Project for Excellence in Journalism
So far the coverage has defied the tendency seen in many major national news events to turn quickly partisan, according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The mainstream media’s major themes: Trying to parse out the details leading up to and during the raid, and sorting through the national and international reaction to it. Pew examine more than 120,000 news stories, 100,000 blog posts, and 6.9 million posts on Twitter or Facebook and found that:
* The largest share of discussion on Facebook and Twitter, (19 percent) has involved people sharing jokes. The second largest theme (17 percent) involved the question of whether bin Laden was really dead.
* One quarter (25 percent) of the mainstream media coverage involved reconstructing the commando mission at bin Laden’s secret hiding place.
* The second-biggest storyline in the mainstream press (24 percent) was reaction to bin Laden’s death from around the world and around the country. || The PEJ report also notes:
Two of the top themes in the blogosphere involved concerns that got less attention in the mainstream press. One of them (at 13%) was fear or unease about the potential retribution for the raid. In that vein, a number of bloggers reprinted sections of an Associated Press story reporting the Homeland Security Department’s warning of possible retaliatory attacks. That was the No. 2 storyline in blogs, just behind straight accounts of what happened (14%). || Read the full report.
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