November 26, 2008

Health and Religion and campaign coverage -- Pew Reports

A couple of reports were recently released by the Pew Trusts.
Some interesting reading.

From Health News Coverage:
Network evening news viewers were the most likely to find health news
in their programming. Looking at every newscast (Monday - Friday) on
the three evening news programs from January 2007 through June 2008
reveals that fully 8.3% of airtime was devoted to health-related news,
with a heavy emphasis on specific ailments such as heart disease and
cancer. This was more than twice the coverage of health in any other
news genre except newspapers (where it was 5.9%).

Cable news, on the other hand, found very little room for health news, just 1.4% of programming studied


From Religion in the General Election:
[T]here was little attempt by the news media during the campaign to
comprehensively examine the role of faith in the political values and
policies of the candidates, save for those of Republican vice
presidential nominee Sarah Palin. And when religion-focused campaign
stories were covered by the mainstream press, often the context was
negative, controversial or focused on a perceived political problem.

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