Covering the Great Recession

How the Media Have Depicted the Economic Crisis

October 5, 2009

Citizens may be the primary victims of the economic downturn, but they are not the primary actors in the public depiction of it. Instead, a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression has been covered in the media largely from the top down, told primarily from the perspective of the Obama administration and big business, with coverage reflecting the concerns of institutions more than the lives of everyday Americans.

Media coverage of the economy has also largely centered on two cities, and focused on a relatively small number of major story lines.

An analysis of a larger array of media using new "meme tracker" technology developed at Cornell University also finds that phrases and ideas that reverberated most in the coverage came early on, mostly from government, particularly from the president and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and that few Republicans in Congress articulated any memes that got much traction.

What's more, as the story moved away from Washington -- and the news about the economy seemed to improve -- the amount of coverage of the economy dropped off substantially.

These are a few of the findings from the comprehensive study of media coverage of the economy since Obama took office. The PEJ report is comprised of three different analyses of the media's economic coverage. The basic narrative of the coverage was studied from Feb. 1 through Aug. 31, an analysis of about 9,950 stories from television, radio, cable, newspapers and online. A more detailed analysis of the sourcing in stories, the datelines, the events that triggered each story and the differences between media sectors was conducted for a shorter period, from Feb. 1 through July 3. The third element, an examination of the precise phrases and ideas that resonated most fully in the media was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Cornell University and Stanford University. This third element included an even larger universe of media -- millions of different web-based outlets, including mainstream news sites, new media sites and blog RSS feeds.

Among the findings:

Three storylines have dominated: efforts to help revive the banking sector, the battle over the stimulus package and the struggles of the U.S. auto industry. Together they accounted for nearly 40% of the economic coverage from Feb. 1 through Aug. 31. By contrast, topics that may have been harder to cover but arguably affected many more people have been covered much less. As an example, all the reporting of retail sales, food prices, the impact of the crisis on Social Security and Medicare, its effect on education and the implications for health care combined accounted for just over 2% of all the economic coverage.

Government officials and business interests drove much of what the media chose to cover. The actions of the White House and federal agencies alone initiated nearly a third (32%) of economic stories studied through July 3. Business triggered another 21%. The press itself triggered nearly a quarter of stories (23%). Conversely, union workers and ordinary citizens combined to act as the catalyst for only 2% of the stories about the economy.

Fully 76% of the datelines on economic stories studied during the first five months of the Obama presidency were New York (44%) or metro Washington D.C. (32%), the two most powerful and media-saturated cities in the country. Only about one-fifth (21%) of the stories originated in any other city in the U.S., and about a quarter of those emanated from two other major media centers: Atlanta and Los Angeles.

When it came to which phrases and ideas reverberated most in a broad array of media, an analysis of some 1.6 million news websites, blogs and other online sources finds that the president dominated. Nine of the top 20 most-quoted phrases came from him. But among Republicans, it was 38-year-old Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's voice that carried the furthest -- not any of the national party leaders. Overall, Republicans accounted for just four of the top 20 "memes" tracked in the analysis.

Once the economic situation showed some signs of improvement -- and the political fights over economic legislative action subsided -- the media began to lose interest. After accounting for 46% of the overall news coverage in February and March, for instance, coverage of the economic crisis dropped by more than half (to 21% of the newshole studied) from April through June. And in July and August, it fell even further (to 16%). The clearest example came in cable news. Once the political battles subsided, coverage fell by about two-thirds from March to April.