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Mitt Romney needed 15 weeks once the primary contests began to gain a secure hold over his party’s nomination for president. But he emerged as the conclusive winner in the media narrative about the race six weeks earlier, following a narrow win in his native state, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that examines in detail the media’s coverage of the race.

After Romney’s tight victory in the Michigan primary on Feb. 28, news coverage about his candidacy became measurably more favorable and the portrayal of his rivals—particularly Rick Santorum—began to become more negative and to shrink in volume. One main component of that shift in the narrative is that after Michigan, the news media began to view Romney’s nomination as essentially inevitable. Indeed, a close look at the coverage finds that references to delegate math and the concept of electoral inevitability spiked in the media the week after Michigan, rising twelve fold, for instance, on television news programs. From that point on, the amount of attention in the press to Romney’s candidacy began to overwhelm that of his rivals, and the tone of coverage about him, which had been often mixed or negative before, became solidly positive. A look inside the coverage also reveals that Romney endured more media "vetting" of his record and personal character than the other Republican contenders. Since November, just over 12% of the coverage in which Romney was a significant figure was devoted to those subjects. The press focused in particular on his wealth and his experience at the private equity investment firm Bain Capital.

Ofcom, the UK media regulator, has launched an investigation into Sky News, the channel run by BSkyB, following its admission that it hacked the e-mails of individuals suspected of criminal activity.

Earlier this month BSkyB, 39.1 percent owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, said it authorized a journalist to access e-mails belonging to John Darwin, dubbed the “canoe man” because he faked his death in a canoeing accident. Sky insisted that it was acting in the public interest because it shared information with the police which led to a criminal conviction. The news of the latest probe will come as a blow to Mr Murdoch is who due to testify at the Leveson inquiry into press ethics April 25 and 26. The regulator is weighing whether News Corp is a “fit and proper” owner of a broadcasting license.

Back in 2004, as Google prepared to go public, Larry Page and Sergey Brin celebrated the maxim that was supposed to define their company: “Don’t be evil.” But these days, a lot of people — at least the mere mortals outside the Googleplex — seem to be wondering about that uncorporate motto. How is it that Google, a company chockablock with brainiac engineers, savvy marketing types and flinty legal minds, keeps getting itself in hot water? Google, which stood up to the Death Star of Microsoft? Which changed the world as we know it?

The latest brouhaha, of course, involves the strange tale of Street View, Google’s project to photograph the entire world, one street at a time, for its maps feature. It turns out Google was collecting more than just images: federal authorities have dinged the company for lifting personal data off Wi-Fi systems, too, including e-mails and passwords. Evil? Hard to know. But certainly weird — and enough to prompt a small fine of $25,000 from the Federal Communications Commission and, far more damaging, howls from Congress and privacy advocates. A Google spokeswoman called the hack “a mistake” and disagreed with the F.C.C.’s contention that Google “deliberately impeded and delayed” the commission’s investigation. Many people might let this one go, were it not for all those other worrisome things at Google. The company has been accused of flouting copyrights, leveraging other people’s work for its benefit and violating European protections of personal privacy, among other things. “Don’t be evil” no longer has its old ring. And Google, an underdog turned overlord, is no humble giant. It tends to approach any controversy with an air that ranges somewhere between “trust us” and “what’s good for Google is good for the world.” But ascribing what’s going on here solely to the power or arrogance of a single company misses an important dimension of today’s high-technology business, where there are frequent assaults, real or perceived, on various business standards and practices.

Qualcomm said it was having problems finding enough capacity to manufacture chips designed for mobile phones, something that’s likely to become more common as the physics that govern how we make semiconductors buckles under the demands of our increasingly mobile lives. But this isn’t just about Moore’s Law; this is a story of how the demands for more performance, less power and smaller sizes are all combining to force changes in the chip industry.

The chip industry is well aware that it’s about to hit a wall and everyone from Intel to startups have been working on solutions. That’s why last year Intel made a big deal of its 3-D transistors. This is a new way of making transistors that helps address some of the problems that arise from smaller channel widths — a breakthrough that Intel has been working on for 10 years. The chip industry must adapt to deliver the performance we need in lower power envelopes, and the solutions to that problem range from “rip and replace” options like quantum computing to the efforts described above. All of these will help bridge the demand our mobile devices are placing on chips. In the meantime, the increasing complexity is helping chip manufacturing equipment makers like Applied and startups that are seeking a new way.