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.
Pew's 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. According to Pew, previous analysis of the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, another news story with strong racial undertones involving the shooting death of a black teen in Florida, found similar treatment by the three cable channels.
Twitter conversation about Ferguson started soon after Brown’s death, unlike the Trayvon Martin story, in which Twitter conversation erupted several weeks later. There was also a higher volume of Ferguson tweets than tweets about Martin. On its peak day so far, Thursday, August 14, there were more than 3.6 million tweets about the events in Ferguson, compared with a daily high of 692,000 tweets about Martin two years ago.
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