You’d better be sitting down for this one: The Pew Research Center has found that Apple gets more coverage from the mainstream press than any other tech company in the U.S. We know, that’s not really a surprise, but in sharp contrast to the not-so-distant past, the organization also found that “the bulk” of that coverage was positive.
To put some numbers to that concept, The Pew center found that from June 2009 through June of 2010, 15.1% of all technology stories in the mainstream press were primarily about Apple. That’s greater than one in every seven stories. About Apple. One is seven (1 in 6.67 to be a little more precise).
The organization attributed the press frenzy to Apple’s “popular devices” and its “orchestrated PR strategy.” Of those stories, some 40% said that, “[Apple’s] products are innovative and superior in quality.” 27% of Apple’s coverage highlighted Apple’s loyal fan base.
“And what about problems like ineffective touch screens, poor connections or limited user freedoms? Hard to find in this media coverage,” The Center’s report said. “Just 17% suggested the products are overhyped, and less than half that, 7%, portrayed the company as too controlling with its products.”
The closest competitor to Apple was Google, which garnered 11.4% of the mainstream coverage of tech-related issues. Combined, Apple and Google were the subject of more than one quarter, 26.5%, of all tech-related news coverage.
The chart below shows the sharp dropoff to Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft as the next most popular subjects of news stories, with everything else getting crumbs. In fact, after the top five companies, no other company got even 1% of coverage.
The report also broke down the nature of the coverage on Apple, finding that 6.4% of stories were about the iPhone, 4.6% were about the iPad, 1.6% of all stories were about Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and 1.4% were about the App Store. Those stories made up 14% of all coverage, meaning the remaining 1.1% of coverage that was about Apple was about the Mac, Apple’s financial results, iTunes, Apple TV, and other Apple’s related topics.