Almost immediately after the February 26 shooting of Trayvon Martin, the conversation about the case began simmering on Twitter. But it was nearly three weeks later, on March 17-after the release of 911 tapes-before the story exploded on Twitter, on blogs and in the mainstream media to become the first story of the year to get more coverage than the race for the president. 

As attention to the story surged, the focus within these three parts of our media culture varied greatly, according to a special report by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. On Twitter, the conversation has focused on sympathy for the slain teenager and expressions of outrage at the killing. On blogs, the emphasis has been on the role of race in the highly charged case. In the mainstream media, the Trayvon Martin controversy was heavily a cable news and talk radio story. And there, the primary discussion has focused on two politically oriented issues-gun control laws and the Florida Stand Your Ground statute, which gives citizens the right to use deadly force when they believe they are being threatened.

Moreover, the Martin story has been a much bigger story on MSNBC, whose talk show hosts are liberal, and a much smaller story on Fox, whose prime time lineup leans conservative. The focus of the discussion differs as well. Conservative talkers paid the most attention to questions about who Martin is and to the defense of the man who pulled the trigger, George Zimmerman.  Liberal hosts focused primarily on gun control and the Florida law.

A Story that Took Two Weeks to Emerge

Travyon Martin, the 17-year-old African American walking home from a convenience store, was shot by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman on February 26. In the days immediately after, the shooting got more attention in social media than in the national mainstream press, though even on Twitter and in blogs the attention was still fairly modest.

That changed on March 17 after the release of 911 audio tapes of Zimmerman calling police who advised him not to follow Martin. The volume on Twitter doubled overnight and continued to rise for the next several days.[1] The same thing happened in the blogosphere, where the discussion had been minimal at the outset.

The same triggering event also jump started coverage in the national press. According to PEJ's News Coverage Index, the Trayvon Martin story became the No.1 story after the 17th, filling 19% of the newshole studied from March 19-27 -exceeding coverage of the presidential campaign (14%). This was the first story of the year to get more attention than the campaign in any given week.

Most of that attention came from cable news and talk radio.

Differing Focus By Media

Yet while all three sectors of media were suddenly trained on the event, their focus was just as striking for how it differed.

On Twitter, the conversation focused heavily on calls for justice (21% of the statements about the case) and sympathy for the victim and his family (19%). Together those two themes made up 40% of all the discussion about the case, which included millions of tweets on the subject over the 11 days since it became a major story.

On blogs, the No. 1 theme of the conversation (accounting for 15% of it) was the role of race. That was followed calls for justice (13%).

And on cable news and talk radio, the most discussed topic was legalistic, the subject of gun control and Florida's Stand Your Ground law.  That accounted for 17% of the airtime devoted to the case.[2] That was followed by questions about Trayvon Martin and defense of George Zimmerman.

 

MSNBC, with a liberal prime time lineup, devoted the largest portion of its newshole to the story. Fully 49% of MSNBC programming studied was dedicated to the case. On CNN, the case made up 40% of the hours studied during the period. Fox News covered the story much less than the other two outlets. It devoted 15% of its airtime studied to the case. Not only did the three cable news channels cover the story to different degrees. They homed in on different aspects of the case.

MSNBC devoted the most attention the gun control issue and Florida's Stand Your Ground law. The second-most popular topic on MSNBC was the city of Sanford, including discussion of its police force and the city's rocky racial history.

The leading theme of CNN's coverage of the case involved questions about Trayvon Martin and the defense of Zimmerman followed closely by straight news accounts.

On Fox, questions about Trayvon Martin's past and statements in defense of George Zimmerman also garnered the most attention by far. That was followed by attention to the media's handling of the story.

Some of these differences in approach can be seen in how the three channels handled a mid-afternoon March 26 press conference called by Trayvon Martin's family. MSNBC showed the press conference live for over 14 minutes, with no commercial interruptions or comments or summary by the new hosts. CNN also provided live coverage of the press conference, but for less time than MSNBC, a little over five minutes. Fox did not show any footage from the press conference when it was occurring and did not discuss the case in that hour.

When coverage is broken down by the ideology of the talk show host-both in talk radio and cable-there are also differences. The No. 1 storyline among liberal talkers was gun control and the Florida law followed by a discussion of the remark by Fox News' Geraldo Rivera blaming the hoodie for Trayvon Martin's death.

Among conservative talkers, the top subject included questions about Trayvon and a defense of Zimmerman, followed by a discussion of the media's handling of the story. 

The news agendas in social media, meanwhile, varied significantly from that of the mainstream press. The most prominent topic on cable and talk radio-gun control and the Florida Stand Your Ground law-was considerably farther down the list on both Twitter and blogs. Conversely, sympathy for Trayvon-a major topic in social media-was not nearly as popular in the cable and talk radio universe.

But there were also significant differences in focus between the blogosphere and Twitter universe. On Twitter, where the 140 character limit impacts the depth of the discussion, the combined topics of sympathy for Trayvon Martin and calls for justice accounted for 40% of the statements. On blogs these themes were significant, but not nearly as prominent, accounting for one quarter (25%) of the conversation.

There gun control/the Florida law and the role of race were bigger issues, accounting for 26% of the conversation studied versus 15% on Twitter.

On other topics connected to the case, there was less divergence between the two social media forms.  That was certainly the case regarding expressions of skepticism about the victim and a defense of the shooter, which accounted for 7% on blogs and 6% on Twitter. (On cable and talk radio, that theme was twice as prominent, at 14%).

In other words, in social media support for Trayvon and outrage at the killing far outweighed any sense that Zimmerman might have been justified in his actions. On cable and talk radio, suspicion of Trayvon Martin was virtually equal to doubts about George Zimmerman.

 

Despite new developments in the story itself, the leading frames in social media did not change much over time.  On blogs, there was negligible change in the focus of the conversation. On Twitter, there was some diminution in attention to both supportive tweets about Trayvon Martin and his family and outrage at the killing as the story played on. The former dropped from 19% on March 17 to 12% on March 28 while the latter fell from 25% to 20% in that time period.

On cable news and talk radio however, the themes of the coverage shifted more according to ideology (as discussed above) than to timeframe. Still, one theme spiked dramatically as time went on: the media's handling of the story. It was not much of a theme at all in the beginning, accounting for 1% of the coverage studied. Later, that number jumped to 13%.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Twitter volume doubled to an average of 338,000 per day. For comparison, in the 3 days after the Kony 2012 story hit Twitter (March 7-9), there were an average of 1,380,900 statements per day. And, the day following Obama's Jan 24 SOTU speech (Jan 25), there were 1,362,200 statements. In the day following the death of Osama bin Laden (May 1), there were approximately 4 million statements.

[2] None of the cable programs that are included in PEJ's regular coding are broadcast on weekends. However, there was some coverage of the topic on other cable and network television broadcasts the weekend of March 17^th and 18^th, evidence that the story had penetrated the national media by then.

Islam and Politics Dominate Religion Coverage in 2011

Jesse Holcomb of PEJ

The biggest religion stories of 2011 involved tensions over Islam and questions about faith in presidential politics, especially Mormonism, according to an annual review of religion in the news by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) and the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Events and controversies related to Islam also dominated U.S. press coverage of religion in 2010. However, coverage of some stories faded in the past year, notably coverage of the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, which received much more media attention in 2010.

Compared with topics such as politics and the economy, religion does not typically receive a lot of attention from the mainstream news media, and 2011 was no exception. When religion did make news, it was often because of accusations about extremism or intolerance. For instance, among the biggest individual stories of 2011 were a controversial congressional hearing about the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the fallout after a Florida pastor staged a Koran burning. And one of the top religion and politics stories of the year centered on an incident in which a Texas minister called the Mormon faith a "cult."

The discussion of religion in social media in 2011 was quite different than the coverage in the traditional press. None of the top religion-related subjects among bloggers in 2011 was a top story in traditional media outlets. While the presidential campaign and political incidents involving Islam captured the attention of the traditional press, bloggers focused on such topics as the Rapture predictions of a Christian radio host and science and religion. Bloggers also tended to cover religion in a less sustained way than the mainstream media.

These are among the findings of a new study that examines news coverage in a broad range of mainstream media sources, as well as in blogs and on Twitter, from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2011.

Among the key findings of the study:

• Religion accounted for 0.7% of all mainstream media coverage studied in 2011, down from 2.0% in 2010. In the 52 news outlets monitored throughout the year, including the evening TV news programs, newspaper front pages, top cable news programs, top news websites and top radio programs, religion received about as much coverage as race/gender/gay issues (0.8%) and immigration (0.7%).
• Islam has become a bigger part of the media's focus on religion in recent years. Six of the top 10 religion stories in 2011 were about Islam. This continues a trend first seen in 2010, when four of the top five religion stories involved controversies related to Islam. In 2007-2009, by contrast, Islam-focused stories generally accounted for a much smaller share of the coverage.

• Viewed from another angle - the specific religious faiths on which media coverage focused - Islam again ranked at the top. It was the subject of nearly a third (31.3%) of the religion "newshole" - the amount of space and time devoted to religion news online, in print, on television and on the radio - in 2011. This was nearly three times the amount that focused on Catholicism (11.3%) and more than three times the amount that focused on Mormonism (9.6%).
• While a variety of stories about Islam collectively accounted for the biggest share of media coverage about religion in 2011, the largest single storyline involving religion was the presidential election campaign. The campaign accounted for 13.1% of all religion coverage studied. But while it ranked first for the year, coverage of religion in the presidential election was down considerably from four years earlier, in the run-up to the 2008 election, when campaign news made up 23.8% of 2007 religion coverage.
• An analysis of the past five years of religion coverage suggests that interest in religion tends to be heavily event-driven, at least at the top of the media agenda. In 2008, for instance, Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United States accounted for about 37% of all religion coverage during that year, though the visit itself lasted for only six days in April. And 82.3% of the stories about the visit were published or broadcast within that six-day window.
• Users of another social media platform, Twitter, gave less prominence to religion in 2011 than they had the previous year. Only during one week in 2011 did a religion-focused story appear among the top five stories discussed on the micro-blogging tool. (Interest was triggered by a BBC report on a group of scientists who predicted that religion was headed for extinction in certain parts of the world.)

This examination of religion coverage in the media is built from two separate areas of research. The study of traditional news sources analyzed nearly 46,000 stories from newspaper front pages, home pages of major news websites, the first half-hour of network and cable television news programs and the first half-hour of radio news and talk shows. (For details, see the methodology.) The content of new media was analyzed separately by aggregating and coding a sample of blogs, tweets and other sources monitored by Tweetmeme, Technorati, Icerocket and Twitteruly, which track millions of blogs and social media entries. (For details, see the New Media Index methodology.) 

Read the full report.

The apology by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, which culminated Tuesday in the resignation of a top executive, did little to change the highly critical reaction in social media, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The controversy that engulfed Komen after it announced it would no longer make grants to Planned Parenthood was as much a story about social media as politics.

The news, which broke January 31, triggered a massive outpouring of protest on Twitter and Facebook. Indeed when front-page stories appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post on February 3, they focused on the intensity of the social media response as much as anything. The Times cited a “roiling anger on the Internet” that highlighted “the power of social media to harness protests.”

But a detailed analysis of the conversation on Twitter finds that the group’s decision later on February 3 to reverse its new policy and restore funding to Planned Parenthood, did little to change the mix of the conversation on Twitter.  Instead it only reduced the volume, according to PEJ’s analysis using technology from the firm Crimson Hexagon, which analyzes every public Tweet.

In the three days that followed the January 31 decision, PEJ found that almost two-thirds of the statements on Twitter—64%—were negative toward Komen and its decision, while 19% were neutral and just 17% were positive.

Of the criticism of Komen, the biggest share—20%—was lauding Planned Parenthood or calling for donations to the organization. Another 16% was more directly critical of Komen or called on it to reverse its decision. Another 12% called the defunding move political.

Of the conversation that praised Komen’s initial move, most of that (11% of all Twitter statements during the period) took the form of attacks on Planned Parenthood. Only 4% of the statements were actually praising Komen.

After the story became page one news, thanks largely to the Twitter reaction, the conversation on Twitter exploded—almost tripling from the scale it had seen the three days before. But the basic tone of the conversation remained largely unchanged—with 57% still negative about Komen, 23% neutral and 21% supportive of the breast cancer organization or critical of Planned Parenthood.

And after Komen changed its mind, the Twitter reaction was unchanged.

In the two days immediately following the reversal—February 4 and 5—64% of the statements about the group remained negative, while just 16% was positive and 20% neutral.

The largest percentage of criticism, (42% of all statements studied) continued to register anger about the original decision to defund Planned Parenthood or voice skepticism about Komen’s reversal.

What was different on February 4 and 5 was that the volume of statements about the controversy had dropped off—by 85% from February 3, and by 60% from the days immediately after they made the original decision.

That continuing criticism, though diminished, may in part help explain the departure February 7 of Karen Handel, a former Republican candidate who ran for governor of Georgia on a staunch pro-life platform.

Mark Jurkowitz, Tricia Sartor and Nancy Vogt of PEJ