It isn’t exactly so.

The corps of journalists covering Washington D.C. at the dawn of the Obama administration is not so much smaller as it is dramatically transformed. And that transformation will markedly alter what Americans will know and not know about the new government, as well as who will know it and who will not.

A careful accounting of the numbers, plus detailed interviews with journalists, lawmakers, press association executives and government officials, reveals that what we once thought of as the mainstream news media serving a general public have indeed shrunk — perhaps far more than many would imagine. A roll call of the numbers may shock.

But as the mainstream media have shrunk, a new sector of niche media has grown in its place, offering more specialized and detailed information than the general media to smaller, elite audiences, often built around narrowly targeted financial, lobbying and political interests. Some of these niche outlets are financed by an economic model of high-priced subscriptions, others by image advertising from big companies like defense contractors, oil companies and mobile phone alliances trying to influence policy makers.

In addition, the contingent of foreign reporters in Washington has grown to nearly 10 times the size it was a generation ago. And the picture they are sending abroad of the country is a far different one than the world received when the information came mainly via American based wire services and cable news.

Consider a few examples:

ClimateWire, an on-line newsletter launched less than a year ago to cover the climate policy debate for a small, high-end audience, deploys more than twice the reporting power around Capitol Hill as does the Hearst News Service, which provides Washington news for the chain’s 16 daily newspapers.

The Washington bureau of Mother Jones, a San Francisco-based, left-leaning non-profit magazine, which had no reporters permanently assigned to the nation’s capital a decade ago, today has seven, about the same size as the now-reduced Time magazine bureau.

The Washington bureau of the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera, which opened a modest bureau when George W. Bush took office eight years ago, now has 105 staff members in its various services accredited to cover Congress, a staff similar in size to that of CBS News — both radio and television — at 129.

Or consider that the organization with the largest number of journalists accredited to the press galleries Congress is CQ, a news operation that produces an array of on-line and print publications with names like CQ Budget Tracker and CQ Senate Watch. Its 149 reporters eclipse the number of Hill-accredited journalists at the Associated Press (134), and congressional staffers dealing with accreditation say CQ has since surpassed even the hometown Washington Post in numbers. A decade ago, CQ had 40.

Collectively, the implications of these changes are considerable. For those who participate in the American democracy, the “balance of information” has been tilted away from voters along Main Streets thousands of miles away to issue-based groups that jostle for influence daily in the corridors of power.

In 2008, newspapers from only 23 states had reporters based in Washington covering the federal government, according to the listings of Hudson’s Washington News Media Contacts Directory. That is down by a third from 35 states listed in the directory’s 1985 edition — and that was before a host of further cutbacks late in 2008.

As New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet put it, “It concentrates knowledge in the hands of those who want to influence votes. It means [for example] the lobbyist knows more about Senator [Richard] Shelby than the people of Alabama. That’s not good for democracy.”

These are the conclusions of a three-month study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and journalist Tyler Marshall on the scale, scope and nature of the Washington press corps at the beginning of the new administration. Marshall conducted the research and reporting. The report was written by the Project and Marshall jointly.

Among the findings:

• A significant decline in the reporting power of mainstream media. The poster child of this trend is the daily newspaper, historically the backbone of American journalism, whose robust Washington presence and aggressive reporting has uncovered scandals that toppled a president, sent members of Congress to jail and does the daily job of covering congressional delegations and federal agencies. Since the 1980s, the number of newspapers accredited to cover Congress has fallen by two-thirds. The number claiming a presence in Washington generally, according to capitol directories, has fallen by more than half.

• The decline in mainstream press has been nearly matched by a sharp growth among more narrowly focused special interest or niche media. The number of specialty newspapers, magazines and newsletters has risen by half since the mid-1980s. Newsletters alone are up nearly two-thirds.
• A marked jump in foreign media now represented in Washington. When the U.S. State Department first opened a Foreign Press Center for representatives of non-U.S. media in 1968, there were about 160 foreign correspondents reporting from Washington. In October, 2008, there were nearly 10 times as many. With some notable exceptions, this growth has been more a broadening than a deepening of coverage to international audiences. Foreign journalists tend to fare poorly in the fight for access to key federal government decision-makers and consequently, they break few important stories. Still, their presence in such large numbers has changed the way the world gets its news from Washington, and the implications of their presence for America’s image in the world are considerable.

The shift from media aimed at a general public toward one serving more specialized and elite interests also comes as important parts of the federal government — most notably arms of the executive branch — have become more circumspect, more secretive, and more combative in their dealings with the media. As a result, the traditional — and natural — adversarial relationship between the media and the federal government has hardened perceptibly at a time when the mainstream Washington-based media have weakened. Symbolic of the state of this relationship, George W. Bush is the first president since Theodore Roosevelt not to address the National Press Club during his years in office.

Read the full report at journalism.org

1. As of January 2009, Time had eight in its Washington bureau, down from more than 30 in the mid-1980s.

2. This means accredited to cover the 110^th Congress, whose term concluded at the end of 2008.

Where do the current criticisms fit in with the history of national political leaders’ relations with the press? Criticism of the press by political figures is hardly new. As far back as 1796, George Washington explained his decision not to seek a third term noting, among other reasons, he was “disinclined to be longer buffeted in the public prints by a set of infamous scribblers.”¹

The criticism has not always come from the political right. During the Vietnam War, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon alike condemned the press for what they saw as undermining of their war efforts. Bill Clinton’s relationship with the press, never good, soured further during the scandal over Monica Lewinsky, and variously included complaints about both liberalism and a right-wing media machine.

The more overtly partisan and ideological nature of the criticism — that the press is liberal — is relatively new. The modern critique by conservatives that the press is liberal first notably flowered in public in 1964 when former President Dwight Eisenhower raised the complaint at the Republican convention, to wild reaction. The criticism has become noticeably bolder since the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich, representing the second generation of movement conservatism, took power in the House. Yet it may have never been more pointed or personal than this year.

What follows is a timeline of key examples of political leaders attacking the press that offers something of a guide to how the rhetoric has evolved.

Thomas Jefferson, often regarded as a champion of press freedoms, is famously remembered for saying he would prefer newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers. Yet that was in 1787, before he ran for president. After a heated presidential campaign in 1800, during which newspapers published rumors about his personal life, he offered a number of utterances in the other direction, including:

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”²

President Woodrow Wilson made extraordinary efforts at using the press to influence public opinion in favor of his policies. His administration held the first sustained regularly-scheduled presidential press conferences between 1913 and 1915. Upset by press coverage resulting from a stream of leaks from his Cabinet, he lamented in a letter to a senator:

“I am so accustomed to having everything reported erroneously that I have almost come to the point of believing nothing that I see in the newspapers.”³

Upon losing the 1962 race for Governor of California, Richard Nixon famously lashed out at the press, though his critique was more personal than ideological:

“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference … I hope that the press … recognize that they have a right and a responsibility, if they’re against a candidate, give him the shaft, but also recognize if they give him the shaft, put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then.”⁴

Former President Dwight Eisenhower inspired wild cheers with an unexpected lashing out at columnists and commentators in a speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco:

“Let us particularly scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family, including sensation-seeking columnists and commentators, because I assure you that these are people who couldn’t care less about the good of our party.”⁵

Though at times Lyndon Johnson privately admitted the Vietnam War was unwinnable, he also privately complained about coverage of the conflict in the press, particularly The New York Times, which he said was undermining public confidence in the administration. He said the people in charge of the newspaper were:

“…a bunch of commies…they want to get out of Vietnam and yield it to them, and I don’t think I can quite do that.”⁶

The critique against the press took on new velocity on November 13, 1969, when Vice President Spiro Agnew, in a speech written by William Safire and Pat Buchanan, condemned the phenomenon of “instant analysis” on television, after a critical reaction to a nationally televised speech by Richard Nixon. While the speech was considered striking at the time, the tone seems reserved compared with what one might find today.

“When the president completed his address…his words and policies were subjected to instant analysis and querulous criticism…by a small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts, the majority of whom expressed in one way or another their hostility to what he had to say. It was obvious that their minds were made up in advance. Now I want to make myself perfectly clear. I’m not asking for government censorship or any other kind of censorship. I am asking whether a form of censorship already exists when the news that forty million Americans receive each night is determined by a handful of men responsible only to their corporate employers and is filtered through a handful of commentators who admit to their own set of biases.”⁷

Starting in 1971, the office of President Nixon’s White House Counsel Chuck Colson compiled an “enemies list” that originally included 20 people, but in time grew to more. The original list included three news people, although it eventually swelled to more than 50 journalists and media outlets.

The three journalists on the original list were Ed Guthman, Los Angeles Times, Daniel Schorr, CBS, and Mary McGrory, Washington Post columnist.⁸

In the fall of 1992, as he trailed in the polls in the presidential campaign, President George H.W. Bush produced an anti-media slogan, which the president would mention from the stump:

“Annoy the Media: Re-elect Bush.”

After his election, President Bill Clinton also complained about the media, which he sometimes argued was attacking from the left, as he did in this interview with Rolling Stone magazine published in the Dec. 9, 1993 issue:

“I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any president has in twenty years, with the possible exception of Reagan’s first budget, and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that in your damn article.”

During Clinton’s second term, Congress appointed Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to investigate allegations pertaining to President Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. By early 1998, news headlines began to focus on the tactics behind the investigation. First Lady Hillary Clinton appeared on the “Today Show” on January 27, 1998 and urged more critical coverage of those she believed were conspiring against President Clinton:

“The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

The leader of a new generation of conservatives in Congress, Newt Gingrich became increasingly vocal in condemning the press as liberal after becoming speaker of the House in the mid 1990s. This point was driven home during remarks to an American Society of Newspaper Editors Convention on April 16, 1996:

“I unequivocally believe as a Republican activist that the core of the news media is biased, that the bias is amazing.”⁹

President George W. Bush took the media critique further, by suggesting that it was possible to ignore the media. He told Fox News Washington bureau chief Brit Hume in a September 22, 2003 interview that he doesn’t pay much attention to the press:

“I glance at the headlines just to get a kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories … The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”¹⁰

After the 2004 presidential election, Howard Dean, a former frontrunner who lost the Democratic primary battle, complained about corporate ownership of the news media, the increased focus on entertainment, and the decline of investigative reporting:

“The media is a failing institution in this country. They are not maintaining their responsibility to maintain democracy.”¹¹

Former President Bill Clinton also condemned the press during the primary season for sensationalism in suggesting that he had engaged in racial politics against Barack Obama, during an angry exchange on Jan. 23, 2008 with CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin:

“The people of South Carolina are coming to these meetings and asking questions about what they care about. And what they care about is not going to be in the news coverage tonight because you don’t care about it. What you care about is this, [whether Bill Clinton is playing the race card against Barack Obama]. And the Obama people know that. So they just spin you up on this and you happily go along.

In the primary season of the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton complained about press coverage being unfairly biased toward Barack Obama, most notably on February 26, 2008 during a debate in Cleveland:

“Well, can I just point out that in the last several debates, I seem to get the first question all the time. And I don’t mind. I — you know, I’ll be happy to field them, but I do find it curious, and if anybody saw “Saturday Night Live,” you know, maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow.”

After John McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, the McCain campaign excoriated the media for focusing on her personal life and for treating her disrespectfully. Palin herself addressed the issue by portraying herself as a woman aligned with “the people” instead of Washington journalists in her Sept. 3, 2008 speech to the Republican National Convention.

“But here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion – I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country. Americans expect us to go to Washington for the right reasons, and not just to mingle with the right people.”

On September 22, 2008, during a conference call with reporters, McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt condemned the New York Times for a story saying McCain campaign manager Rick Davis had been paid about $2 million to help Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stave off tighter regulation:

“Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate, which is their prerogative to be. Everything that is read in The New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated by the American people from that perspective.”¹²

Notes

¹ George Washington was speaking to his VP John Adams in 1796, explaining his disinterest in a third term. Quotation is taken from Brian J. Buchanan, “Sex and politics as news is hardly new,” First Amendment Center Online, Oct. 20, 2006.

² Craig Crawford, Attack the Messenger: How Politicians Turn You Against the Media, (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2006), p.3.

³ Woodrow Wilson wrote those words in a March 1914 letter to Sen. W. J. Stone of Missouri. Quotation taken from Stephen Ponder, Managing the Press: Origins of the Media Presidency, 1897-1933, (New York: Macmillan, 2000), p. 84.

⁴ President Richard Nixon, November 6, 1962. Quotation taken from David Wise, The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power, (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).

⁵ J. Patrick Coolican, “Republicans attack liberal media again…and again,” Las Vegas Sun, Sept. 5, 2008.

⁶ Kelley Shannon, “Tapes Reveal LBJ’s Vietnam Conversations,” Associated Press, November, 18, 2006.

⁷ Richard Heffner, A Documentary History of the United States, (New York: Signet Classic, 2002), p. 453.

⁸ Facts on File, Watergate and the White House, vol. 1, pages 96-97.

⁹ Federal News Service, April 17, 1996.

¹⁰ The Hotline, September 23, 2003.

¹¹ Dean made remarks at a November 16, 2004 Yale University Forum titled “The Media and the Election: A Postmortem.” Quotation taken from Yotam Barakai, “Dean ’71 Criticizes News Media,” Yale Daily News, November 17, 2004.

¹² McCain Camp Takes Issue With Times Coverage, The New York Times, September 22, 2008.

Barack Obama may be building an insurmountable lead in the Democratic primary race, but the public is sending a strong message to journalists and pundits: It is too early to declare, as some already have, that the race is over.

Fully 72% of the public — including comparable percentages of Democrats, Republicans and independents — say that journalists should not be anointing Obama as the Democratic nominee at this stage in the race. Just 20% say that journalists should be doing this.

Opinion among Democrats about what the press should do in this regard may well reflect their view that Hillary Clinton should stay in the race. Recent surveys by Gallup and ABC News/Washington Post find that most Democrats believe that Clinton should stay in the race. In the ABC News/Washington Post survey, released May 12, 64% of Democrats, including 42% of Obama supporters, said Clinton should remain in the race.

The presidential campaign once again dominated the national news last week, with 46% of the newshole devoted to the race. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Campaign Coverage Index, this represented the biggest single week of election coverage since the week of the Texas and Ohio primaries in early March.

Public interest in the campaign was up moderately: 35% followed campaign news very closely up from 27% the week before. Clinton generated her highest level of campaign coverage for the year thus far (70% of all campaign stories featured Clinton), edging out Obama (at 67%), according to PEJ. However, Obama remained the most visible candidate in the eyes of the public.

Since mid-March, the amount of news coverage devoted to Clinton compared with Obama has fluctuated in concert with events on the campaign trail. However Obama has consistently been the more visible candidate to the public. On average, more than half of the public has pointed to Obama as the candidate they have heard the most about in the news recently. About 30%, on average, have named Clinton. Consistently, fewer than 10% have named John McCain as the most visible candidate in the news during this period.

Most Aware of Primary Endgame Debate

After what was clearly not a good week for the Clinton campaign, both in terms of press coverage and primary results, overall opinions of Clinton grew somewhat less favorable. While 61% of the public said their views of Clinton had not changed in recent days, 25% said their opinion of the former first lady had become less favorable and only 12% said their opinion had become more favorable. There was no net change for Obama: 55% said their views of the Illinois senator had not changed in recent days, 20% said their opinion had become more favorable and 23% said it was less favorable. As in previous weeks, opinions of McCain remain largely unchanged.

An overwhelming percentage of Americans have heard at least a little about the debate over whether Hillary Clinton should end her campaign now, or stay in the race until the primaries are completed. More than half (52%) have heard a lot about this and 33% have heard a little. Only 15% have heard nothing at all.

By contrast, the public is far less aware of recent efforts by talk show host Rush Limbaugh to prolong the Democratic nomination race by encouraging his listeners to vote for Clinton over Obama in the primaries. Just 14% of the public, including 18% of Republicans, heard a lot about what Limbaugh called “Operation Chaos;” another 28% of the public heard a little about this. More than half of the public (58%) said they heard nothing about this.

These findings are based on the most recent installment of the weekly News Interest Index, an ongoing project of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. The index, building on the Center’s longstanding research into public attentiveness to major news stories, examines news interest as it relates to the news media’s agenda. The weekly survey is conducted in conjunction with The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, which monitors the news reported by major newspaper, television, radio and online news outlets on an ongoing basis. In the most recent week, data relating to news coverage was collected from May 5-11 and survey data measuring public interest in the top news stories of the week was collected May 9-12 from a nationally representative sample of 1,001 adults.

Continuing Interest in Economy

In other news last week, the public continued to pay close attention to reports about the U.S. economy. Fully 45% followed news about the economy very closely and 25% listed this as the single news story they followed more closely than any other. The national media devoted 5% of its overall coverage to the economy.

The cyclone that struck Burma resulting in devastating loss of life and property was the second most heavily covered news story of the week. The media devoted 15% of its coverage to this story.

Public interest in this story was modest, especially when compared with the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. About a quarter of the public (23%) tracked news about the cyclone very closely, with 15% saying it was their top story of the week. In January 2005, 58% of the public said they followed the tsunami’s aftermath very closely.

Despite very little news coverage of the situation in Iraq, 29% of the public continued to follow the war very closely. Public interest in news about the war has remained fairly stable over the past year, even as coverage has fluctuated significantly.

News about Jenna Bush’s recent wedding in Crawford, Texas was closely guarded by the White House. With little press coverage of the May 10 wedding, just 4% say they followed the event very closely, and another 7% followed it fairly closely. Republicans expressed more interest in the nuptials than did Democrats or independents; 21% of Republicans say they followed the wedding very or fairly closely, compared with 8% of Democrats and 9% of independents.

Who’s Watching American Idol?

As the seventh season of American Idol wraps up, 19% of the public is paying close attention to the show — 12% are following Idol very closely and 7% are following fairly closely. The percentage closely following Idol is down slightly from 22% at this point in the season last year.

Last year women were more likely than men to be paying close attention to American Idol. This year that gap has narrowed — 21% of women and 17% of men are following the show very or fairly closely. The falloff in female viewers has been exclusively among those under age 50.

Only 17% of those under age 30 say they’re following Idol very or fairly closely, down somewhat from 26% last year. The show, which is popular with children as well as adults, continues to draw in more parents than non-parents. Nearly a quarter of those with children under age 18 living in their household are closely following Idol (23%), compared with 16% of non-parents.

Information about the News Interest Index and top line questionnaire results may be found at at people-press.org.

It has been 20 years since the Fairness Doctrine was repealed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Yet in recent weeks, the rule that required broadcasters to balance views they aired on controversial subjects has re-emerged as a topic of debate in media circles—and particularly on talk radio.

Some hosts in the conservative-dominated talk radio universe have warned listeners that Congressional Democrats and liberals want to revive the Fairness Doctrine in an effort to silence voices and views they don’t like. And some have warned that any return to the rule would produce a “Hush Rush Bill.” (The National Review published a recent cover story on the topic, complete with a photo of Rush Limbaugh gagged with duct tape.)

A few weeks ago, Limbaugh raised that prospect when he described his show as something “that frightens and scares the American left to the point that they want to deny this program Constitutional access to the First Amendment.”

Conversely, Ed Schultz, a syndicated liberal talker, has accused conservatives of setting up a “straw man” by playing up the threat of a new Fairness Doctrine. “I can guarantee you folks that no one is out there saying ‘let’s have the Fairness Doctrine,”’ Schultz declared, and he blamed conservatives for trying to stifle liberal voices on the air.

What is the Fairness Doctrine and what is going on here? Some background seems in order:

What exactly was the Fairness Doctrine and what happened to it?

Created by the FCC in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine was a set of rules based on the idea that the airwaves were in scarce supply and were owned by the public, with TV and radio stations functioning as “public trustees.” As such, the FCC required that broadcasters provide a reasonable opportunity for “ample play for the free and fair competition of opposing views … [for all] issues of importance to the public.”

Stations, in other words, had to carry contrasting opinions on the important issues of the day.

The Fairness Doctrine survived for decades and was affirmed as constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1969. But in the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan’s administration, the FCC revisited the subject. The agency concluded that the rise of cable television had eased some of the scarcity issues and that the Fairness Doctrine might be chilling speech by keeping broadcasters from addressing important issues out of a reluctance to represent both sides. In August 1987, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine.

Did ending the Fairness Doctrine give birth to conservative talk radio?

Some observers have long held that the end of the Fairness Doctrine helped usher in the era of conservative-dominated talk radio by ending the requirement of editorial balance. Under the doctrine, Limbaugh’s conservatism would need a counterpoint, and positioning a radio station format solely toward a conservative audience would have been impossible.

That’s not quite accurate, according to Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project, a non-profit media and telecom law firm.

The major reason for the rise of national talk personalities like Limbaugh, Schwartzman believes, was a change in the cost of national satellite distribution. Syndicated programming meant that stations no longer had to develop their own local talent. Instead, they could simply bring in national voices that had already proven themselves in other markets for less money. Those national voices belonged to the most successful talk hosts, many of whom were conservatives.

“Rush Limbaugh was around before 1987,” Schwartzman said. “In the 1980s what really happened was national syndication and it happened in a big way.”

The Fairness Doctrine, however, was not forgotten. Congress twice tried to reestablish it — in 1987 and later during the George H.W. Bush administration — but both efforts ran into presidential opposition and failed.

Whatever the reason, the news/talk radio format took off in the 1990s. According to one industry data base, there were about 360 news/talk stations in 1990. Today, there are more than 1,300.

Why are people arguing over a rule that hasn’t existed for 20 years?

In late June, a confluence of events suddenly pushed the long-buried Fairness Doctrine back into the media spotlight.

For one thing, The Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy group, released a report on June 20 headlined, “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.” It concluded that among the top five radio station owners “91% of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative.”

Around the same time, a number of talk hosts, predominantly conservative, mounted an aggressive campaign against the immigration bill supported primarily by President Bush and a coalition that included Senate Democrats and some Republicans. After a bitter legislative battle, the measure died in the Senate on June 28, and some of the talkers openly celebrated that result on the air, even taking credit for helping make it happen.

The talk hosts’ role in the immigration debate got some Democrats talking about a possible return to the Fairness Doctrine. In a June 25 interview with Fox News, California Senator Dianne Feinstein said she was “looking at” bringing it back. Two days later, a Capitol Hill newspaper quoted Illinois Senator Dick Durbin saying it was “time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine.”

Even some conservative Republicans expressed frustration with the radio hosts. Appearing with Feinstein on Fox News, Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott uttered the memorable statement that “Talk radio is running America. We have to do something about that problem.”

Given those comments, some in Congress decided to move preemptively. On June 28, the House (by a 309-115 vote) passed a measure pushed by Republicans that would deny the FCC the money to implement the Fairness Doctrine, should it be reinstated.

Schwartzman said the recent Fairness Doctrine furor has a lot to do with constituent politics. While liberals are making their “ritual remarks” about restoring it, in part to please their base, conservatives are seizing on those remarks for much the same reason, he said.

What are the chances the Fairness Doctrine will be coming back soon?

Even according to some Democratic lawmakers who have expressed interest in the issue, there isn’t significant momentum for a revival of the Fairness Doctrine.

A spokesman for Feinstein said there is no pending legislation, no scheduled hearings, nor any meetings related to the subject. On the House side, a spokesperson for Democratic Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who heads the subcommittee with authority over the FCC, also said no action is pending in that body.

The Center for American Progress, which issued the report asserting that talk radio is ideologically tilted to the right, is not calling for a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. The group, which said the repeal of the doctrine is not an adequate explanation for the dominance of conservative talk, focuses more on the issue of the conglomeration of media ownership as a cause.

Tom Taylor, publisher of a radio industry newsletter, has no doubts about the Fairness Doctrine’s ability to stir passions. “You think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is full of hard feelings,” he said, “you watch what happens if you try to hold a hearing on the Fairness Doctrine.” However, for all the rhetoric floating around, Taylor believes there is virtually no likelihood of a legislative effort to revive it.

Taylor said that even if the doctrine were reinstated, it wouldn’t “hush Rush.” Conservative and liberal talkers wouldn’t be required to introduce balance into their own programs. Rather the stations that air those shows would have to allow opposing views to be heard at some point in the day. (And that could be in the wee small hours of the morning.)

“Let’s just be kind and say there is some bad information floating around out there,” Taylor said. “But, you know, it sure is a great topic for talk radio.”

For more on related topics visit journalism.org.

Americans, both black and white, generally agree with the punishment radio host Don Imus received for the racist and sexist remarks he made about the Rutgers University’s women basketball team. Nonetheless, there are substantial racial differences in views of Imus’s punishment, and an even bigger gap in opinions about news media’s coverage of the story.

Majorities of both whites (53%) and African Americans (61%) who have been following the Imus story say that the punishment he received was appropriate. But roughly twice as many whites as blacks believe his punishment was too tough (35% vs. 18%). On April 12, the talk show host’s morning radio program was cancelled by CBS. A day earlier, a cable television simulcast of the program on MSNBC was cancelled by NBC.

Fully 62% of whites say that news organizations are giving too much coverage to the Imus story. This compares with just 31% of African Americans who believe the controversy has been overcovered. A plurality of blacks (44%) says that the amount of coverage has been appropriate, while a sizable minority (18%) says it has gotten too little coverage.

Imus-Type Comments Heard Frequently

More than four-in-ten Americans (42%) who have been following the Imus story say that, based on what they know about the radio host’s comments, they often or sometimes hear that kind of language used in their daily lives. African Americans – particularly black men – are far more likely than whites to say they frequently hear such language.

Overall, 55% of blacks who have heard a lot or a little about the story say they often or sometimes hear the sort of language that Imus used in denigrating the Rutgers players; by comparison, 38% of whites who have heard about the Imus story say they often or sometimes hear such language. There also are significant gender differences, among those in both races, in views of how often such language is used.

For example, about a third of black men (32%) say they often hear the sort of language that Imus used; this compares with 20% of black women. Among whites, 22% of men, but only 13% of women, say they frequently hear such language.

There also are large age differences in these perceptions, with young people much more likely than older Americans to report often or sometimes hearing this type of language. And younger African Americans, in particular, say they frequently hear the type of language Imus used. Fully 74% of African Americans under age 40 say they often or sometimes hear such language, compared with 44% of whites in the same age group.

Who Uses Offensive Language

Among those who have been following the Imus story, 38% say that “most” or “many” black males make racist or sexist remarks without thinking about it. By comparison, about a quarter of this group (27%) says that most or many white males use such language without thinking.

This is an issue on which blacks and whites generally agree: 39% of blacks say most or many African American males use racist or sexist language without thinking about it, while somewhat fewer blacks (31%) believe that white males use that kind of language unthinkingly. Attitudes are comparable among whites – 37% of whites say most or many black males make racist or sexist remarks, while 26% of whites say many or most white males make such comments.

Notably, a majority of African Americans under age 40 (53%) say that most or many black males make racist or sexist remarks without thinking about it. A smaller number of younger African Americans (39%) say most or many white males use such language.

“A Foot In His Mouth and No Clue In His Head,” declared the Baltimore Sun headline. “Imus Can’t Dribble Around This Flagrant, Racist Foul” added the New York Daily News. “Misogyny InThe Morning” were the words atop a Washington Post column.

If the spreading fallout is any indication, the last chapter has not yet been written in the huge national story triggered by Don Imus’s remarks about the Rutgers woman’s basketball team.

Already, after a number of advertisers dropped the controversial talk show host, MSNBC has discontinued its morning simulcast of Imus, and CBS has cancelled his radio show.

Meanwhile, a quick survey of the media coverage in the week since the veteran talk host uttered his infamous April 4 racial and gender insult against the Rutgers women suggests he will face a tough battle to re-establish his reputation and viability. Put simply, he is taking a pummeling from a press corps that can’t seem to get enough of the story.

In order to take a snapshot of the Imus coverage, PEJ searched both Google News and LexisNexis in the period from April 4 until April 11. We searched for stories that matched Imus’s name with a number of related terms to try and get some sense of the overall tenor of the coverage.

Through mid-day on April 11, there were about 5,200 stories on Google News alone that contained the name “Imus.” The search does not provide a definitive portrait of the coverage. But it does suggest that the tone of the reporting and commentary is quite tough.

Of the search terms selected, the one that came up most frequently in stories about Imus on both data bases was Al Sharpton, the black leader whose criticisms of Imus propelled the controversy. Sharpton blasted the talk host during a tense in-studio interview on Sharpton’s April 9 radio show. (In an exchange widely picked up in the media, Sharpton introduced his daughter, a recent college graduate, and said to Imus: “Are we now saying it’s acceptable…for you to sit up and call my daughter a ho?”) Sharpton’s name appeared in some 3,200 Google stories that featured Imus’s name and in more than 1,500 such stories on LexisNexis.

More generally, all of the top five Google News terms that appeared in stories about Imus had negative connotations including “racism” or “racist” (almost 2,600), “apology” (about 2,300), “sexism” or “sexist” (about 1,250) and “should be fired” (more than 840). Those also turned out to be the top five terms, with a slightly different ranking, in the LexisNexis search.

Conversely, a number of the words or phrases that might be construed as a defense of Imus did not show up as often. In the Google search, “free speech,” for example, appeared in about 290 stories.

Some people have argued that if Imus is being punished for his language, there should be more criticism of the misogynistic language and imagery that appears in some African-American popular culture, most notably rap music. Thus, the words “rap” or “gangsta rap” showed up in about 240 Google stories, with “hypocrisy” (50 stories) and “double standard” (40 stories) lagging further behind. “Political correctness” also clocked in about 40 stories.

Several other key figures in this drama showed up in a number of the Imus-related stories. Gwen Ifill — an African-American PBS staffer and a former New York Times White House correspondent — wrote an April 10 Times column recounting what Imus once said about her: “Isn’t the Times wonderful. It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.” In the April 4-11 Google search, Ifill’s name showed up in more than 350 stories and it was present in more than 60 LexisNexis stories as well.

Someone who is quickly becoming a household name here is the captain of the Rutgers basketball squad who displayed poise and grace during the team’s heavily covered April 10 press conference. Essence Carson’s name appeared in about 270 stories in the Google search and in about 90 stories on LexisNexis.

In one of the lighter moments during an often emotional press conference, Carson also displayed a knack for the disarming ad lib. When the subject came around to what New York radio station WFAN might air during Imus’s two week absence from the show, she suggested that it broadcast highlights of Rutgers women’s basketball games.

Source: Google News Search carried out on April 11, 2007