Every week the Pew Research Center tracks what news topics Americans are interested in. This past week, the stories ranged from the economy to the passing of Steve Jobs to the 2012 elections. But Pew also found that interest in the return of Amanda Knox, the American acquitted of murder in Italy, attracted more attention than the Occupy Wall Street protests, despite the same amount of news coverage.
Pew’s “News Interest Index” showed that seven percent of respondents said they were interested in news on Occupy Wall Street, and ten said they wanted to know more about Knox. Both were dwarfed by interest in the economy and somewhat by Mr. Jobs, who was of interest to 14 percent. An equal seven percent of coverage was afforded to both Knox and Occupy Wall Street.
Even Democrats, which polling released on Wednesday showed are more likely to support the protests, are not particularly interested in news coverage on it. A look back at Pew’s data shows that there is currently much less interest in Occupy Wall Street than there was in the start of the modern Tea Party movement. From Pew:
In mid-April 2009, news about early Tea Party protests made up 7% of news coverage, identical to the amount of coverage devoted to the anti-Wall Street protests over the past week. But public interest today is significantly lower than it was in 2009 – just 17% say they are following the current protests very closely, compared with 27% who followed early Tea Party protests very closely.
The attention to the early Tea Party protests came largely from Republicans, fully 43% of whom tracked the story very closely in April 2009. Fewer than half as many Democrats (18%) were equally engaged with the story. Today, however, there is no such disparity, with limited interest in the Occupy Wall Street protests from Republicans (12%), Democrats (17%) and independents (19%) alike. However, when asked what one story they followed most closely, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to cite the protest news (11% vs. 3%).
Read more about the latest Pew News Interest Index here.
The Pew survey used 1,000 live telephone interviews with adult Americans conducted from Oct. 6th to the 9th. It has a sampling error of four percent.
