The much disdained debt ceiling deal,
followed by a barrage of ominous news from Wall Street and a top credit rating
agency, drove coverage of the economy to its second highest level in 2011.
From August 1-7, the economy accounted
for 45% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence
in Journalism—down modestly from 52% the previous week, when the debt debate
drama was peaking.
One thing that distinguished last week’s
economic coverage was the overwhelmingly negative tone to the news that
followed the August 2 debt agreement. That included reports of widespread
public dissatisfaction with the deal—and the process that produced it—as well
as a 513 point plunge in stock prices on August 4. That was followed by the
August 5 bombshell that Standard & Poor’s was downgrading the U.S. credit
rating for the first time ever.
Another story that reinforced the sense
of gridlock in Washington, the battle over funding the Federal Aviation
Administration, was the No. 3 subject last week, at 6%.
The economy was the No. 1 story last
week in all five media sectors studied by PEJ, receiving the most attention on
cable news (63% of the airtime), which is fueled by the ideological prime-time
cable shows. And attention to the deficit and debt ceiling storyline was still high,
accounting for almost 60% of all the economic coverage. But the stock market
travails and more news on the employment picture combined to account for about
another quarter of the economic newshole.
The week’s No. 2 story (7%) was the
continuing unrest in the Middle East. The key newsmakers included the Syrian
government’s assault on the city of Hama and former Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak’s appearance—infirm and caged—in an Egyptian courtroom, an event that
seemed to symbolize the sweeping change underway in that region.
The week’s fourth and fifth stories
revisited two of the biggest newsmaking events in 2011. The No. 4 story (3%) focused on Osama bin Laden after
a New Yorker magazine piece provided a minute-by-minute account of the May 1
raid on his Pakistan compound that killed the al Qaeda leader. The aftermath of
bin Laden’s death had accounted for 69% of the newshole from May 2-8,
2011—making it the single biggest story since PEJ began tracking the news in
January 2007.
The No. 5 subject (2%) was Arizona
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ dramatic return to Congress—eight months
after she was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt—to vote on the debt
ceiling agreement. That shooting rampage had accounted for 57% of the newshole
from January 10-16, 2011.
The
Debt Deal and Economy: A Grim Media Narrative
In the weeks leading up the eleventh-hour
agreement on raising the debt ceiling, the press was consumed with the ups and
downs of the negotiating process, often alternating between hopeful and pessimistic
coverage as the chances for a significant deal waxed and waned.
But almost as soon as the ink dried on
President Obama’s signature, the storyline turned relentlessly negative as
various parties—from the man in the street to the Wall Street investor—weighed
in on the deal.
One
of the first tidings of bad news was
a CNN poll
that surfaced on August 2 and reported that 77% of the respondents believed
elected officials had behaved like “spoiled children” during the debt negotiations.
That same day, the Atlantic Journal
Constitution sampled
public opinion in that region. And the verdict was thumbs down.
“Washington
may expect people to cheer the debt ceiling deal negotiated over the weekend,
but Georgians such as Beth Gray are still disgusted that partisan rancor
brought the country to the brink of crisis," the story stated. “Our
government should be fired. Every single one of them," said Gray, 23, a
technical writer from Alpharetta. "The Democrats say they won. The
Republicans say they won. They're all idiots."
The
August 3 Washington Post made
it clear that investors weren’t pleased with the agreement either: “The
package did not cheer the stock market, where the major indexes tumbled more
than 2 percent on worries that the U.S. economic recovery is stalling and that
the debt plan might even undermine it by weakening demand in the next year or
two. These fears…have discouraged some investors, especially after political
leaders in Washington raised expectations in recent weeks that they would reach
consensus on putting the nation's financial house in order.”
One
day later, a USA
Today poll put some numbers behind the sour public sentiment.
“The hard-won, last-minute agreement to
raise the debt ceiling and cut the deficit gets low ratings from Americans, who
by more than 2-to-1 predict it will make the nation's fragile economy worse
rather than better,” the paper reported.
Of the key players in the process, none
of them fared well with the public, with President Obama doing the best by getting
a 41% approval rating for his role in the negotiations. That topped the ratings
for House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and
congressional Tea Party members.
Amid all this naysaying came another
major event: on Thursday August 4, the stock market plunged perilously, falling
513 points.
“What began as a weak day in the stock markets
ended in the worst rout in more than two years, as investors dumped stocks amid
anxiety that both Europe and the United States were failing to fix deepening
economic problems,” declared the New York Times. “With a steep decline of
around 5 percent in the United States on Thursday, stocks have now fallen nearly
11 percent in two weeks.”
The next shoe dropped on August 5 when Standard
& Poor’s registered its dismay with the debt deal by downgrading U.S.
credit.
“The credit rating agency on Friday lowered
the nation's AAA rating for the first time since granting it in 1917,” the
Associated Press reported. “The move came less than a week after a gridlocked
Congress finally agreed to spending cuts that would reduce the debt by more
than $2 trillion—a tumultuous process that contributed to convulsions in
financial markets….The promised cuts were not enough to satisfy S&P.”
In a week that started with a sense of some relief that a debt agreement had
avoided default, the story quickly went downhill from there.
The Rest of the Week’s News
While unrest in the Middle East was the dominant story in the first quarter
of 2011—accounting for one-quarter of the newshole—media attention has dropped
so significantly since the beginning of the “Arab spring” protests that last
week’s coverage (7%) represented the highest level in two months. It was driven
by the increasingly bloody conflict in Syria and Mubarak’s courtroom
appearance. At the same time, the continuing fighting in Libya has virtually
dropped off the media radar screen.
The third-biggest story, (6%) was about the political battle that resulted
in a partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration until a compromise
was reached late in the week. Much of the media coverage suggested the dispute
was another example of a dysfunctional Washington.
On the August 4 edition of ABC’s evening newscast David Muir noted that the
FAA showdown resulted from an effort by “some lawmakers…to stop subsidies to
small airports [in order] to save some sixteen million dollars a year in
taxpayer money…The problem is, while trying to save that $16 million, they were
actually costing taxpayers $30 million every day” in lost airport tax revenues
and fees on tickets.
The detailed
New Yorker piece on the bin Laden raid triggered media reaction to the
story and accounted for 3% of the newshole. Perhaps the biggest revelation in
the piece was the assertion that the elite team of Navy Seals was clearly on a
mission to kill the al Qaeda chief, with capturing him not deemed a viable
option.
Finally, the return of Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to
Congress (2%) prompted an outpouring of emotion.
“U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords received a standing
ovation as she entered the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives today to
vote in favor of legislation to avoid a default by the U.S. government,”
reported the Arizona Daily Star. “Wearing a blue jacket and smiling, Giffords
hugged colleagues as she prepared to cast her first vote since January.”
Last week, Giffords’ return provided a very rare
piece of good news from Washington.
Newsmakers
of the Week
The man at the center of last week’s economic
news, President Obama, was a dominant newsmaker in 8% of all the stories from
August 1-7—up slightly from 7% the week before. (To register as a dominant
newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a story.)
The second leading newsmaker, at 2%, was Gabrielle
Giffords as she re-emerged in the public spotlight following her arduous
recovery from the shooting attack.
Next, at 1% came two people who were in trouble
with the law for very different reasons. One was polygamist sect leader Warren
Jeffs, who was convicted of sexually assaulting two young girls. The other was
former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whose trial on murder and corruption
charges began last week.
The fifth leading newsmaker, also at 1%, was Casey
Anthony who had been acquitted in early July after a high profile trial. Much of the public was outraged that Anthony
was not convicted for the murder of her two-year-old daughter Caylee and last
week, there was some legal skirmishing over her probation status.
About the NCI
PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index
examines the news agenda of 52 different outlets from five sectors of the
media: print, online, network TV, cable and radio. (See List of Outlets.) The weekly study, which includes some 900 stories, is
designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data
about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of that
media narrative and differences among news platforms. The percentages are based
on "newshole," or the space devoted to each subject in print and
online and time on radio and TV. (See Our Methodology.) In addition, these reports also include a rundown of the
week’s leading newsmakers, a designation given to people who account for at
least 50% of a given story.
Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ
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