Here's What News Voters Saw, Read or Heard in 2018

The deadly Parkland high school shooting, the death of former President George H.W. Bush and Hurricane Florence’s battering of the Carolinas were the news events voters were most likely to hear about this year, while many bits of Beltway drama did not break through, according to an analysis of yearlong Morning Consult polling.

Throughout 2018, Morning Consult surveyed roughly 100,000 registered voters about how much they had seen, read or heard about the top news of the day, from major stories such as Democrats winning the House, to news that didn’t make much of a dent in voters’ minds, such as the arrest of alleged Russian agent Maria Butina.

Among more than 130 events included in surveys this year, Morning Consult narrowed the list down to 72 noteworthy stories — see the full interactive here.

Tim Groeling, a professor of communications at UCLA, said consumption of such news items can be discretionary, “depending on how they’re connected to people’s lives in general.” Another thing could be the onslaught of headlines that dominated the news this year, moving from one apparent bombshell to another.

“It is often the case that there are lot of things that happen, and there is less of an attention span to follow up than there used to be, often on the part of the press,” he said in an interview. 

Seventy-six percent of voters heard “a lot” about the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, which kicked off the “March For Our Lives” movement, two points higher than the share who heard “a lot” about Bush’s death.