Overview

Americans focused most closely last week on news about the nation’s troubled economy amid concerns about the stalled recovery and fears of a possible new recession.

About four-in-ten (42%) say they followed reports about the condition of the U.S. economy more closely than any other news. That is three times the number saying their top story was news about the candidates for the 2012 presidential election (14%), according to the latest weekly News Interest Index survey, conducted Aug. 18-21 among 1,007 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Economic news topped coverage as well, accounting for a quarter of the newshole (25%), according to a separate analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ). News about the 2012 elections made up 13% of all news coverage.

Melding Economic and Political News

Economic story lines top the public’s news interest. At the same time, the debate over what the federal government can or should do to help the economy has become a key issue in the 2012 race for the White House.

More than four-in-ten (44%) say they followed news about the economy very closely last week, approaching the year’s high of 49%, while 42% say this was the news they followed most closely. Another 12% say they very closely followed news about the debate among European leaders over how to address the region’s debt crisis. This was the top story for 4% and accounted for 3% of coverage.

More than a quarter (27%) say they very closely followed news about candidates for the 2012 presidential elections, up from 19% the previous week and a high point for the year so far. With Texas Gov. Rick Perry stepping up his campaign for the GOP nomination and President Obama making a campaign-style bus trip, election news made up 13% of coverage, which was little changed from 15% the previous week, when Michele Bachmann won the Republican straw poll in Iowa and Perry officially entered the race.

Coverage and interest have both increased since early August. And, as the economic news has worsened, the GOP contenders have focused their criticism on Obama’s efforts to improve the situation. Perry made news last week with blunt criticism of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke.

There are no partisan differences in attention to news about the economy with 48% of Republicans, 45% of Democrats and 47% of independents saying they followed economic news very closely. Republicans and Democrats also express similar interest in news about the 2012 elections: 36% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats followed this news very closely. Just more than two-in-ten independents (22%) say the same.

The Week’s Other News

One-in-ten (10%) say they followed news about recent scandals in college football very closely, while 6% say this was their top story for the week. The stories focused primarily on alleged NCAA rule violations at the University of Miami. News about the scandals accounted for just 1% of the coverage measured by PEJ.

Not surprisingly, this is a story that attracts the attention of men – especially younger men. Among all men, 15% say they followed this news very closely, compared with 5% of women. Among men under age 50, 19% followed news about the football scandals very closely, compared with 11% of men 50 and older.

Though the conflict in Libya appears to be reaching a critical point, the situation there attracted modest interest last week. Just 14% say they followed news about events in Libya very closely, matching the number that said this in early June, while 4% say this was the news they followed most closely. But the survey was largely completed before rebel forces made their way into Tripoli on Sunday and Moammar Gadhafi’s hold on power appeared to be slipping.

For the full week, reporting about Libya made up 3% of coverage. In total, news about the conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa accounted for 10% of coverage. Coverage and interest are likely to grow this week as Gadhafi’s fate becomes more clear.

The public paid little attention to news about Google, the internet giant, purchasing mobile phone maker Motorola Mobility. Just 7% say they followed this business story very closely; 1% say this was the news they followed most closely. The Google-Motorola story made up 2% of the coverage measured by PEJ.

These findings are based on the most recent installment of the weekly News Interest Index, an ongoing project of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. The index, building on the Center’s longstanding research into public attentiveness to major news stories, examines news interest as it relates to the news media’s coverage. The weekly survey is conducted in conjunction with The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, which monitors the news reported by major newspaper, television, radio and online news outlets on an ongoing basis. In the most recent week, data relating to news coverage were collected August 15-21, and survey data measuring public interest in the top news stories of the week were collected August 18-21 from a nationally representative sample of 1,007 adults.

The News Interest Index is a weekly survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press aimed at gauging the public’s interest in and reaction to major news events. This project has been undertaken in conjunction with the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, an ongoing content analysis of the news.  The News Coverage Index catalogues the news from top news organizations across five major sectors of the media: newspapers, network television, cable television, radio and the internet.  Each week (from Monday through Sunday) PEJ compiles this data to identify the top stories for the week.  (For more information about the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, go to www.pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/journalism.) The News Interest Index survey collects data from Thursday through Sunday to gauge public interest in the most covered stories of the week.

Results for this survey are based on telephone interviews conducted August 18-21, 2011, among a national sample of 1,007 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States (603 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 404 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 195 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older.

The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin, region, and population density to parameters from the March 2010 Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The sample is also weighted to match current patterns of telephone status based on extrapolations from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting. The following table shows the sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request.

In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.