Not surprisingly, the controversy surrounding the proposed lower Manhattan mosque was at the top of the news agenda last week, according to the PEJ. The story filled 15% of the newshole with much of the boost attributed to a comment by Pres. Obama at a White House dinner Friday, August 13. As Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Sunday, “Building a mosque is building ratings. And so cable is going to keep covering it…for as long as that’s the case.”
The withdrawal of the last combat brigade from Iraq made the war the No. 2 story last week at 9%.
Some background on how the PEJ conducts the weekly study, after the jump…
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.
The weekly study, which includes some 1,100 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.