Few Are Interested in Most News Stories, Survey Finds

A space shuttle explodes. An earthquake wreaks havoc in San Francisco. Such national calamities transfix most Americans, but only one in four pays very close attention to most news.

That’s what a new report by the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press indicates.

The center conducted 54 separate national surveys between 1989 and 1995 and questioned more than 75,000 people to compile an “interest index” of the 480 stories in its database. Almost half of the respondents paid little or no attention to any one of the news stories, the center said.

“There are an awful lot of people who are missing out on what’s going on,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the center, which becomes the Pew Research Center for the People & The Press on Jan. 1.

Foreign events that didn’t involve the United States or its troops, reports of scandal and failed celebrity, and British royal marriages garnered the least attention, said the center’s survey, released this week.

The stories were “very closely” followed by just 25% of survey respondents, while 32% said they followed them “fairly closely.”

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The most closely followed stories: the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 (80% of those surveyed followed it closely); the San Francisco quake in 1989 (73%); the Rodney G. King beating verdicts and ensuing riots in 1992 (70%), and the 1987 saga of a Texas toddler who fell down a well (69%).

Those events garnered even more attention than the more recent bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City (58%) or the O.J. Simpson murder trial (never more than 48%).

Slightly less than 30% of the respondents followed reports about the economy, major Supreme Court rulings, race and gender issues and major scientific events.

Washington news about national issues, politics and elections interested one in four respondents, followed by news of world events or foreign conflicts that did not involve the United States or its citizens, the survey found.

The outbreak of civil war in the former Yugoslavia was one of the least-followed news stories, the center said.

Fascination with Simpson’s legal travails appeared to be temporary. Some 48% of respondents followed the story “very closely” in the wake of the white Bronco police chase in June 1994. But half of that audience had disappeared by October 1994, the center said.

The center estimated that nearly 40 million people watched “all or a lot” of live trial coverage on television. At one point, though, 90% of those surveyed complained that the Simpson story was getting too much media coverage--a record level of complaint.

More than half of the respondents shunned the Simpson story for most of its run, the report said.