshole, making it the No. 5 story for the week. Two events drove that coverage—the ascension of Ayman al Zawahiri as the new leader of al Qaeda, and Pakistan’s arrest of five informants who had helped lead U.S. forces to bin Laden. New Hampshire Debate Kicks off Campaign After a week in which the presidential campaign had been overshadowed by the Anthony Weiner scandal, the media resumed their interest in the 2012 presidential campaign as GOP candidates debated in New Hampshire on Monday, June 13. And by far the most coverage of the election last week came from the cable news sector—30% of the airtime studied. Some of the coverage, inevitably, anointed winners and losers.
A
National Journal analysis on June 14, suggested that Romney had succeeded by emerging
unscathed. “Mitt Romney easily survived his first debate of the 2012 primary
with barely a nick to his early frontrunner status.”
“By the end of the debate, the most obvious beneficiaries were Romney and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, the “tea party” favorite who used the debate to announce her official entrance into the presidential race and to get off several zingers that roused the crowd,” stated a Los Angeles Times article from the same day. A June 15 USA Today article, titled “Debate showing elevates Bachmann to higher tier,” sung her praises, calling her “lively, confident and personable….She emerged from the pack in a way that is likely to make it easier for her to raise money, attract grass-roots support—and even emerge as a Tea Party favorite to rival Sarah Palin,” stated the story. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty chose not to attack Romney in the debate when asked about his earlier coinage of the term “Obamneycare” to refer to the similarities between the health care plans enacted by the former Massachusetts governor and President Obama. That struck some pundits as weak. “During Monday night’s Republican debate in New Hampshire, Governor Pawlenty had the opportunity to repeat that line but he declined. And some are suggesting that he missed an opportunity to go after the GOP frontrunner,” said Sean Hannity on his Fox News program. But perhaps the key element of the post-debate analysis was the observation that what united the seven candidates on stage was displeasure with President Obama. “The Republican debate was largely about one thing: the leadership of Barack Obama,” narrated CBS’ Jan Crawford on the Early Show, June 14.
An
NPR report on the same morning echoed that observation: “The seven leading
Republican presidential contenders have used their first major debate to level
a strong critical assault on the policies of President Obama, in particular,
his handling of the U.S. economy.”
Obama did some traveling and campaigning of his own last week, although he was seemingly unable to shake the media’s focus on the president’s critics. CNN’s John King—who moderated the New Hampshire debate—reported on the annual gathering of the Netroots contingent of liberal activists and summarized the challenge faced by Obama, even among his base. “The stakes here are enormous,” King said. “The struggling economy guarantees a competitive 2012 presidential race. And the president needs to reinvigorate his grassroots support.” The Rest of the Week’s News The economy was the top story last week in three different sectors, radio (22%), newspapers (20%) and online (12%). And for the second week in a row, economic coverage was the sum of a number of disparate storylines. The largest portion of coverage, about a quarter, focused on the job market as Barack Obama visited North Carolina to talk about job creation. A number of stories highlighted some encouraging news about a drop in jobless reports. But for every one of those there was another story about a drop in retail sales and the possible impact of the Greek debt crisis on the U.S. stock market. After three weeks of substantial and sometimes intense media coverage, embattled New York Rep. Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress on June 16. The resignation—held at a Brooklyn senior center—was carnival-like as Weiner spoke for four minutes to a crowd of reporters amidst a chorus of boos, cheers and at least one heckler whose crass jeers at times made Weiner inaudible. The spectacle accounted for 10% of last week’s coverage. The NATO military operation in Libya presented political complications for the Obama administration last week. Most of the Libya coverage followed congressional pushback against what some members—on both sides of the aisle—called an illegal war. The other significant aspect of last week’s Mideast coverage was the escalation of violent crackdowns in Syria, forcing evacuations and putting even more pressure—particularly from the U.S.—on that country’s president to reform. Together, these events accounted for 6% of the newshole last week—down from 11% the week before, and a long way from the 47% dedicated to the region during the week of March 21-27 when the U.S. and NATO entered the conflict in Libya. Nearly seven weeks after the death of the world’s most wanted terrorism suspect, Osama bin Laden was in the news again as the media learned that his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri’s would succeed bin Laden as the top al Qaeda leader. In the same week, the Pakistani government arrested five informants who had helped the U.S. find bin Laden, which reporters interpreted as a deepening of the tensions in American-Pakistani relations. These two events combined drove coverage of bin Laden-related news to 4% of the newshole last week. Newsmakers of the week
For
a second week in a row, Anthony Weiner was, to his likely dismay, the top overall
newsmaker. During the week of June 13-19, he was a dominant figure in 9% of the
week’s stories. (To register as a dominant newsmaker, someone must be featured
in at least 50% of a story.) Even so, that was down somewhat from 13% the week
before, when the scandal involving revelations about lewd pictures he had sent
to women on Twitter brought the uproar to a fever pitch. The focus on Weiner was enough to edge out the coverage of Barack Obama, the No. 2 newsmaker last week, featured prominently in 8% of stories. Much of that coverage was focused on the presidential campaign in which the president and his policies were the focus of GOP attacks. At No. 3 last week was the apparent Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney (2%). The near universal media verdict on his performance in New Hampshire was that he made it through the night having done himself no harm. Also a lead newsmaker in 2% of stories last week was Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who finally left hospital treatment after being shot at point blank range by a gunman on January 8. Finally, at No. 5 was Ayman al-Zawahiri (1% of stories), the longtime deputy leader of al Qaeda who was promoted as the successor of Osama bin Laden. 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. Jesse Holcomb of PEJ
Twitter users weighed in quickly and voluminously to Apple’s introduction of its new iOS 5 operating system. Reaction to the June 6 rollout accounted for nearly one-third (31%) of the news links from June 6-10, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The day after the June 6 announcement, social media
users were already downloading the upgrade, which had already been released for
developers—and which includes more than 200 new features for the iPhone and
iPad—by following steps to get a beta
Their verdict was largely positive. “Day 2 with iOS 5 Beta: Impressed. New Music app rocks. iMessages are pretty flawless (albeit "jumpy"), Apple nailed Notification Center,” tweeted Arron Hirst, in what was a typical response to the new product. In the often technology-heavy Twitter conversation, no subject generates more consistent interest than the doings at digital media giant Apple. Couple that with a central function of acting as a kind of social media consumer reports for new tech products and gadgets, and this release was ready made for the Twitter entourage. The rest of the top stories on Twitter last week did not come close to generating the attention of the iOS 5. No. 2, at 6% of the links, was a video of a drunk man stumbling around after leaving an awards show in London. That was followed by a story about how passengers’ electronics can, in fact, harm airplanes in flight (4%). Coming in 4th, was the fallout from Congressman Anthony Weiner’s June 6 admission of sending inappropriate photos and messages to a number of women. But at just 4% the story generated much less attention here than in the mainstream press last week. The No. 5 story was an article about innovation in resource efficiency, the concept of creating economic value out of a more creative use of natural resources (4%). iOS5 Whenever Apple releases a new product, or even when there are simply rumors about a product, Twitter users get excited. And last week, the new iOS 5 operating system generated a lot of specific evaluations. “Love the new notification center. iOS 5 Just slide down from the time bar at the top,” wrote Grant Luckey.* “Surprise! Apple Has Also Built Social Contact Integration With Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Myspace Into iOS 5,” said Liz Gannes. Many Mac and tech blogs wrote about the issue, also focusing on individual features of the update. “Apple to finally deliver 1080P video playback on iOS devices with iOS 5 http://goo.gl/fb/rKrjB #appleinc #iosdevices,” wrote 9to5mac, using the popular Twitter hash tags. “In iOS 5, The Weather App Is Location Aware http://bit.ly/lYvUaw,” wrote AppAdvice.com. “iOS 5 To Feature Nuance Voice Controls At Launch? http://goo.gl/fb/QiCGJ,” tweeted another blog, Geeky Gadgets. There were a few less-than-satisfied users. “The 7 Most-Wanted Features STILL Missing from iOS 5,” Alex Schleber tweeted, linking to an article listing the missing features. But others questioned why anyone would complain about the latest innovation. “why are people mad that iOS 5 is not compatible with 3G? that's like being mad that Windows 7 doesn't run on your pentium 1,” quipped Marc D’Amico. In the Blogosphere: Health Care, Guns and Japanese Tourists The discussions in the blogosphere last week focused on several hot button issues—including health care, guns, the drug war and the presidential campaign.
The No. 1 subject, with 15% of news links was a story about how
three federal
judges in Atlanta posed skeptical questions during oral argument,
suggesting they might be ready to declare all or part of the health care law
unconstitutional. The large majority
of bloggers who weighed in were pleased that the bill signed by President Obama
was under legal challenge.
The second-biggest subject (13%) was a BBC story about Japanese tourists getting “Paris syndrome”—becoming stressed when visiting the city because of rude Parisians or high expectations. It attracted attention last week when The Guardian revisited the topic and linked to the original BBC piece after noticing it was getting buzz on Twitter. The third-biggest story, with 9% of links, was an article about the police chief in Los Angeles urging the passage of a law requiring BB guns to be brightly colored to avoid confusion with firearms. That generated comments from gun-rights advocates who argued that criminals would paint regular firearms in bright colors. The No. 4 story (6%) was about how the war on drugs in Central America has not been very successful. That was closely followed (also at 6%) by news of likely GOP presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman choosing to bypass the Iowa caucuses. Health Care and the Courts Conservative bloggers last week cheered the circuit court’s apparent skepticism about the constitutionality of the health care bill that was signed last year after a long and bitter political battle. “Is it possible? Could a branch of our government still have the common sense to save us from this humongous over-stepping of governmental authority?” asked Have Some Sense, “Hopefully the Judicial will come to the rescue. In this case, law-making is like baseball; 1 for 3 is not too bad.” “Granted, granted, a tough oral argument is no guarantee of defeat, but the mere possibility of O-Care crashing and burning in the 11th Circuit is tasty enough to be blogworthy,” wrote Republican Heritage. “I certainly hope they rule in favor of the Constitution, but the SCOTUS hasn’t always been so favorable to liberty. While I look forward to the day when the SCOTUS rules the entire law unconstitutional, I much prefer Congress completely repealing it,” wrote Chris Bounds at Liberty Juice. “…Things are looking up,” added MaxRedline. Guns and Paint A number of bloggers jumped on the LAPD BB gun story, arguing that criminals would paint their guns in bright colors so that police would think they were BB guns. “If i were a violent criminal in LA, then I would paint my real gun to look like a colored toy or BB gun and that will cause the officer to delay that critical shot,” wrote M.J. Mollenhour at LuckyGunner.com. “Okay, so what happens when criminals start painting their real guns in bright neon colors?” wrote dcr Blogs. “Don't worry criminals don't know about Duracoat or Krylon,” said The Gun Guy Next Door.
YouTube On YouTube, Sarah Palin and her much-publicized “One Nation” bus tour drew the most attention last week. The No. 1 and No. 5 videos focused on Palin’s June 2 stop at the Old North Church in Boston where she offered her own version of Paul Revere’s famous Midnight Ride. Palin said that Revere, “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.” That statement, as was quickly pointed out in many quarters of the media, does not exactly fit with the historical record.
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 Emily Guskin and Sovini Tan, PEJ
The From June 6-12, the saga accounted for 17% of the newshole measured by the News Coverage Index of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That makes the Weiner saga the fourth-most covered scandal involving elected officials since PEJ began tracking news in January 2007. The biggest political scandal of the last four and a half years was former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s corruption case (28%)—also known as “Blago-gate”—in which he allegedly tried to sell President Barack Obama’s former senate seat. No 2 was former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s admission that he used prostitutes (23%), followed quickly by his resignation from that office. News of former Idaho Senator Larry Craig’s arrest for lewd behavior in an airport was the No. 3 scandal, at 18%. Craig ultimately pled guilty to lesser charges. For the week, Weiner was easily the dominant newsmaker, appearing prominently in 13% of the week’s stories studied by PEJ—nearly tripling the coverage devoted to President Obama (5%). The week’s No. 2 story was the economy (11% of the newshole) although coverage slipped markedly from the previous week (19%) when gloomy reports about the jobs and housing markets fueled the news. Last week, a mix of storylines contributed to the economic narrative. The economy was followed closely by the continuing upheaval in the Mideast (11%). A big part of the story last week was the chaos in both Syria and Yemen, including reports that U.S. has become increasingly involved, targeting airstrikes at militants in the latter country. Coverage of the presidential campaign dropped last week, filling 8% of the newshole compared with 12% the previous week. Last week’s coverage included former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s entry into the GOP field and the mass defections of staffers from Newt Gingrich’s troubled campaign. A related story—the release of about 24,000 pages of Sarah Palin emails from her time as Alaska governor—filled another 3%. The No. 5 subject, at 4%, were the raging Arizona wildfires that consumed an estimated half million acres in the eastern part of the state. The blazes were the latest in a series of natural and weather disasters that have proved to be major newsmakers in 2011. The Weiner Scandal Last week saw a significant increase in coverage of a story that emerged a week earlier. The initial reports of an illicit photo, which Weiner claimed must have been sent by a hacker, generated significant coverage, ranking as the fifth-biggest story (accounting for 4% of the coverage) from May 30-June 5.
Yet news of a hacker embarrassing a congressman wasn’t nearly as big a news story as a congressman embarrassing himself. Last week’s dramatic turns in the narrative started with a teary June 6 press conference at which Weiner admitted to inappropriate contacts with a half dozen woman and acknowledged lying to the media. That was followed by a cascade of damning news, including the surfacing of X-rated photos of the New York Democrat and a growing chorus of calls for his resignation. By week’s end, the congressman announced he would be taking a leave of absence and seeking treatment for his problem. There was a prurient paparazzi component to last week’s coverage as well. News outlets apparently could not resist relying on double entendres to describe the episode and some of the coverage had an inevitably giggling quality to it. Cameras swarmed around the congressman as he ran routine errands in New York over the weekend. And to some degree, the scandal was politicized, particularly on the cable sector which devoted the most coverage (about one-third of its airtime) to the story last week. At the same time, however, there were enough newsworthy developments and genuine plot twists to keep the media’s attention. The essence of that pivotal June 6 press conference was summed up that day by CNN”s Anderson Cooper, who described it as “one of the nation's most influential and outspoken Democratic lawmakers, tearfully admitting he lied about tweeting a lewd photo of himself and more, saying it's part of a pattern.” “This is not going away,” added Cooper. That proved an understatement.
Coverage quickly expanded to include Weiner’s new wife, Huma Abedin, who is an aide to Hillary Clinton and who was not at her husband’s press conference. The Clinton connection offered the press a chance for allusions to other scandals. An ABC story noted that Abedin’s boss, “Hillary Clinton weathered the same humiliation when her husband was unfaithful with a White House intern, yet chose to stand by her man.” Shortly after that, came reports that Abedin was pregnant. On June 7, ABC’s Good Morning America aired an interview with one of the women who Weiner had communicated with—26-year-old Megan Broussard. She described how her online exchanges with Weiner quickly turned into him sending explicit images. “I don’t think he’s a bad guy,” she observed. “I think he has issues—just like everybody else.” ABC News became part of the story itself when it subsequently was reported that it had paid Broussard for photos sent by Weiner. The next shoe to drop was news of dwindling support for Weiner, particularly among fellow Democrats. The June 8 Washington Post reported that his “political survival was in question…as the leaders of his own party continued to distance themselves from the disgraced New York lawmaker…Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, issued a statement indicating that his caucus has no appetite for defending Weiner.” Given Weiner’s role as a high-profile and combative liberal who frequently made the talk show rounds, it was perhaps inevitable that the scandal would provide yet another partisan battleground for the cable hosts. On June 8, liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow accused Republicans of hypocrisy in calling for Weiner’s resignation when they hadn’t done so in the case of David Vitter, the Republican Senator from Louisiana who admitted to using prostitutes. “If Anthony Weiner must resign from Congress, why mustn’t David Vitter?” she asked. “Seriously. It is not a hypothetical question.” From the other side of the spectrum, conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity, on his June 10 program, criticized Democrats for not being quick enough to call for Weiner’s resignation. The Rest of the Week’s News News of the U.S. economy last week (11%) was divided into several key storylines. Congress rolled back the fees banks can charge when consumers swipe a debit card. There was more coverage of the debt ceiling impasse and President Obama addressed the latest batch of bad news on the employment front. With the exception of the week of May 30-June 5 when coverage reached 19%, the subject has regularly registered near the 10% mark in recent weeks. The unrest in the Mideast (11%) was up modestly from the previous week (9%) and generated the most coverage in the newspaper sector (15%). One storyline was the continuing violence and harsh government crackdown in Syria. Another was the upheaval in Yemen, particularly after President Ali Abdullah Saleh left for Saudi Arabia where he is being treated for serious injuries after an attack on his palace. Coverage of the presidential race last week (8%) focused on the faltering campaign of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum’s entry into the contest. Those events however, did not generate as much attention as Mitt Romney’s presidential announcement and Sarah Palin’s media-drenched bus tour one week earlier. Indeed, Palin’s ability to generate media buzz—for better or worse—was illustrated last week by the coverage of the batch of emails released on June 10. The No. 5 story was Arizona wildfires (4%). And for much of the week, the narrative focused on the problems firefighters were facing while trying to contain the massive inferno. Newsmakers of the Week
Next on the list were two prominent Republicans. Sarah Palin (3%) made the list of top five newsmakers for the third straight week. Newt Gingrich, facing a mutiny by at least 16 campaign staffers who quit and more questions about his discipline as a candidate, was No. 4, also at 3%. The No. 5 newsmaker was outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates (2%) who made news last week by warning NATO members that their cutbacks in defense expenditures were harming the alliance. 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 |
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The ever-expanding British phone hacking scandal involving Rupert
Murdoch's media empire grabbed the attention of the Twitter universe last week in
a way very few stories have. And they offered virtually no sympathy to the beleaguered
Australian magnate.
Two dramatic events—reports of a potential breakthrough
in deadlocked deficit talks and the verdict in the Casey Anthony murder trial—drove
the dominant news stories last week.
Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party favorite who formally announced
her presidential candidacy on June 27, created a major buzz in social media
last week, registering as the dominant subject on blogs as well as a hot topic
on Twitter. Most of the commentary was highly critical.
The No. 2 story on Twitter, with 11% of links, was about
global warming, all from British publications. The articles included a Guardian
story about 
The struggling U.S. economy and the unfolding 2012 presidential race accounted for about one-third of the newshole, further evidence that these two domestic issues have become for now the dominant narratives in the U.S. mainstream media.
Bloggers, last week, responded strongly to President Obama's June 22 speech about the U.S. role in the Afghan war. Reaction to the announcement, which proposed to remove 10,000 troops this year and a total of 33,000 by next September, received 18% of the news links on blogs from June 20-24, making it the No.1 topic, according to the 
The second-largest story, with 18% of the links, was a 
Twitter users took to the social networking site to warn others about the lapse in security.
For Afghanistan to feature prominently in the news, the years have shown it usually depends on what is happening in Washington.
The top two stories on Twitter last week moved away from technology and into the more natural world around us.
The
2012 presidential campaign generated its highest level of coverage to date as a
large cast of GOP candidates squared off in New Hampshire last week.
version of the upgrade before it was made
public 
scandal that launched 1,000 puns—Rep. Anthony Weiner’s exchange of explicit messages and images with a number of women—topped the news last week, registering as one of the biggest political scandal stories of the past four years.
Some of CNN’s early coverage, like that of other media outlets, focused on the fact that Weiner had lied to the press in earlier interviews where he raised the possibility that he had been victimized by online hackers.
Anthony Weiner was easily the top newsmaker from June 6-12. He was a dominant figure in 13% of the week’s stories. (To register as a dominant newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a story.) That easily topped the No. 2 newsmaker, Barack Obama, at 5%.