For our weekly rotating question in the most recent Daily Kos/SEIU State of the Nation poll, we decided to do something a little different. We knew countless pollsters would be trying to gauge the impact of Osama bin Laden's death on the American electorate, so another "me too" question didn't seem worthwhile. Instead, we took the opportunity to find out how the announcement of the bin Laden news traversed our modern media landscape. The results were interesting:
Q: Where did you first hear the news about Osama bin Laden’s death: television, word of mouth, Twitter, Facebook, a blog, from a media organization website, from a text message, from the newspaper, from the radio, or in some other way?
Television: 67
Word of mouth: 12
Facebook: 5
Media organization website: 4
Radio: 4
Newspaper: 3
Text message: 2
Twitter: 1
Blog: 0
Some other way: 2
It's not even close: For major breaking news, even today, television still rules. And all the various Internet sources combined barely equal "word of mouth." Facebook was much more popular than Twitter, though I suspect the former's larger userbase is a big reason why. (Interestingly, FB was actually a little more popular among the 30-45 age cohort than the 18-29 bracket.) Radio ranked pretty low, too, but perhaps would have rated higher had the news come out during drive-time rather than late on a Sunday night.
But poor blogs, checking in with a can't-do-worse zero percent. I was curious to know if anyone at all said they found out via the blogosphere, so I took a dive into our raw data (CSV file)—something which no other media outfit provides with its polling. (Note that our published results are weighted for gender, race, and age—the raw data is unweighted.) It turns out that a total of five respondents (out of 1002) did in fact say they first got the news from a blog. I can't speak for all of blogtopia, but Daily Kos did have a huge night (and following day) in terms of traffic. So we may be outliers, or perhaps people heard the news on TV and then quickly went online to talk about it.
How about you? Where did you first find out the news? Take our online poll, which features the same choices as our State of the Nation poll.