News poll: Public interest in Penn State scandal 9 times greater than in deficit failure

posted at 1:10 pm on November 27, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Congress ]   

How important was the news last week that the congressional Supercommittee failed at the task of isolating $1.2 trillion in budget cuts before its November 23 deadline? Not terribly, according to a new poll by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The poll gauged popular interest in six headline topics, including:

• the Penn State child abuse scandal that cost coaching legend Joe Paterno his job;
• the economy;
• the 2012 elections;
• the anti-Wall Street protests;
• the announcement that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear legal challenges to last year’s health care reform law;
• the inability of the bipartisan deficit committee to reach a consensus on where to make needed cuts.

The poll found that only 3% followed the news of the deficit panel’s implosion as compared with 27% who followed the ongoing Penn State child sex abuse saga. The second most followed news topic was the economy, at 15%, even though it received only a fourth as much coverage by the media as the collegiate sex scandal.

One might argue that the ostensible apathy toward the budget committee’s failure was more a function of Americans’ weariness over ongoing bad economic news, but as noted earlier the economy as a topic continues to have legs. A more plausible explanation is that many news junkies understood that the committee by design was set up to fail and found the news unsurprising.

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