Study: Blacks followed Zimmerman trial more closely than whites

Black Americans paid much closer attention to George Zimmerman’s trial than white Americans did, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

It wasn’t difficult to follow the murder case against Zimmerman, who shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., in February 2012: News coverage of the trial was almost ubiquitous in its closing days.

But not everbody took advantage. Fifty-six percent of the blacks surveyed said they followed the trial “very closely,” compared to 20% of whites. The telephone survey of 1,002 adults was taken July 11 to July 14. The six-woman jury returned a not-guilty verdict for Zimmerman on July 13.

LIVE BLOG: Ongoing coverage of Crenshaw protestOverall, 26% of respondents said they were paying very close attention to the trial, down from 35% in April 2012 when a special prosecutor brought a second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman. The trial was the top news story of the week for respondents, beating last week’s Asiana airliner crash at San Francisco International Airport by 2 percentage points.

Black Americans have historically paid closer attention to race-related news stories than their white counterparts, according to Pew data.

For example, in a September 1995 survey, 44% of black respondents said they paid very close attention to the murder trial of former football star O.J. Simpson, compared to 20% of white respondents.

Sizable gaps between white and black respondents held true for other race-related news events, such as for Simpson’s arrest in 1994, the acquittal in 2000 of four New York police officers in the shooting death of unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo, and the arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2009.

In the Zimmerman case, when the news first went viral in March 2012 that Martin had been shot and killed but no charges would be filed, interest level among black respondents was at 70% -- its highest level for any of the aforementioned events, exceeded only by 83% interest in the Rodney King verdict and the ensuing riots in 1992.

Twenty-one percent of black respondents in the latest survey said they watched “almost all” of the Zimmerman trial coverage, versus 5% of white respondents; that split was 24%/9% for Simpson’s trial. Two-thirds of black respondents said they watched at least some of the Zimmerman trial.

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