Survey Report

From news about the economy to controversy over Hillary Clinton’s emails and the trial of the Boston marathon bomber, no single story dominated the public’s news interest last week.

Two stories drew far more interest from Republicans than Democrats: 34% of Republicans followed reports about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address as secretary of state very closely, compared with just 16% of Democrats. Similarly, about twice as many Republicans (34%) as Democrats (18%) closely followed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress last Tuesday.

There are smaller partisan differences in interest in the week’s other stories. For instance, comparable percentages of Democrats (26%) and Republicans (22%) paid very close attention to arguments at the Supreme Court over the Affordable Care Act; 30% of Democrats and 24% of Republicans very closely followed news about the Department of Justice report on race and policing in Ferguson, Mo.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted March 5-8 among 1,000 adults, finds wide racial and ideological differences in interest in the Ferguson report. Roughly four-in-ten blacks (42%) followed news about the report very closely, compared with 18% of whites and 13% of Hispanics. Nearly half of liberal Democrats (46%) paid very close attention to the Ferguson report, making it the top story of the week for liberal Democrats.

By contrast, 29% of conservative Republicans followed the Justice Department report on Ferguson very closely. The top stories of the week for conservative Republicans are news about Clinton’s emails (44% following very closely) and Netanyahu’s speech to Congress (43%).

As is typically the case, there are substantial age differences in news interest, with adults 50 and older paying more attention than those under 30 to the week’s stories. But young people expressed especially low interest in stories about Netanyahu and Clinton’s emails: Just 3% followed news about Netanyahu’s address to C0ngress very closely, while just 4% said the same regarding news about Clinton’s emails as secretary of state. Among those 50 and older, 29% followed news on Netanyahu’s speech very closely and 22% tracked Clinton’s emails very closely.

The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted March 5-8, 2015 among a national sample of 1,000 adults, 18 years of age or older, living in the continental United States (500 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 500 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 298 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Survey Sampling International, LLC 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 https://alpha.pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/methodology/u-s-survey-research/

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 2013 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 (landline only, cell phone only, or both landline and cell phone), based on extrapolations from the 2014 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. The margins of error reported and statistical tests of significance are adjusted to account for the survey’s design effect, a measure of how much efficiency is lost from the weighting procedures.

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.

Pew Research Center is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)3 organization and a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder.