Within each media sector, the number of outlets and individual programs vary considerably, as do the number of stories and size of the audience. The mainstream or establishment daily news media in the United States can be broken down into five main sectors. The weighting process is discussed further down in this document. In addition to front-end selections, we have also weighted the various sectors on the back end to account for differences in audience. It involves the balancing of several factors including the number of media sectors that offer news, the number of news outlets in any given sector, the amount of news programming in each outlet and the audience reach. It is a multistage sampling process that cannot be entirely formulaic or numeric because of differences in measuring systems across media. The sample is also a purposive one, selected to meet this criteria rather than to be strictly random. Therefore, our sample, based on the advice of our academic team, is designed to include a broad range of outlets-illustrative but not strictly representative of the media universe. The Universe: What we are Studyingīecause the landscape is becoming more diverse-in platform, content, style and emphasis-and because media consumption habits are also changing, even varying day to day, the Index is designed to be broad. Note: After consulting various reference guides and outside consultants on usage, the Project has chosen to refer to its several weekly content analysis reports as “indexes”-the version largely accepted in journalism-instead of “indices”-a term used more frequently in scientific or academic writing. And specific methodological information for the Campaign Coverage Index is available here.
Specific methodological information for the Talk Show Index is available here. Two variations of reports that PEJ has already produced using data from the News Coverage Index are the Talk Show Index and the Campaign Coverage Index. The basic Index does not involve additional possible questions–such as tone of stories, sourcing, or other matters–that could be the subject of secondary analysis of the material. Over time, this Index will tell us how stories ebbed and flowed, how the character or narrative focus of the story changed, and, stepping back one level further, what broad topic categories get more coverage than others.
The Index focuses on a primary variable-the topic of the story-and measures what percentage of the newshole analyzed is about that topic. The PEJ News Coverage Index analyzes a wide swath of American news media to identify what is being covered and not covered-the media’s broad news agenda.Įach week, the Index issues a report on the top stories across the mainstream news media, as well as a breakdown of how the news agenda that week differed among the media sectors–network TV, for instance, vs.
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