by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
The Pew Center for the People and the Press has compiled the results of the last two decades worth of surveys on interest in the news. It turns out that preferences for various types of news has remained mostly constant over time. Disasters (man-made or natural), personal finance, and the weather (!) generate the most interest, while international news not involving Americans and tabloid news generates the least interest. But, the amount of coverage a story gets is frequently out of whack with the amount of interest it generates. Global warming is severely undercovered. Stories about inside-the-beltway personalities (Scooter Libby) get too much coverage. Stories about political issues that affect more everyday Americans (Walter Reed) get too little.
In general, interest in political news splits into two categories. Stories about the who or how of politics generate below-average interest. Stories about scandals involving individual Washington personalities (DeLay's ethics violations, Whitewhater, Jim Wright in the '80s) generate slightly less interest despite often intensive coverage. But both these interest levels are a few percentage points lower than interest in a broad category called "domestic policy", which includes things like Supreme Court decisions, Bush's Social Security privatization drive, debates about campaign finance reform and so forth.
The moral of this story is, the American public may be smarter than you think, and actually care about policy more than they do about who's up and who's down in Washington.
—signed, not Ezra Klein, dagnabbit
