Terror Tops the News Agenda

More than eight years after 9/11, the ability of a terror attack—even a failed one—to transform and dominate the news landscape was evident last week. With the fallout from the Christmas Day airline bombing plot as the No. 1 story, topics intertwined with terrorism accounted for more than one-third (36%) of the newshole from January 4-10, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. That represents the biggest week of terror-related coverage since PEJ's News Coverage Index began in January 2007. At the same time, the two top domestic policy issues, the economy and health care, combined to account for 15% of last week's overall coverage.