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Project for Excellence in Journalism
Osama bin Laden's Death Dominates the News
The death of Osama bin Laden drove unprecedented amounts of coverage last week, making it the biggest story in a single week since the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism began tracking mainstream media coverage in January 2007.
Coverage of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and its aftermath, accounted for 69% of the newshole during the week of May 2-8, according to PEJ's News Coverage Index. That edged out the media attention (just under 69%) devoted to the presidential campaign from Aug. 25-31, 2008, when Democrats nominated Barack Obama at their Denver convention and John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his surprise running mate.
On cable television alone, the bin Laden story accounted for a staggering 90% of the airtime studied last week.
In another illustration of the enormity of coverage, bin Laden was a dominant newsmaker in 28% of last week's stories, the most media attention devoted to anyone since the week of Barack Obama's inauguration, Jan. 19-25, 2009.
Overall coverage of the story did taper somewhat throughout the week. On Monday, it accounted for 83% of the newshole. On Friday, it accounted for 40%. Yet even at its lowest level, the subject dominated all other news events.
The biggest bin Laden storyline from May 2-8 was piecing together the dramatic narrative of the mission to kill him, which accounted for 36% of all bin Laden coverage as new details -- and sometimes corrections to previous details -- continued to emerge throughout the week.
The second biggest storyline was coverage of the political implications of the event, at 15%. But that lagged well behind the narrative thread. Even on cable news, which focuses heavily on political and partisan issues, that thread accounted for only 13% of the airtime. The next biggest storyline was the role of Pakistan and its impact on U.S.-Pakistan relations, at 10%. Then came the implications for future terrorism and national security, at 7% of all bin Laden coverage.
Toward the end of the week, however, some aspects of the narrative began to change as the media explored new angles. On Friday, May 6, attention to the political implications of the killing accounted for over one-fifth of all bin Laden coverage. The numbers were about the same that day for Obama's visit to the World Trade Center as well as for coverage of the broader implications for the fight against terrorism. Those were some of the narratives that finally began to supplant the tick-tock recounting of events, which made up 16% of the coverage studied that day, down from 53% on Monday.
The impact and intensity of this story prompted PEJ to release a May 9 special report on the early coverage of the death of bin Laden, using computer technology by Crimson Hexagon that examined more than 120,000 news stories from May 1 through May 4. An updated analysis of Crimson Hexagon, incorporating the rest of the week, found little overall change in the mainstream media conversation about bin Laden. About a third of it focused on the events of the raid. Another quarter focused on the global reaction to the death. These and the other narratives comprising coverage of bin Laden's death largely tracked along with PEJ's NCI sample of outlets for the week.
All this wall-to-wall attention left little room for the media to focus on anything else last week. In fact, the No. 2 story, the U.S. economy, registered at 5% of the newshole, a whopping 64 percentage points behind the bin Laden saga.