Last Week's Most Closely-Followed Stories. The Envelope Please ...

Health care reform topped the list of stories that Americans followed most closely last week followed by reports on swine flu and - yes, right up there in third place - the runaway balloon in Colorado, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

Thirty-two percent said their most closely followed story was health care, 20 percent named swine flu, 14 percent picked balloon boy, 9 percent cited Afghanistan, and the stock market and Iraq were named by 6 percent each.

Health care also came out first in terms of the amount of news coverage devoted to it, at 21 percent, but the runner-up here was the balloon boy story at 8 percent.

Probing a little more deeply into the results on Afghanistan, 56 percent said it "seems like the same news all the time, nothing ever really changes" while 42 percent disagreed with that statement. Fifty-three percent said they didn't feel they had enough background information to follow the story while 46 percent said they did.

Only 25 percent chose the right answer when asked how many troop deaths there had been in Afghanistan (around 900) while 42 percent picked correctly for Iraq (around 4,300).