Survey Report

The public followed news about the missing Malaysia Airlines plane more closely than any other story last week. While the story has attracted extensive news coverage, especially from cable TV outlets, most Americans do not feel there has been too much coverage of the missing jetliner.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted March 20-23 among 1,002 adults, finds that 44% followed news about the missing Malaysian jetliner most closely, far surpassing interest in any other story. Russia’s annexation of Crimea was a distant second, with 15% following that news most closely.

Nearly half of Americans (48%) say news organizations are giving the right amount of coverage to the investigation into the missing jetliner; another 12% say there has been too little coverage of this story. A third (33%) think the investigation into plane’s fate has received too much coverage.

However, more people think that the missing jetliner has received too much news coverage than say that about two other stories last week – Russia’s actions in Crimea and the rollout of the 2010 health care law; just 14% each view those stories as over-covered. For the most part, the public sees the amount of coverage of Russia and Crimea as appropriate (56% right amount). But fewer (40%) say that news about the rollout of the health care law has gotten the right amount of coverage. Nearly four-in-ten (37%) say implementation of the health care law has been under-covered by news organizations – the highest percentage of the three stories asked about.

More women than men said they followed news about the missing plane very closely (45% vs. 32%). Women view the amount of coverage as appropriate; 54% say there has been the right amount of coverage, while just half as many (27%) see it as excessive. By comparison, men are more divided: about four-in-ten men each say there has been the right amount (42%) and too much (38%) coverage.

Opinions about the plane coverage vary by education level, as well, even though similar shares of each group closely followed the story. Among adults with a college degree, about as many say there has been too much coverage (45%) as say the right amount of coverage (46%). Among those with a high school degree or less, 23% see too much coverage and 52% say it is the right amount.

About four-in-ten Republicans (41%) say there has been too much coverage of the missing jetliner. That compares with 34% of independents and just 25% of Democrats.

The Week’s Top Stories

Malaysian Airline Flight 370 went missing on March 8. Since then, there has been intensive speculation about what might have happened to the plane. Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, announced March 24 that the flight went down in the Indian Ocean.

The survey, conducted March 20-23, found that while nearly four-in-ten (39%) followed news about the investigation into the missing jetliner very closely, 30% each tracked news about Russia taking control of Crimea and the U.S. economy very closely.

But when people are asked which story they followed most closely, interest in the probe into the Malaysian plane’s fate far exceeds interest in the week’s other news stories.

As is typically the case, young people express less interest in most of this week’s news stories than do older adults. Only about a quarter of those under 30 (26%) tracked news about the missing jetliner very closely, by far the lowest share of any age group.

When it comes to news about the government’s phone and internet surveillance programs, however, young adults are about as interested as older people. Moreover, among young people interest in news about surveillance programs (14% very closely) is about on par with interest in news about Russia and Crimea (15%) and news about the rollout of the 2010 health care law (9%).

The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted March 20-23, 2014 among a national sample of 1,002 adults, 18 years of age or older, living in the continental United States (501 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 501 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 299 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 and Spanish. 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 nativity and region to parameters from the 2012 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 2013 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.