Pew Research Center

Washington Monthly Blogger: ‘Politicized Religion’ Drives ‘Moderate-Minded People’ Away From Faith
By Tom Johnson | May 13, 2015 | 10:38 AM EDT

A new Pew Research study found that between 2007 and 2014, the percentage of Americans self-identifying as Christian fell from 78.4 to 70.6. In a Tuesday post, Martin Longman speculated about causes for the dropoff, commenting that “the Republican Party’s embrace of a very conservative interpretation of Christianity” may be “undermining people’s faith.”

Longman added that it’s not solely the fault of the domestic religious right: “Islamic radicals…committing unspeakable atrocities in Allah’s name” and “Jewish radicals…standing in the way of [Israeli-Palestinian] peace negotiations” share the blame. “Most of the war and killing that is going on in the world today is generated by disputes between or within a small handful of very well-established traditional religions,” he remarked. “If the whole world woke up tomorrow with no memory of the New Testament, the Torah, or the Koran, it’s quite possible that peace would break out in ways that seem unthinkable today.”

Pew Poll Finds 59 Percent Support For ‘Completely Changing’ Federal Tax System, Networks Ignore
By Joseph Rossell | March 23, 2015 | 4:21 PM EDT

Tax Day is rapidly approaching and most Americans say the federal tax system “should be completely changed.”

The Pew Research Center recently conducted a poll that found a majority of Americans supported “Congress completely changing the federal tax system.” Pew announced the findings March 19, which showed 59 percent of its respondents agreed with a total overhaul of federal taxation.

Salon: Republicans Who Feel ‘Threatened’ By Obama Policies Are ‘In Need of a Reality Check’
By Tom Johnson | July 9, 2014 | 7:14 AM EDT

Much like Don Quixote mistook windmills for giants and wished to do battle with them, Republicans wrongly perceive Democrats as extreme leftists and consequently work themselves into an ideological lather.

That was, essentially, one of the main points that Salon’s Paul Rosenberg made in his Saturday piece on "Tea Party phonies" pegged to the Pew Research Center’s recent study on American political polarization. Rosenberg contended, reasonably enough, that congressional Republicans as a group are far more conservative than their counterparts of fifty years ago, but also claimed strangely that congressional Democrats are, overall, no more liberal than their mid-’60s predecessors.

Pew Report: MSNBC Lost More Viewers, Revenue in 2013 Than Fox News, CNN Combined
By Randy Hall | March 26, 2014 | 11:00 PM EDT

According to a new report released on Wednesday by the Pew Research Center, the liberal MSNBC channel's prime-time audience fell 24 percent to 619,500 during the last calendar year, more than the Cable News Network -- which dropped 13 percent to a viewership of 543,000 – and the Fox News Channel, which lost 6 percent but still easily held onto first place with 1.75 million viewers.

As if that weren't bad enough, the “Lean Forward” network's revenue in 2013 lost 2 percent to total only $475 million. During the same period, CNN's income grew 2 percent to reach $1.11 billion, and the revenue for Fox News increased 5 percent to a tidy sum of $1.89 billion.

Pew's 'Stateline' Pushes Alarmist Message on Texas Abortion Law; Reuters, by Contrast, Gives Readers Nuance
By Ken Shepherd | July 25, 2013 | 6:30 PM EDT

"New state restrictions on clinics that provide abortions could leave millions of women -- many of them poor and uninsured -- without easy access to cancer screenings and other basic health care services," worried Jake Grovum of the Pew Charitable Trust's Stateline news agency in his heavily-slanted July 24 piece at USAToday.com headlined "Anti-abortion measures may hit women's health care." Grovum quoted two foes of abortion regulation laws -- making sure to give one of them the last word in his 16 paragraph story. By contrast, he cited just one pro-life proponent of clinic regulation, Alabama State Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin.

But aside from the article's imbalance and the all-too-common meme that women only have abortion clinics to turn to for free or low-cost health care -- patently untrue as we've noted time and again -- Grovum's article was off-base for suggesting that abortion clinics will become an endangered species in states which regulate them. By contrast, as Lisa Maria Garza of Reuters explained in her July 18 story, "Why many abortion clinics in Texas may stay open despite new law," abortion-rights advocates who study changes in abortion laws for a living admit that clinic closures might not be a widespread as feared by the Wendy Davis-types in the pro-choice lobby (emphasis mine):