Economy and Wikileaks Lead the News

Two topics dominated the news agenda last week. Attention to the economy reached its highest level in 20 months and a major document dump cemented WikiLeaks’ status as a significant newsmaker.

From November 29 to December 5, the economy accounted for 28% of the newshole studied, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That represents the most coverage devoted to the subject since the week of March 23-29, 2009 (43%), shortly after Barack Obama became president when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner unveiled his plan to clean up “toxic assets” in banks. Three events drove last week’s economic coverage -- negotiations over the fate of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts, the debt commission vote on its proposal to reduce the deficit and a surprisingly gloomy jobs report late in the week. The release of thousands of State Department cables by the WikiLeaks site was the No. 2 story of the week, filling 16% of the newshole in PEJ’s News Interest Index, which includes the front pages of newspapers, a sampling of cable news, talk and news radio, the top stories on news websites, and morning and evening broadcast news programs. This marks the third time since the summer that WikiLeaks’ dissemination of classified documents has been a top five story. (Information about the Afghanistan war accounted for 13% of the newshole from July 26-August 1 and material pertaining to the Iraq conflict filled 2% of the newshole from October 18-24.)