The Pew Research Center is an American think tank organization based in Washington, D.C. that provides information on issues, attitudes and trends shaping the United States and the world. The Center and its projects receive funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts. In 1990, Donald S. Kellermann was named to serve as the first director of what was initially known as the Times Mirror Center. It was then part of the opinion polling operation run by Times Mirror, the parent of the Los Angeles Times.

The Pew Research Center's work is carried out by seven projects:

The Pew Global Attitudes Project is a series of worldwide public-opinion surveys and reports aimed at understanding worldwide attitudes on various issues. The Project is chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Danforth. The project is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, with a supplemental grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

A research center is a facility or building dedicated to research, commonly with the focus on a specific area. There are over 14,000 research centers in the United States. Centers apply varied disciplines including basic research and applied research in addition to non traditional techniques.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.

Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is an award-winning British columnist and author, noted for his traditionalist conservative stance. He has published five books, including The Abolition of Britain, A Brief History of Crime, The Broken Compass and most recently The Rage Against God. Hitchens writes for Britain's The Mail on Sunday newspaper. A former resident correspondent in Moscow and Washington, Hitchens continues to work as an occasional foreign reporter, and appears frequently in the British broadcast media. He is the younger brother of the late US-based writer Christopher Hitchens.

In 2010 Hitchens was described by Edward Lucas in The Economist as "a forceful, tenacious, eloquent and brave journalist. Readers with long memories may remember his extraordinary coverage of the revolution in Romania in 1989, or more recently his intrepid travels to places such as North Korea. He lambasts woolly thinking and crooked behaviour at home and abroad".

Peter Hitchens was born in 1951 in Malta, where his father, who had been a commander during World War 2, was stationed with the Royal Navy. He was educated at The Leys School and the Oxford College of Further Education before doing a BA in Politics at the University of York, where he is said to have replied "I was too busy starting a revolution" when asked why he was late for a lecture. He married Eve Ross, the daughter of left-wing journalist David Ross, in 1983.^{[citation needed]} Hitchens originally hoped to become a naval officer, but an eye defect prevented him from doing so.

Tom Rosenstiel is an author, journalist, press critic and founder and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), a research organization that studies the news media and is part of the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. A journalist for more than 30 years, he worked as a media critic for the Los Angeles Times and chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek magazine and as co-founder and vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. Among his books, he is the co-author of the popular The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect." He appears often on radio, television and in print, and has written widely on politics and media.

A graduate of Oberlin College and the Columbia School of Journalism, Rosenstiel began his career as a reporter for muckraking political columnist Jack Anderson. He worked at The Peninsula Times Tribune, his hometown paper in Palo Alto, CA, as a business reporter and Business Editor from 1980 to 1983. He then spent 12 years at the Los Angeles Times, most of those as a media critic and Washington correspondent. He left the Times in 1995 to join Newsweek Magazine, where he served as chief congressional correspondent and covered the Gingrich revolution.