A study to be released Monday of financial news coverage this year found that government, Wall Street and a small handful of story lines got the bulk of the attention while much less was paid to the economic troubles of ordinary people.
The study, by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, also found that when the stock market rebounded from its lows and pitched battles in Washington ended, the news media turned their attention away from economic coverage.
Reviewing almost 10,000 reports from Feb. 1 to Aug. 31 in newspapers, on news Web sites, on the radio and on network broadcast and cable television, Pew found that almost 40 percent of economic news reports dealt with the trials of the banking and auto industries, and the federal stimulus bill passed in February.
Unemployment and the housing crisis accounted for 12 percent. And, the study said, “stories that tried to explicitly examine the broader impact of the economic downturn on the lives of ordinary Americans filled 5 percent of the economic coverage.”
Three-quarters of the reports originated from Washington or New York, and a similar number were based on the actions of government and business leaders.
In February and March, the economy was the subject of nearly half of all news coverage, driven mostly by the stimulus bill and the uses of bank bailout money. After those fights died down, financial news coverage fell by more than half.
Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Pew project, said it was easier for the national news media to cover Washington “than to fan out around the country and measure the impact on real lives.”
“There’s plenty of reason to understand why a lot of this is a Washington and New York story,” he said. “But we’re talking about something that affected almost every American in some way.”
Newspapers did more financial reporting than other media, and covered a much broader range of economic topics about a wider range of people, and they were far more likely to dig up items on their own, the study said.
Researchers at Cornell and Stanford, along with Pew and Facebook, also combed through 1.6 million Web sites to see what phrases about the economy were repeated most. Nine of the top 20 came from President Obama, like the statement Feb. 24 that “the weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation.”
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