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Project for Excellence in Journalism
For a Second Straight Week, It's the Debt Crisis and Tabloid Scandal
Two stories that have become fixtures in the headlines -- the deadlocked debt debate and the intensifying News of the World phone hacking scandal -- accounted for more than half of last week's newshole, relegating other significant events to secondary status in the media.
During the week of July 18-24, the U.S. economy was the No. 1 story at 35% of the newshole, almost tied with the previous week's level of interest (37%), according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
That marked the fifth week in a row that the economy topped the mainstream news agenda, the coverage almost entirely driven by bipartisan disagreement over raising the debt limit and how to trim the budget deficit. That storyline accounted for more than three-quarters of the economic coverage last week.
Overall last week, economic coverage was biggest in cable and radio news -- the two sectors that include the ideological talk shows -- where it accounted for nearly half of all coverage on both platforms.
Meanwhile, coverage of the hacking scandal surrounding Rupert Murdoch's media empire -- which last week included his testimony before the British Parliament -- rose to 17% of the newshole, up from 12% and 6% the two previous weeks.
That high level of media interest in its own industry is somewhat unusual. Last week's coverage made the scandal the second-biggest media story since PEJ began tracking coverage in January 2007. The No. 1 media-focused story (26%) occurred the week of April 8-13, 2007, when radio talk host Don Imus lost his job for making racist and sexist remarks on the air.
The sustained and expanding nature of the story was unusual, too -- last week was the third consecutive week that the News of the World scandal ranked among the top five stories. Only one other media-focused story -- the release of troves of secret government information through open-source whistleblower Wikileaks -- lasted as long in the spotlight, (it was a top-five story for three straight weeks in December 2010). That story, however, decreased in media attention each week over that period, while the News of the World scandal has thus far increased each week.
The No. 3 story last week was a major heat wave that made its way from the Midwest to the East Coast, accounting for 5% of the newshole. By the end of the week, news outlets were reporting that as many as 34 people had died due to the extreme heat.
The U.S. presidential campaign came in at No. 4, at 4%. In recent weeks, the public and media attention to the deficit debates in Washington have easily overshadowed the campaign as a major story. Indeed, since July 4, the campaign has only accounted for 4% of the newshole.
The No. 5 story, at 3% of the newshole, was the end of the final mission of the NASA shuttle Atlantis. That marked the end of an era, and news organizations took the opportunity to reflect on the decades of space exploration by the U.S. program.
The week's No. 6 story (at 2%) was the worst attack in Norway's postwar history when one man allegedly orchestrated a bombing and a shooting that left nearly 100 people dead. The July 22 attack occurred late in the week, which may explain the relatively low level of coverage in the News Coverage Index.
Read the full report at journalism.org. See also the latest News Interest Index at people-press.org and an analysis at journalism.org about which players in the debt debate are commanding the most coverage.