N.Y. Strife Captures Minority Interest

Blacks and members of other minority groups paid more attention to articles about racial tensions in New York City than any other news story in the last month, and most believe that the press has done a mediocre job at best of covering the issue, according to a monthly survey by the Times Mirror Co.

Among nonwhites, 38% said that they were “very closely” following accounts of the New York trial of two young white men convicted of charges related to the killing of a black teen-ager in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and of the boycott of Korean-owned stores in Brooklyn by some blacks. Only 13% of whites said that they were giving those stories “very close” attention.

The racial disparity in how much attention those stories received was a departure from the usual pattern that has been found by the Times Mirror News Interest Index. The monthly survey about which news stories people follow generally has found that interest in news breaks down along lines of income and age, but not of race.

Those who were paying close attention to coverage of the tensions in New York indicated unhappiness with the press. Only 7% said that they thought the coverage was excellent--usually about one-quarter of respondents give an excellent rating to news coverage they are interested in--and 58% said that the coverage was only “fair” or “poor.”

In New York itself, press coverage of racial tensions has been highly controversial. Both blacks and whites attending the Bensonhurst trial shouted epithets at reporters and photographers, and some photographers were injured in melees after the verdicts were announced last month.

Overall, in a month when no single news story captured an overwhelming amount of public interest, the Bush-Gorbachev summit was the story cited by more people than any other as the one they were paying attention to, with 38% of those polled saying that they were following it “very closely.” That was about the same percentage as said they were “very closely” following news coverage of the presidential election in 1988 or the Navy’s escort of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf in 1987.

As is usually the case, older people and those with more education--core readers for most major newspapers--were more likely to say that they were paying close attention to the summit than others.

Among people under 30 who were polled, more said that they were paying very close attention to reports of floods in the Southwest (29%) than the summit (26%).

However, asked what the “most important” news story of the last month had been, roughly 50% of those who had an opinion named the summit, whether or not they were paying attention to it. The remaining respondents split, with no more than a handful specifying any other story.

Times Mirror Co., which conducts the survey every month, owns several newspapers and magazines, including The Times.