Who were newspapers making famous? What was driving the news?

For years critics have argued that television has personalized, or even "celebritized" news, causing journalists to build their stories more around people. The White House, this critique went, became a backdrop for the president. Government stories became focused around a single personality - the mayor in town, taking on the special interests. Politics became more personal. Coverage focused more around scandal.

Does the content bear this out?

Not in 2003 at least, according to this study, and not in newspapers. The news in 2003, apparently, was driven by events.

Overall, only 32 percent of newspaper articles focused at least half of their content around a single personality. If one looks only at Page A1 articles, the number is even smaller, 28 percent. Metro pages were most likely to build articles around individual protagonists, 36 percent.

Newspaper Tendencies Toward a Central Protagonist
Percent of All Stories

Protagonist	Total	A1	Style	Metro
Person	32%	28%	33%	36%
Institution	17	21	12	16
None	51	51	55	48

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

If newspapers were not building articles around personalities, were they doing so around institutions, such as the Bush administration, city hall, Enron or Wall Street? Not really. Even fewer articles, 17 percent, were built around institutions.

Instead, articles tended to focus on several people talking about events and ideas - not pegging them around institutions or people.

Not even President Bush was the center of newspaper articles studied, something that was also found in other media. While a third of the articles were built around a primary protagonist, President Bush was this personality in less than 1 percent, or 54 of the 5,867 studied. If one looks only at A1 front pages, the number rises to only 2 percent.

When it came to articles about the war in Iraq, the Bush administration, rather than the president, was more likely to be the focus. In all, 12 percent of articles about Iraq focused on the administration or other federal entities, such as the Pentagon, compared with just 2 percent that focused on President Bush.

How celebrity-driven were newspapers compared with other media? Overall, 4 percent of newspaper articles studied focused around a celebrity - primarily on the style section-front. This compares with 19 percent for magazine articles.