Cable, Twitter picked up Ferguson story at a similar clip
The shooting death of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, quickly became a national news story on mainstream and social media last week. A new Pew Research Center analysis of media coverage of the event and subsequent protests finds that the story emerged on Twitter before cable, but the trajectory of attention quickly rose in tandem, peaking on both mediums the day after two journalists were arrested and protests turned more violent.
Our analysis also finds differences in how much of their prime-time news coverage the three major cable news outlets devoted to the racially charged story centered around the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. MSNBC devoted far more time to the story than its top competitors Fox News and CNN. Fox News gave a total of about half the airtime that MSNBC did to events in Ferguson over the course of the first six days of the story, with CNN's coverage in the middle.
The shootings of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin also developed differently as news stories. It took nearly three weeks for Martin's death to generate national headlines. His shooting received hardly any coverage when it occurred on February 26, 2012. But the release of the 911 tapes several weeks later created a jump in the volume of conversation on Twitter.
In comparison, the events in Ferguson came to the nation's attention much more quickly. Brown was killed on Saturday, August 9, and his death was covered by most national news outlets two days later. By the end of that week, Brown's shooting and the subsequent protests and riots were the largest story in the country.
The Ferguson story also generated more activity on Twitter than the Martin story did. More than 10.6 million tweets were posted about Ferguson from the day the shooting occurred through the eight days that followed. (Of those, about 8.3 million used the hashtag #Ferguson, while 2.3 million additional tweets without that hashtag were identified by the computer learning algorithm Crimson Hexagon.) In comparison, the Martin story generated about 4.7 million tweets during the entire month following his shooting.
The size of the Twitter audience has grown since 2012, when the Trayvon Martin shooting occurred. In 2012, 15% of U.S. online adults were on Twitter; today that figure has grown to 19%. Analysis of Twitter is meant to show how one subset of the population is discovering, reacting to and discussing the news, and is not meant to serve as a means to represent the national U.S. adult population.
