Two out of five media agreed: Immigration was the #1 story for the week of 6/24-29/07, and that was enough to put it at the top of the overall Project for Excellence in Journalism coverage chart. Radio REALLY was homed in on immigration, giving it a huge 27% of its time, leading to a 12% overall rating. Newspapers gave it 14%, and in a major anomaly, it was the only topic on all five top ten lists. Online news sources gave events in Iraq a narrow win, network TV focused on the Supreme Court and cable was fascinated by the latest UK terror plot.
Overall, after immigration, there was only a 3% difference between the other nine stories on the top ten list. In another anomaly, online news services managed to skip numbers two through five. The intramural Palestinian conflict was the biggest story to fall out of the top ten. The fire disaster in Charleston SC was replaced with one at Lake Tahoe, and the Texas flooding story was expanded to include other states in the Great Plains. Radio, besides its fascination with the immigration story, had another fascination which it shared with no other medium: The Fairness Doctrine. Hmmmmm, now why would that be?
