Cable, Twitter picked up Ferguson story at a similar clip

The shooting death of an unarmed teenager inFerguson and 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,D Type Velcro Cable Ties 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?ˉs coverage in the middle.1 Our 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?ˉs 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.

Over the last few days, there have been a number of pieces reflecting on the role of Twitter in this story. This analysis helps shed light on its role, particularly in relation to the role of cable and network news. The story did indeed pop on Twitter before it did on cable. For those not turning to Twitter (only 19% of online U.S. adults use the social media site and about half get news there), network news was covering the story by Sunday evening, and two of the cable networks were by Monday evening (CNN did not give prime-time attention to the story until Tuesday day three of the event). After day three, our analysis finds similar increases in volume, as the shooting death story became one about protests, police conduct and military-style tactics and eventually a federal response.