Overview

The final days of the trial of George Zimmerman, which concluded July 13 with a verdict of not guilty, attracted relatively modest public interest overall. In a weekend survey, 26% say they were following news about the trial very closely.

This is lower than interest in the initial controversy over Trayvon Martin’s shooting when it erupted last year. In March 2012, 35% said they followed news about Martin’s shooting very closely.

However, the story has consistently attracted far more interest among blacks than whites – and that remained the case in the trial’s final days. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to say they tracked news about the Zimmerman trial very closely (56% vs. 20%).

Moreover, fully 67% of blacks say they watched at least some live coverage of the Zimmerman trial, compared with 38% of whites. About one-in-five blacks (21%) say they watched “almost all’’ of the trial coverage; just 5% of whites reported watching almost all of it.

The Pew Research Center survey was conducted July 11-14 among 1,002 adults. In 237 interviews conducted July 14

, the day after the Zimmerman verdict, 29% say they were following news about the trial very closely.

The Zimmerman trial and Trayvon Martin shooting have drawn less interest than some other racially charged incidents in recent years, including the riots that followed the Rodney King verdict in 1992 (70% very closely) and O.J. Simpson’s arrest in 1994 (48%).

Racial Gap in News Interest

Blacks have consistently expressed more interest than whites in Trayvon Martin’s shooting and the prosecution and trial of George Zimmerman. Currently 56% of blacks and just 20% of whites say they followed news about the trial very closely.

Racial differences in interest about Martin’s shooting and its aftermath are wider than in interest in the police beating of Rodney King in March 1991, as well as the acquittal of the officers and subsequent riots in May 1992. The racial gap in interest in Martin/Zimmerman news also is wider than in O.J. Simpson’s arrest in June 1994 and his trial a year later.

However, the racial gaps in interest were as wide in some other recent racially charged stories – including news in 2007 about the “Jena Six” (the prosecution of Louisiana teens involved in a school fight) and the 2000 acquittal of four New York City police officers in the shooting death of Amadou Diallo.

Trial Viewership: Zimmerman vs. O.J

Fully 67% of blacks say they watched at least some live coverage of the Zimmerman trial, with 21% saying they watched “almost all” the trial coverage. Just 38% of whites say they watched at least some coverage of Zimmerman’s court proceedings; only 5% say they watched almost all the coverage of the trial.

Nearly three times as many whites as blacks say they watched no live coverage of the Zimmerman trial (36% vs. 13%).

About as many blacks reported watching at least some live coverage of the Zimmerman trial as watched the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. In March of that year, 71% of blacks said they watched at least some trial coverage.

Whites are far less likely to say they tuned into the Zimmerman trial than the Simpson trial. In March 1995, half of whites said they watched at least some coverage of the Simpson court proceedings; today, 38% say the same about coverage of the Zimmerman trial.

News of the Week

While 26% of Americans say they followed news about the Zimmerman trial very closely about as many (24%) say they tracked news about a plane crash in San Francisco very closely.

Among other stories, 18% followed news about the debate over immigration policy very closely, while comparable percentages paid very close attention to efforts by Edward Snowden to gain asylum (16%) and the situation in Egypt (15%).

The “royal baby” attracted very little public interest: Just 5% followed news about about the upcoming birth of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s first baby, one of the lowest levels of interest for any news story this year. In recent years, news about the royals has been very limited, with one notable exception – the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

Zimmerman Trial and Social Media

For the entire survey period (July 11-14

), 28% of those who use Facebook, Twitter or other social networking sites reported hearing a lot about the Zimmerman trial from these sources. However, the share of social networkers hearing a lot about the trial spiked to 44% on Sunday, the day after the six-person jury found Zimmerman not guilty.

In July 2011, a comparable percentage of those who use social network sites (40%) said they heard a lot about verdict in the Casey Anthony trial from Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites.

More young social network users than older users reported hearing a lot about the Zimmerman trial from these sources.  Among SNS users, about a third (35%) of those under age 30 heard a lot about the Zimmerman trial compared with 23% of those 50 and older.

The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted July 11-14, 2013, among a national sample of 1,002 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States (502 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 500 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 268 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. For detailed information about our survey methodology, see:  http://pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/politics/methodology/.

The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin and region to parameters from the 2011 Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and population density to parameters from the Decennial Census. The sample also is weighted to match current patterns of telephone status, based on extrapolations from the 2012 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 among respondents with a landline phone. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting. The following table shows the unweighted 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.