Campaign 2012 Dominates the News

The latest GOP frontrunner, Newt Gingrich, has now been become the top campaign newsmaker after weeks of attention to Herman Cain and allegations about his personal behavior.

The 2012 presidential campaign once again topped the news agenda, accounting for 24% of the newshole during the week of December 5-11, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That was only slightly higher than the previous week’s level of 23%. The focus of that coverage was squarely on Gingrich, the former House speaker who has quickly risen to the top of the polls. He was a dominant newsmaker in 47% of all campaign stories studied last week, nearly twice as prevalent the next biggest newsmaker, Mitt Romney. (To register as a dominant newsmaker, someone must be featured in at least 50% of a story.) The coverage, which was heaviest on radio news (42% of airtime studied) and cable news (39%)—the two sectors that include the ideological talk shows—largely examined his dramatic rise in those polls, but also raised questions about his temperament and record.

Nearly one-third of last week’s coverage of the economy—the No. 2 story at 14%—focused on President Barack Obama’s highly publicized Kansas speech in which he advocated policies to help the middle class. Among the issues raised in the speech was the impending expiration of the payroll tax cuts. The debate in Washington over how to pay for the tax cuts has broken down along the typical partisan lines of spending reductions versus taxing the wealthy. The cable and radio talk shows reflected that divide last week.