News Index

Of all the coverage of last week’s California wildfires, one of the more memorable moments occurred when San Diego TV reporter Larry Himmel—wearing goggles and grasping a microphone—reported on the destruction of his own home.

Pointing to a fiery pile of rubble, Himmel told viewers, “This was what is left of my home,” of a quarter century. “This was our garage; the living room was over there, there was a porch right there, the bedrooms…”

“This was a living hell,” he added. “This is what I came home to today.”

By week’s end, the California wildfires took a heavy toll. Estimates include seven dead, more than 2,700 structures destroyed, up to 500,000 acres burned, and hundreds of thousands forced to evacuate.

There were also many elements of a media mega-story. Heroic, exhausted firefighters. Human interest stories of loss and survival. Spectacular, frightening video of the advancing flames. The weather as a key player in determining the course and ferocity of the fires. Reports that arson was responsible for some of the blazes. The mystery as the fires advanced of how far they would go.

But undergirding all that was another angle that drove a good deal of the coverage—the K-word. Was the California disaster an example of government preparedness and skill in facing a major crisis? Or was it another Hurricane Katrina, a costly failure to effectively protect American lives and property? That theme permeated the coverage and helped make the California wildfires that were actually smaller in scale and mortality than those in 2003 a huge story.

A CBS News report on Oct. 23 from San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, which was housing about 15,000 fire evacuees, made the inevitable comparisons between that facility and the New Orleans Superdome during Katrina. But the temporary shelter at Qualcomm seemed infinitely more hospitable than life inside the Superdome.

“During Katrina, New Orleans’ attempt to shelter people in a sports stadium went terribly wrong,” anchor Katie Couric reported. Qualcomm she added “is getting high marks.” Still, that didn’t keep the media from hammering away at the Katrina analogy.

All those angles and the scope of the disaster made “California burning” the second- biggest story of 2007, according to PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index from Oct. 21-26. Last week, coverage of the wildfires filled 38% of the newshole, as measured in our Index. (Only the April 16 Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 dead accounted for more coverage, 51%, in a single week).

What’s more, the fires were the top story in every media sector—newspapers (19%), online (33%), and radio (35%). But coverage was especially heavy, at more than 50% of the airtime, on network TV (53%) and cable TV (51%).

No others subject in last week’s top-10 list came close, or even reached double digits. The presidential campaign registered as the second-biggest story at 9%, followed by events inside Iraq (7%), tensions with Iran (3%) and the Iraq war policy debate at 3%.

The coverage devoted to the California fires also far exceeded any previous 2007 coverage of natural disasters and deadly weather. According to the Index, no similar event ever accounted for more than 8% of the newshole in a given week. Two other disasters involving made-made technology, gained more attention, but still nothing like the wildfires. The Utah mine cave-in in August accounted for 13% of the coverage in one week and the Aug. 1 collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis was a top story at 25%.

PEJ’s News Coverage Index examines the news agenda of 48 different outlets from five sectors of the media. (See a List of Outlets.) It is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of major stories and differences among news platforms. (See Our Methodology.)

Some of last week’s coverage, of course, was devoted to the stories of the firefighters. On CBS’s “Early Show” on Oct. 24, anchor Harry Smith trailed along with Scott McLean, a fire captain in Spring Valley California. An exhausted-looking McLean talked of efforts to contain new blazes that kept breaking out and grimly predicted it would be another full week before the fires were fully contained. Nothing the laconic firefighter said on camera was particularly memorable. But the fatigue in his voice mixed with his determination to battle on was one reason the segment was headlined: “Courage under Fire.”

The human interest angle in the coverage took a number of different forms. In an Oct. 25 “Today” piece on pets put at risk by the fire, NBC’s Lester Holt opened his report by petting a dog at a facility for “therapy animals who deal with special needs kids.” The animals were saved from the flames when their owner put an ad on Craigslist asking, successfully, for volunteers to take them out of harm’s way. One Malibu goat breeder, not so fortunate, lost most of his herd.

On the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes,” two newlyweds talked of the last minutes in their new home. They “had about 15 minutes to grab what we could,” recalled Amy Bieri. “[We] left behind a lot of our wedding pictures.”

“I’m just hoping I can find my wedding ring,” added husband Drew, who in his haste to evacuate, said he left the ring on a nightstand that no longer exists.

What separated the story, or gave a public policy rationale that journalists seized on, was the question of government preparedness and the specter of another public sector failure comparable to what happened after Katrina rolled through New Orleans. Much of the coverage emphasized the administration’s determination to avoid just such a comparison.

An October 24 National Public Radio piece on President Bush’s planned trip to California noted that he had already declared seven counties federal disaster areas and dispatched FEMA director David Paulison and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to the scene.

“Mr. Bush was criticized for his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005,” correspondent David Greene noted with what might be considered understatement. “White House aides say communication between the federal and state and local officials during disasters have improved since then.”

A front-page story in the Oct. 24 Wall Street Journal, which cited critics’ complaints that “local government officials…still haven’t adequately staffed or funded fire departments,” pointed out that the “Bush administration [was] determined to apply lessons learned from its missteps in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.”

And in a story that gave high marks to the federal government, Fox News correspondent Jim Angle knocked down some claims that the war in Iraq had siphoned off needed resources in California.

Angle’s report on Brit Hume’s newscast cited everything from President Bush’s aggressive response to happy evacuees at Qualcomm Stadium to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein’s declaration that “I don’t think that there’s any blame to be cast on anyone,” as evidence that past mistakes had been corrected.

“The contrast with post-Katrina New Orleans could hardly be more stark,” Angle noted.

That seemed to be the consensus elsewhere as well.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Note: Due to technical errors, this week's sample does not include some programming from CNN and MSNBC that aired on Wednesday, October 24, and Thursday, October 25. In addition, CNN aired two special programs the evening of Tuesday, October 23, and those shows were not included either.

It may have been the biggest Manhattan media mugging mystery since the 1986 attack on Dan Rather, the notorious incident in which his assailant reportedly asked: “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?”

This one all began with a violent Oct. 14 incident in which Randi Rhodes—the outspoken liberal talk radio host—suffered facial injuries near her New York City home. The next day, another liberal host, Jon Elliott, told listeners that Rhodes had been assaulted, and, according to an account in the Talking Radio Blog, wondered whether it was “an attempt by the right-wing hate machine to silence one of our own.”

With the prospect of politics playing a role in the attack, the story took off, both in the mainstream media and the blogosphere. Liberal talker Ed Schultz told listeners that Rhodes was a victim of “felonious assault,” adding, “I certainly hope this was not a situation where you were stalked or targeted.”

Then events got even murkier. On Oct. 16, Rhodes’ attorney stated that the host was not sure what had happened to her. And Elliott quickly retracted his hate crime speculation. Other scenarios popped up. A New York Post item called it a “murky incident alternately described as a mugging, a fall, a drunken stumble and a right-wing hate attack.”

Back the air on Oct. 18—after four broken teeth and a blackened eye—Rhodes tried to set matters straight, but she really couldn’t clear it up, either.

“I was watching football at an Irish pub. I went out to smoke a cigarette and the next thing I know, I was on the cement face down,” she told her audience, estimated by Talkers Magazine to be about 1.5 million per week. “I don’t know if someone hit me from behind or if I just fainted…I assumed that I had been mugged or that some really rude person had slammed into me and had just taken off.” Rhodes said she quickly dashed off an email to her employer saying, “I had been mugged and that my teeth were smashed. When I wrote that, I thought that was the best explanation of what happened.”

The strange case of Randi Rhodes, and the reaction to it, turned the episode into the 10th biggest talk show subject of the week, where it filled 2% of the cable and radio airtime as measured by PEJ’s Talk Show Index for Oct. 14-19. It was one of three top-10 talk subjects last week that, to one degree or another, directly involved the radio or cable hosts. Not for the first time, widely syndicated conservative radio talker Rush Limbaugh was in the middle of things.

Last week’s No. 1 topic was the presidential campaign at 21% of the newshole, followed by the Iraq policy debate (10%), and health care (6%). Immigration was the fourth-biggest story at 6% and U.S. terrorism issues followed in the fifth slot at 5%.

(PEJ’s Talk Show Index, released each week, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics are most frequently dissected and discussed in the media universe of talk and opinion—a segment of the media that spans across both prime time cable and radio. (See About the Talk Show Index.) PEJ’s Talk Show Index includes seven prime time cable shows and five radio talk hosts and is a subset of our News Coverage Index.)

A major factor driving the Iraq policy conversation last week was the latest twist in a lingering dispute over Limbaugh’s use of the term “phony soldiers” on his Sept. 26 program. Limbaugh has stated he was referring to only one disgraced former vet who had fabricated Iraq atrocities. A number of Democratic lawmakers disagreed and attacked Limbaugh, saying he was using the term to impugn the patriotism of any soldier who criticized the war in Iraq.

Last week, Limbaugh spent considerable time talking about his indisputably creative response to this dispute. He took the “phony soldiers” letter of complaint about him signed by 41 Democratic senators and auctioned it on eBay, where it attracted a winning bid of $2.1 million. Limbaugh has said he would match the top bid, with the money going to a charity that aids the families of injured or killed marines and federal law enforcement personnel.

On his Oct. 19 show Limbaugh played a clip of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—a major critic in the “phony soldiers” battle—uttering a rare word of praise for the host by lauding the auction’s “worthwhile cause.” But the talk host was in no mood for a truce.

“All of a sudden…you and I have buried the hatchet?” he asked rhetorically. “And now he wants credit for helping raise this money?…It’s Orwellian. It’s surreal.”

About one-third of all the talk segments related to the Iraq policy debate were initiated by Limbaugh last week.

The health care debate that played out on the talk shows involved a proposed expansion of the “SCHIP” (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) vetoed by President Bush. A major point of contention revolved around one family—the Frosts and their 12-year-old son Graeme—who became visible advocates for the program, which provides health care for lower and moderate-income children. The controversy sharpened when some opponents began digging into the Frosts finances and contending that they were too well-off to be using SCHIP.

For two of the talkers—Limbaugh and MSNBC’s liberal “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann—that issue got personal.

Olbermann had earlier accused some Frost family critics of “a venom unfathomable to nearly all mentally balanced humans,” and argued that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “helped to disseminate…lies” about the family.

Last week he revisited the issue. On his Oct. 16 program, Olbermann reported that McConnell’s office had countered by attacking him, not by name, but as a “liberal talk show host.” The title of Olbermann’s segment on the subject, “smear anarchy.”

Limbaugh was on the other side, in his case taking on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had charged that “hate radio has made a vicious attack” on the Frosts.

“Hate radio, she means me,” said Limbaugh. “Let’s be honest. You know it and I know it.”

Denying he had made “a vicious attack” on the SCHIP family, Limbaugh aimed at the Democrats attacking him.

“Can anyone who is smeared by Harry Reid on one issue and smeared by Nancy Pelosi on another issue be all that bad?” he asked.

If the nuances of an issue like SCHIP seem confusing, have no fear. In the talk culture, the purported topic can seem like an accessory to the main event, the host and his or her enemies, whether the mugging is imagined or actually happened.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Top Ten Stories in the Talk Show Index

Top Ten Stories in the broader News Coverage Index

Click here to read the methodology behind the Talk Show Index.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s return from exile was big news for surfers checking the MSNBC Web site on Oct. 18. Aside from a lengthy AP story that described her hopes for launching a “remarkable political comeback,” the online treatment included such interactive components as a primer on the “challenges facing President Gen. Pervez Musharraf” and analyst Richard Haass’ view of the unstable situation inside a country with an uneasy alliance with the U.S.

The next day, after Bhutto’s homecoming was punctuated by bomb attacks that killed approximately 140 people, AOL News highlighted an AP story speculating on possible perpetrators. While a security official suspected someone the story identified as “an al-Qaida-linked, pro-Taliban warlord based near the Afghan border,” Bhutto’s husband pointed the finger at someone different, at “elements sitting within the government.”

The dramatic and bloody events in Pakistan constituted the second-biggest story last week as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index for Oct. 14-19, filling 6% of the newshole. Yet the subject was a much bigger story in one of the five media sectors examined by the Index each week. In the online outlets, the events in Pakistan filled 12% of the newshole and were the top web story by a 2-1 margin over the 2008 presidential race (6%).

Given the patterns we have seen since the Index was launched in January, those numbers are not surprising. In some media sectors, differing coverage priorities have emerged, and none has been clearer than the online news outlets’ tendency to provide the broadest range of international news. Thus far in 2007, four international conflicts—the war in Iraq, tensions between the U.S. and Iran, the fighting in Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian standoff—have been among the top-seven online stories—far broader than in any other media.

Last week, aside from Pakistan, two other geopolitical events/crises made the online sector’s top-10 story list—Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to Iran (the first by a Russian leader in 64 years) was the fourth-biggest story, filling 6% of the newshole of top stories among the sites examined. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s accelerated efforts to facilitate a new round of peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians was seventh, at 4%

By way of comparison, in the overall Index last week, Putin’s Iran visit (2%) and Rice’s Mideast diplomacy (1%) finished outside of the top-10 story list.

The leading overall story last week was the 2008 presidential campaign (at 11%). After Pakistan, the third-biggest story was the Iraq policy debate (5%), followed by events on the ground in Iraq (4%) and the debate over immigration policy (3%).

PEJ’s News Coverage Index examines the news agenda of 48 different outlets from five sectors of the media. (See a List of Outlets.) It is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of major stories and differences among news platforms. (See Our Methodology.)

Another breaking news story that emerged last week also attracted more attention in one particular media sector. The scary news about MRSA, a drug-resistant Staph infection was driven by several major developments. One was a study in the Oct. 17 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) estimating that the spreading bug was doing more damage than expected—infecting about 94,000 Americans and killing about 18,000 of those a year. The other was the news that a Virginia high school student had died of MRSA on Oct. 15, temporarily shutting all school facilities in that county.

The MRSA “superbug” was the ninth-biggest story overall (3%), but it got the most coverage on network news. There it was the fifth story at 4%. (It failed to even make the top-10 story list in cable, online, and radio.)

The health scare led the Oct. 16 NBC nightly newscast, with anchor Brian Williams, warning of “a scary, indiscriminate and silent killer,” before turning the story over to the network’s chief science correspondent Robert Bazell.

The next morning, CBS “Early Show” correspondent Nancy Cordes was standing in front of the deceased Virginia teen’s school—Staunton River High—to deliver a report that warned of research suggesting that MRSA “may eventually become more deadly than AIDS.”

There are several reasons why network newscasts may have been inclined to give this story more coverage, including that sense that its content is applicable to both the authoritative half-hour nightly newscasts and the more lifestyle-oriented morning shows. At the same time, health and science have long been valued beats at the networks as epitomized by NBC’s Bazell, a 30-year network veteran who began covering the AIDS epidemic a quarter century ago, has written a book on a breast cancer treatment and has received numerous honors for his expertise.

If the staph infection story seemed to come out of nowhere last week, that’s not the case with the 2008 presidential campaign, the second-biggest story of the entire year, according to the News Coverage Index.

Last week marked the third-consecutive week in which the race for the White House was the top story, and it was No. 1 in three sectors, radio (9%), newspapers (14%) and cable (16%).

It’s also no coincidence that cable news devoted a larger portion of its total coverage to the campaign last week than any other sector. While daytime cable coverage is often given over to breaking news events, the prime-time talk shows often devote more time than many other media outlets to arguing about whatever the candidates happen to be arguing about. Overall, indeed, the 2008 campaign has generated more coverage on cable (12% of the newshole) than in any other sector in 2007. On the Oct. 17 edition of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews zeroed in on Democrat Barack Obama’s increasingly aggressive attacks on Clinton’s views on Iraq—and cheered the battle.

Obama focused on “the difference between Hillary and himself,” Matthews summarized. “She wants to refine the Bush policy in Iraq. He wants to reject it outright. She says Bush didn’t do it right. He says he didn’t do the right thing. Finally, the debate we’ve been hoping [for] and deserving as a country, the debate over the war.”

Two days earlier, on the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes,” the discussion was about Arizona Senator John McCain’s questioning of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s conservative bona fides. The two guest commentators put their own partisan spin on things.

Former GOP Senator Rick Santorum allowed that some of Romney’s views had evolved, but was quick to point out that unlike Democratic front runner Hillary Clinton, there has been no “flip flopping on the fly” on the Republican side. Democratic strategist Rich Masters responded by asserting that “there’s no question, whatsoever, that Mitt Romney’s positions are night and day.”

It is a tried and true cable talk equation of candidate vs. candidate + pundit vs. pundit. And there are 12 more months of this campaign to go.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Note: Due to a technical error, the MSNBC.com web site from Monday, October 15, was not included in this week's sample.

You may have thought the big news on the 2008 campaign trail last week was the GOP gathering in Dearborn Michigan that marked the first debate for recently announced candidate Fred Thompson.

But in some quarters of the talk show world, it wasn’t just the debaters, but the moderator, who became the focus of attention.

On his MSNBC talk show on Oct. 8, host Dan Abrams accused the Fox News Channel of conducting a campaign to discredit the moderator—MSNBC’s Chris Matthews—on ideological grounds.

“In a silly and obvious partisan attack, [Fox News is] suggesting Matthews shouldn’t host a Republican debate,” said Abrams. “I say Chris Matthews expresses opinions on his show that are far less predictable than any host covering politics on Fox.”

The next day conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh dismissed the idea that Matthews was an independent, non-partisan. “This is all about elevating the stature of Chris Matthews as an NBC personality,” he said. “The idea he is not partisan is absurd. He is in the tank for Hillary Clinton.”

Last week, it was not just campaign events themselves, but contentious sideshows like the Matthews controversy that helped make the presidential campaign the hottest topic—by far—on the radio and cable talk shows. The race for the White House consumed a full one-third of the talk airtime (33%), as measured by PEJ’s Talk Show Index for Oct. 7-12. Only once in 2007 has the campaign garnered more talk time—the week of Aug. 5-10—when it filled 35% of the talk newshole.

Just as striking, there was a huge 25 percentage-point gap last week between the top story (campaign at 33%) and the second-biggest story (immigration debate at 8%). Only four times all year has there been a bigger difference in coverage between the first two subjects.

The third-biggest talk topic last week, U.S. domestic terrorism (7%) was spurred by sparring over domestic surveillance legislation. The rest of the top five on the talk agenda last week were the debate over Iraq policy (5%) and the awarding of the Nobel Prizes (5%), which gave hosts an opportunity to either applaud or attack Peace Prize Winner Al Gore.

PEJ’s Talk Show Index, released each week, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics are most frequently dissected and discussed in the media universe of talk and opinion—a segment of the media that spans across both prime time cable and radio. (See About the Talk Show Index.) PEJ’s Talk Show Index includes seven prime time cable shows and five radio talk hosts and is a subset of our News Coverage Index.

Some of the conversation about the presidential campaign on the talk airwaves last week also involved a story that bounced around the Internet, but never got much mainstream media play. A National Enquirer story alleging an extramarital affair between Democratic candidate John Edwards and a campaign worker got the attention of several radio hosts, even if they warned their listeners to be skeptical.

“Here comes the smut,” declared liberal radio host Ed Schultz on his Oct. 12 show as he described the story and Edwards’s declaration that it was “completely untrue.” But while clearly doubting, Schultz was not completely dismissive.

“The scary thing here is there are stories that have been in the National Enquirer in the past that have turned out to be true…Is it a plant? It it true? Is it just made up by the National Enquirer?”

Conservative radio host Sean Hannity, perhaps as a justification for taking up the story, said he’d been “inundated” with emails about the Edwards story. And while he didn’t completely discount the possibility that the supermarket tab got it right, he warned his listeners that “they’re not exactly the most credible source…stay away from this stuff and don’t look towards a scandal as the great hope for winning an election.”

Also helping to fill some of that huge newshole for the presidential campaign was an atypical analyst. Actor Ben Affleck showed up on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” on MSNBC to comment on the Republicans in their Michigan debate. Introduced by Matthews as one of the “brightest stars in Hollywood” and “one of the sharpest political minds as well,” Affleck seemed somewhat embarrassed by an introduction that viewers might think overstated his gifts of political analysis and film reviewers might think exaggerated his acting skills.

Affleck was not the only unusual guest making the talk rounds last week. On his Oct. 8 show, the Fox New Channel’s Bill O’Reilly discussed the war on terror with Kinky Friedman, the cigar-chomping Texan and former front man for the satirical 1970s cowboy band, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. As for his political bona fides in relation to Ben Affleck, the philosopher, author, and country and western star did garner about 12% of the vote in a quixotic bid in the 2006 Texas gubernatorial race.

When O’Reilly asked for a reaction to musician Bruce Springsteen’s vocal criticism of the government’s war on terror, Friedman wasn’t in the mood to attack. “I’ve met the guy on one occasion. I think it was in ’75 or something,” he recalled. “I was at that time touring with Bob Dylan and I was flyin’ on 11 different kinds of herbs and spices, I guess. And I refused to shake hands with him for some reason. And I got seven years of bad luck. I’d like to make it up to Bruce.”

Thus are the risks of having celebrity pundits be a tad too candid.

When it came to what was arguably the biggest event on the campaign trail last weekend—Thompson’s first appearance at a GOP debate—the reviews tended to be mixed, leaning toward unimpressed. After garnering a good deal of positive attention when he was just contemplating a run for President, Thompson is finding the going a lot tougher now that he’s actually in the game.

On Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show last week, (guest hosted by David Shuster), Newsweek’s Richard Wolfe graded the former Tennessee senator’s performance as “good and bad…He really didn’t rise to expectations.” On the same show, former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey said Thompson “should have prepared himself to come on the stage and command the stage…I don’t think he did that.”

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, on the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” program, was also less than effusive about Thompson’s debate performance. “The most important thing was that he met sort of a basic expectation,” he said. “He didn’t knock the ball out of the park.”

Savage Savages Coulter

Of the radio talk hosts on both sides of the political divide, the most unconventional may be San Francisco-based Michael Savage. A conservative/contrarian known for rambling monologues, a hair-trigger temper, and a willingness to push the envelope on rhetoric, he has outraged many on the left in his 12-year talk radio career.

But last week, he took dead aim at one of the country’s most outspoken conservatives. On an Oct. 8 appearance on CNBC, Ann Coulter again made headlines and stirred a backlash by declaring her preference for an all-Christian nation. When asked about the role of Jews, she added, “We just want Jews to be perfected.”

The only talk host to take her on among the shows PEJ examined was Savage.

“There are many people who don’t even understand how fundamentally thug-like and anti-Semitic this is…you would expect this from uneducated drunken louts,” he declared on his Oct. 12 program. “This woman is a disgrace. She has no place in the media…What’s amazing to me is that there’s been no outcry amongst conservatives.”

Savage’s outcry turned Coulter’s remarks into the 10th-biggest talk topic (at 1%) last week.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Top Ten Stories in the Talk Show Index

Top Ten Stories in the broader News Coverage Index

Click here to read the methodology behind the Talk Show Index.

The coverage of the Oct. 10 shootings at Success Tech Academy in Cleveland had the all-too-familiar elements of the shocking violence in America story.

There was the live “Breaking News” coverage on cable news—complete with scenes of shocked and sobbing students outside the high school, flashing lights on emergency vehicles, a victim wheeled on a gurney, and concern that the carnage was not over.

“The building is not secure,” noted a local TV reporter picked up on CNN. “The gunman, we believe, is still in the building.”

Soon the eyewitness video surfaced, footage of screaming students inside the school (“this is not a joke,” shouted one) scrambling desperately for safety. And within a day, media post-mortems began to focus on Asa Coon, the 14-year-old Success Tech student who wounded four people before killing himself, as well as on the bigger issue of why warning signs about him were missed.

The Oct. 11 “World News Tonight” on ABC described Coon as a violent boy from a troubled family who had earlier attempted suicide. “With more than 50,000 pupils in the Cleveland system, educators are simply overwhelmed and can easily miss teens as troubled as Asa Coon,” ABC correspondent Eric Horng reported. That night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed a psychiatrist about Coon in a segment labeled “Mind of a Shooter.”

Though the Cleveland incident evoked mentions of the 1999 Columbine shooting that left 15 dead, the Success Tech case, fortunately, did not result in extensive casualties. (The worst school massacre in U.S. history occurred on April 16, 2007 when 33 people ended up dead on the campus of Virginia Tech.) But last week’s news coverage included three separate incidents that made it a frightening week for random violence in the U.S.

Together, the three incidents accounted for 8% of the total newshole last week as measured in PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index, which analyzes the content of the news from a range of media. That would have made them collectively the No. 2 story of the week.
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The Cleveland shooting filled 4% of the overall newshole, making it the fifth-biggest story of the week from Oct. 7-12. There was also the Oct. 7 killing spree by a 20-year-old sheriff’s deputy that took six lives in tiny Crandon Wisconsin (ninth-biggest story at 3%). And a Pennsylvania boy who had amassed a weapons arsenal in alleged preparation for an assault on his high school was arrested on Oct. 10. (That story missed the top-10 roster, but did generate 1% of the coverage.)

The top story last week (accounting for 15% of the newshole in the Index), was the Presidential campaign, where a good deal of the coverage was focused on Republican Fred Thompson’s first debate performance. The second-biggest story (at 6%) was immigration, with a federal judge’s ruling against a proposed crackdown on employers generating the most attention to the subject since late June. Events inside Iraq were next at 6%, with the controversy over Blackwater still simmering. And the awarding of the Peace Prize to Al Gore was a major reason why this year’s Nobel awards made up the fourth biggest story at 4%.

PEJ’s News Coverage Index examines the news agenda of 48 different outlets from five sectors of the media. (See a List of Outlets.) It is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of major stories and differences among news platforms. (See Our Methodology.)

There were several similar patterns connecting the three frightening stories out of Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania last week.

First, all three incidents primarily involved young people, many of high school age. For all the attention the stories generated, each was largely a two-day event that then moved quickly off the media radar screen. And cable news again demonstrated its attraction to such breaking-news disasters beyond that of other media. It devoted a combined 14% of its time to the three stories, 7% to the Cleveland school case, 3% to the arrest of the 14-year-old from Plymouth Meeting PA, and 4% to the Wisconsin shooting.

Once the facts of the cases were out, the media quickly began to search for motive, to try to make sense of the senseless.

The carnage in Crandon Wisconsin committed by a 20-year old deputy, Tyler Peterson, might have resulted from “jealousy” according to an Oct. 8 story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune headlined: “6 killed in ‘crime of passion.’” Even as the story quoted a Peterson acquaintance saying “he was just a reasonable kind of guy,” it reported that one of the victims was his ex-girlfriend.

All of those killed, who were either high school students or recent high school graduates, were “run-of-the-mill, regular kids,” a neighbor said in the story. “Real good kids.”

“He had guns, grenades and videos of the Columbine attack,” noted ABC anchor Charles Gibson, introducing an Oct. 11 story on the 14-year-old in the Philly suburb found with a large weapons cache. “All belonged to a boy who was tormented at school and who was plotting revenge.”

If the youngster was plotting to attack a local high school, the ABC account painted a pretty clear picture on motive. The boy (who was not named) had been home schooled by his parents after being bullied and tormented in junior high school because of his weight. Online, the story reported, he ran a web site for an organization called “The Imperial Cobra Army.”

For all that there seems a familiar trajectory to the coverage of these violent crime incidents such as the tragedies last week, however, they have not been a major feature of the media overall this year.

An examination of the News Coverage Index in 2007 finds that only five such incidents cracked the weekly list of top-10 events, and did so during only seven of the 41 weeks of the year so far. (This excludes celebrity crime stories of a different sort, such as Michael Vick, O.J. Simpson, and astronaut Lisa Nowak, and terrorism plots.)

Those five incidents included the January tale of two teenaged Missouri boys who were kidnapped and later rescued; the NASA engineer who killed himself and another employee inside the Johnson Space Center in April; the missing, nine-month pregnant Ohio woman whose cop boyfriend was arrested for her murder in late June; and the brutal home invasion and murder of three family members in peaceful Chesire Connecticut in July.

All of these paled in comparison with the attention given the April 16 Virginia Tech killing spree, however, a story that generated more coverage that week (51% of the newshole from April 15-20) than any other event in 2007. But after the media descended on the Blacksburg campus that week to pursue every conceivable angle, even the story evaporated quickly in the press. The next week it receded into third place (7% of the newshole). The following week, it virtually disappeared, accounting for less than 1% of the overall coverage

If history is any guide, the coverage of last week's incidents has already moved on, too, and soon many are likely to forget about the shooting at Success Tech Academy, Crandon, Wisconsin and “The Imperial Cobra Army.” And when another incident occurs, the media will try to probe “what went wrong?” all over again.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Note: MSNBC aired a special report on the evening of Wednesday, Oct. 10, instead of its regular show Out in the Open. That program is not included in this week's sample.

A look at last week’s coverage of the Iraq conflict makes a pretty compelling case that the talk show universe moves to its own beat.

In the media generally, the expanding investigation into Blackwater USA—the private security firm accused by the Iraqi government of deliberately killing 17 civilians in a Sept. 16 Baghdad incident—was a dominant development last week. So much so, the situation inside Iraq, made up largely of the Blackwater case, was the second-leading story, accounting for 13% of the newshole as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index.

But the cable and radio talk hosts—who employ their own criteria for newsworthiness—had a different set of Iraq priorities from the rest of the media last week. The Blackwater investigation wasn’t deemed very interesting, particularly by conservative talk radio hosts—such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity—who left the subject alone. The Fox News Channel also chose to take a pass. According to PEJ’s Talk Show Index from Sept. 30-Oct. 5, events inside Iraq accounted for only 7% of the cable and radio talk air time.

Instead, the talk hosts were fascinated by the Iraq policy debate, especially by one aspect of the debate that struck close to home. For the second week in a row, talkers on the left and right were abuzz over Limbaugh’s reference to “phony soldiers” on Sept. 26. (Limbaugh insists he was referring to one discredited former soldier who had lied about Iraq atrocities. His foes claim he was attacking any Iraq veteran who voiced opposition to the war.)

With the Limbaugh controversy driving most of the war debate discussion, Iraq policy filled 25% of the talk airwaves, according to PEJ’s Talk Show Index. That made it the second-biggest talk topic, behind the 2008 Presidential campaign (30%). Events inside Iraq (7%), the status of Idaho Senator Larry Craig (3%) and health care (2%) rounded out the top five talk stories. Just for good measure, the fallout from the Feb. 8 death of starlet Anna Nicole Smith reappeared on the top-10 talk roster last week, finishing No. 8 at 1%.

By contrast, the Iraq policy debate filled only 6% of the media newshole overall, and even less if the talkers were removed.

PEJ’s Talk Show Index, released each week, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics are most frequently dissected and discussed in the media universe of talk and opinion—a segment of the media that spans across both prime time cable and radio. (See About the Talk Show Index.) PEJ’s Talk Show Index includes seven prime time cable shows and five radio talk hosts and is a subset of our News Coverage Index.

The furor over “phony soldiers” erupted, in part, because of the broader political context. Congress had just passed resolutions condemning the liberal group MoveOn.org’s advertisement that characterized General David Petraeus as “General Betray Us.” Angry and chagrined, Democrats quickly jumped on Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” line as an attack on the patriotism of troops who dared speak against the war.

As the tiff moved into its second week, Limbaugh continued to defend himself by attacking his attackers.

“I’m wondering if the Democrats might be feeling as if they had opened a Pandora’s Box…Who actually is attacking the military? They are,” he said on his Oct. 4 show. And referring to one Democratic Senator’s professed desire to censure him, Limbaugh responded: “You have no power to censure me or any other private citizen…I will censure you for repeating lies about a private citizen.”

The criticism however, wasn’t just coming from Democrats in Congress. Liberal talk show hosts were making hay as well. A few nights earlier, MSNBC’s liberal Keith Olbermann continued his assault on Limbaugh by airing an ad that features a wounded Iraq veteran saying, “Rush Limbaugh called vets like me ‘phony soliders’ for telling the truth about Iraq…Stop telling lies about my service.”

Olbermann then assailed “Limbaugh’s unceasing tone-deafness about this country and its people.”

The Limbaugh contretemps were, in many ways, a proxy fight over Iraq policy with talk hosts on both sides of the war debate weighing in. The fact that it became personal and self-referential seemed to help inflate its value as a talk topic. The fact that it was going on for a second week is just one continuing feature of the talk culture. It is remarkably self referential.

The Talkers and the Campaign

The presidential campaign, always a hot talk topic, brought some good tidings to Hillary Clinton last week. Her fundraising skill (her campaign collected $27 million in the last quarter, outraising Barack Obama) and her widening lead in the polls (a new Washington Post/ABC News survey had her ahead of Obama by 33 points) sparked more conversation about her prospects for victory in 2008.

“Hillary Clinton is the favorite to become President of the United States. Do you believe that will happen?” Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly asked analyst Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.

While stressing that “there is nothing inevitable in politics,” Sabato responded that “if you had to pick somebody to win today, you’d pick her.”

A significant piece of the GOP presidential story last week was the news that some religious conservatives were talking about backing a third party candidate if the party nominated the more socially liberal Rudy Giuliani. Asked about that on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show last week, former White House deputy director of Faith-Based Initiatives David Kuo warned that social conservatives who were counting on Giuliani to appoint conservative judges were “taking a huge gamble. I don’t know that…you’re gonna trust somebody who says, ‘listen I’m pro gay marriage, I’m pro abortion rights, but it’s okay. I’m gonna appoint justices who rule against those things.’”

Anna Redux

Finally, some of the old cast of characters from the Anna Nicole Smith saga got back into the news last week. And the topic was sheer tabloid. O’Reilly devoted part of his Oct. 3 show to Smith attorney Howard K. Stern’s $60 million lawsuit against a book that reports, among other things, that he and Larry Birkhead—the ex-Smith boyfriend—had sex.

When it comes to the Anna Nicole Smith fiasco, it’s hard to find a protagonist.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Top Ten Stories in the Talk Show Index

Top Ten Stories in the broader News Coverage Index

Click here to read the methodology behind the Talk Show Index.

On Friday Oct. 5, the “CBS Evening News” offered viewers a kind of primer on Blackwater USA, the powerful private security company operating in Iraq.

The dangerous job of protecting dignitaries in Iraq, correspondent Bob Orr said, had been “Blackwater’s biggest bonanza,” generating more than $1 billion in revenue from U.S. tax dollars. That also came at the cost of the lives of 27 Blackwater staffers. And the company’s founder Erik Prince, Orr noted, was a former White House intern for President George H.W. Bush, who was seen by critics as “a profiteering mercenary who’s landed lucrative no-bid contracts from cronies inside the Bush administration.”

Still, the CBS report concluded that, given its daunting line of work, Blackwater had become almost “untouchable” and “impossible to replace.” Declared one analyst somberly: “It’s really emerged to become one of the most powerful private actors in the so-called war on terror.”

Until recently, it’s quite possible that most Americans knew little about the North Carolina company and the murky world of the roughly 10,000 U.S. private security forces in Iraq. Earlier this year, a PEJ study examining coverage of these firms in over 400 mainstream media outlets during the first four years of the war found that with some exceptions, private security firms were “a relatively unknown commodity” in war reporting, generating only occasional in-depth coverage.

That appears to have changed dramatically, particularly in the days since a Sept. 16 incident in Baghdad that the Iraqi government has characterized as an unprovoked killing of 17 civilians by Blackwater employees. (Iraq is asking the company to pay $136 million to compensate the families of the victims. Blackwater has said it came under fire and acted properly.) Last week, the incident took center stage in Washington where Congress, the FBI and the State Department all took roles in the scramble for oversight of private security outfits.

And when the focus moved from cratered urban battlefields in Iraq to the committee rooms of Congress, it became a much easier story for the media to follow.

With the Blackwater controversy accounting for a large majority of stories on the subject, the situation inside Iraq was the second-biggest story in the news last week. It accounted for 13% of the newshole as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index from Sept. 30-Oct. 5. Events inside Iraq led the coverage in the newspaper sector (20%), online (19%), and on network TV (11%).

The Blackwater saga has been percolating in the headlines for several weeks. In the interval between Sept. 16 (when the Baghdad killings took place) and Oct. 5, events in Iraq have been the second-biggest story (at 9%) in the News Index. And nearly 60% of all the stories on that topic involved coverage of Blackwater.

Last week, events in Iraq finished just behind the top story, the 2008 Presidential campaign, which filled 14% of the newshole. In terms of horserace coverage, it was a good week for Democrat Hillary Clinton who out-fundraised top challenger Barack Obama and stretched her lead over him in a new national poll. The third-biggest story, the Iraq policy debate (at 6%), was driven by a heated talk radio debate over conservative host Rush Limbaugh’s use of the term “phony soldiers” on his Sept. 26 show. (That helped make the policy debate the top subject on radio, where it filled 20% of the airtime.)

Rounding out the top-five stories in the news last week were the immigration debate (fourth at 3%) and U.S. domestic terrorism (fifth at 3%).

If the media have been playing catch-up on Blackwater, it may be because the shadowy realm of private security contractors was largely overshadowed by the sectarian violence in Iraq and the activities of U.S. forces on the ground. (One notable exception was the much covered killing and mutilating of a team of Blackwater contractors in Fallujah in March 2004.) Often doing jobs that were once the province of the U.S. military, these firms seemed to function in a netherworld where lines of accountability were uncertain, and press access or even interest, at least by the national media, was limited.

But last week, as the fallout from the Sept. 16 tragedy continued to build, Blackwater emerged into the glare of public and media scrutiny. A front-page New York Times piece on Oct. 2, based on a new Congressional study, reported that “employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, in a vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded.”

In highly publicized testimony, Blackwater chairman Prince appeared before Congress on Oct. 2 to state that his employees have “acted appropriately at all times” and that the company quickly dismisses people “if there is any sort of a discipline problem.” He came under sharp criticism from Democrats. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, for one, was quoted in the Austin American-Statesman warning about “privatizing our military to an organization that has been aggressive and…in some cases, reckless, in the handling of their duties.”

Even in the midst of this criticism, Blackwater generated some good news last week. On Oct. 3 its employees rescued the Polish ambassador who’d been injured in a Baghdad ambush. As viewers watched video of a Blackwater helicopter landing the in the middle of a Baghdad street and whisking the bandaged diplomat to safety, CBS anchor Katie Couric announced that today, “it was Blackwater to the rescue.”

By the end of the week, however, U.S. officials were busy trying to impose a stricter set of standards and controls on security contractors. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced his intention to strengthen oversight of such operations, while the U.S. House of Representatives voted to subject such companies to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. That move “would close a loophole that now leaves security contractors immune from prosecution,” PBS “NewsHour” anchor Judy Woodruff noted.

As CBS national security correspondent David Martin put it in an Oct. 5 story, “right now, it’s unclear if anyone has legal jurisdiction [over the contractors.] As one attorney who defended a contractor accused of shooting at Marines in Iraq said, ‘these guys think they’re above the law. And they’re right.’”

Steroids Back in the News

One person who decided she wasn’t above the law last week was Marion Jones, the once-great Olympic track star who admitted to lying about steroid use. In a tear-filled confessional Oct. 5 press conference, Jones said, “I have betrayed your trust,” and “I want to ask for your forgiveness.” Jones’ saga was the sixth biggest story last week, at 3%. It was the third biggest story on network news (filling 6% of all airtime last week).

In his lead story Oct. 5, NBC anchor Brian Williams called her “the best female athlete of her time.” As for her confession, Williams said “Marion Jones’ admission today was the exception, though. It’s mostly rumors about role models that have ruined the sports experience for so many fans.”

Without saying so directly, it certainly seemed like the NBC anchor was alluding to Barry Bond’s joyless, and often begrudged, passing of Hank Aaron as baseball’s all-time home run king this past season.

But the Jones story itself was not yet over. While she is reported to have handed back the five medals she won in the 2000 Olympics, the fallout, in terms of sentencing for her misleading investigators, was still to come.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

In traditional journalism, one of basic axioms is that the journalist should scrupulously avoid becoming part of the story.

In the talk show genre, the attitude of the host usually is the story. But last week, even that more personal side of talk took on a new twist.

Two of the biggest talk topics were controversies involving things said by hosts themselves--Rush Limbaugh, who has the biggest audience in talk radio according to Talkers Magazine, and Bill O’Reilly, whose Fox News Channel show has consistently garnered the highest ratings in prime-time cable news.

The furor over Limbaugh involved his reference to “phony soldiers” while discussing opposition to the Iraq war. That helped make the Iraq debate the third-biggest talk topic in the talk culture last week as measured by PEJ’s Talk Show Index from Sept. 23-28. It filled 14% of the airtime.

The fallout over O’Reilly involved his visit to a Harlem restaurant, where he seemed pleasantly surprised by the customers’ good behavior. “There wasn’t one person…screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea,” O’Reilly said about the dinner. That was the fourth-biggest talk story at 6%.

The top talk topic last week—as was the case in the more general News Coverage Index—was the U.S. conflict with Iran, a subject largely fueled by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial appearance at Columbia University. It filled 28% of the cable and radio talk newshole. The 2008 presidential campaign, always a favorite subject of talk hosts, was No. 2, filling 20% of the talk time. Rounding out the top-five story list—after the Iraq policy debate and O’Reilly’s restaurant saga—was the immigration debate, way back at 3%.

PEJ’s Talk Show Index, released each week, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics are most frequently dissected and discussed in the media universe of talk and opinion—a segment of the media that spans across both prime time cable and radio. (See About the Talk Show Index.) PEJ’s Talk Show Index includes seven prime time cable shows and five radio talk hosts and is a subset of our News Coverage Index.

But it was passion derived from the O’Reilly and Limbaugh comments that stood out last week.

Their sagas are notable in that they highlight many of the spiciest ingredients in the volatile talk show stew—ideology, personality, ego, and good-old fashioned self-promotion. Friend and foe often jump into the pile, and something akin to a free-for-all ensues over the airwaves.

Limbaugh’s remark about “phony soldiers” came at a particularly politically sensitive time in the Iraq war debate. Democrats and liberals were smarting over the recent passage of Congressional resolutions condemning an ad from the liberal group, MoveOn.org, characterizing top Iraq commander General David Petraeus as “General Betray Us.”

In the Sept. 26 phone conversation about anti-war sentiments, a caller said: “They never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and spout to the media.” Limbaugh then interrupted, saying, “the phony soldiers.”

Limbaugh’s use of the term “phony soldiers” was attacked as an effort to discredit the troops. Capitol Hill Democrats introduced a measure condemning Limbaugh’s words and Democratic Congressman Steny Hoyer, referring to the MoveOn.org controversy, told The New York Times that “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Limbaugh’s talk show foes also waded into the fray, with insults flying.

“I see America’s number one drugster with a microphone is out there beatin’ up on our troops,” snapped liberal talk radio host Ed Schultz, referring to Limbaugh’s problems with prescription painkillers. “Is it fair to have a resolution on the Senate floor condemning MoveOn.org, but to allow the king talker to get away with stuff like that? Is that supporting the troops?”

MSNBC’s liberal host Keith Olbermann, also invoking the MoveOn.org controversy, went after the GOP and Limbaugh, who he called “a conservative jack-in-the-box.”

“For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be a…race among Republicans to blast Limbaugh…the way so they happily wrung hands and necks over the MoveOn.org Petraeus advertisement,” he asserted.

Limbaugh was far from silent in his own defense. He called the response to his remarks the “anatomy of a smear.” He also insisted that his reference to “phony soldiers” was aimed at only one man, Jesse MacBeth, a disgraced former soldier who lied about U.S. atrocities in Iraq. After ending the phone call on Sept. 26, Limbaugh then talked about the MacBeth case on the air. But given the sensitive situation, his foes weren’t buying the MacBeth explanation, leaving the conservative host to lament the bias of what he calls “the drive-by media.”

In several ways, the reaction of the right-leaning O’Reilly to his critics mirrored Limbaugh’s. O’Reilly also declared himself the victim of a smear and counterattacked against the mainstream media.

The episode started with comments made on the Sept. 19 edition of O’Reilly’s syndicated radio show in which he expressed his approval of the black customers in the well-known Sylvia’s restaurant in Harlem.

“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all,” said O’Reilly, who added that “There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.’”

Media Matters for America, a liberal group that expresses its activism by critiquing the press, posted O’Reilly’s remarks. They were part of a pattern, the group claimed, of “provocative statements about race” by the host of radio and TV. The controversy ballooned from there. O’Reilly said he was making a positive statement about race. His critics accused him of insultingly biased preconceptions about African-Americans.

Olbermann, a relentless O’Reilly antagonist, took his shots in segment he titled “Billo Goes to Harlem.”

Yet one of O’Reilly’s attackers came from the right side of the political spectrum. Conservative radio host Michael Savage, oozing sarcasm, remarked that “O’Reilly goes to a restaurant in Harlem and finds out ‘wow, look at that man, blacks use forks and knives. Far out.’”

“Did he put his foot into it this time,” said a gleeful Savage, asking what he clearly believed was a rhetorical question.

For his part, O’Reilly, fought back hard, devoting part of several Fox News Channel shows to the controversy last week. On Sept. 26, he asserted that “the far-left smear web site Media Matters distorted a very positive discussion on race and accused me of racism.” O’Reilly then singled out a number of media outlets—ranging from CNN to CBS’s “Early Show” to the Philadelphia Inquirer—that he said unfairly picked up on the “Media Matters defamation.” (He also pointed out those outlets, including the “Today” show and Newsday, that he believed treated him fairly.)

“The tragedy here is that there is no longer an honest press in America,” O’Reilly observed.

The honesty of the press may be in the eye of the beholder. What is indisputable is that last week, talk hosts were a big part of the talk in the talk show universe.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Top Ten Stories in the Talk Show Index

Top Ten Stories in the broader News Coverage Index

Click here to read the methodology behind the Talk Show Index.

“Taking New York by storm, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rolls into the Big Apple,” announced Matt Lauer on the Sept. 24 “Today” program. Lest that seem too much like hyping a jet-setting rock star, Lauer cautioned that the important question was whether the visit was “free speech at work or a dangerous platform for a hate monger.”

That indeed seemed to be the theme of the No. 1 story of the week: How to cover someone without aggrandizing him?

For National Public Radio, the answer was to do a story about how the media was doing stories. NPR’s “Morning Edition” reported that Ahmadinejad had “produced screaming headlines in New York’s tabloid newspapers. The New York Post called the Iranian leader a ‘madman.’ The Daily News announced [in a bold headline] ‘THE EVIL HAS LANDED.’”

Another way was for the press to allow everyone, from the famous to the ordinary, to register their level of distaste with Ahmadinejad’s speaking engagement last week at one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, Columbia University.

“I think it is an outrage against civilization,” declared former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the “Today” story.

“It will be a spectacle,” predicted one college student interviewed on “Today.” “But so is the circus.”

For a few days last week, it was certainly a circus in the press. According to PEJ’s News Coverage Index for Sept. 23-28, the subject of Iran (dominated by Ahmadinejad’s trip) accounted for 13% of all news coverage. Iran finished ahead of the 2008 Presidential race (11%), the bloody anti-government protests in Myanmar (8%), the labor showdown and deal between General Motors and the United Auto Workers (5%) and the situation on the ground in Iraq (5%).

A look at the coverage of Ahmadinejad’s visit by media sector last week suggests that much of the story was driven by opinion and commentary. In the media that typically are more focused on information, Iran was not as big a story. It was the fifth-biggest subject on newspaper front-pages at only 5%. It was the third-biggest story online (at 7%) and on network news (10%).

But the two platforms where Iran and its leader really dominated were cable news (21%) and radio (28%). In those two sectors, which feature talk shows, hosts took the occasion to sound off on everything from the propriety of Columbia President Lee Bollinger’s insult-riddled introduction of Ahmadinejad (calling him “a petty and cruel dictator”) to whether the Iranian President outsmarted his critics simply by showing up.

Coverage dropped off dramatically after Ahmadinejad’s Sept. 24 Columbia and Sept. 25 UN speeches. More than 80% of the stories about Iran last week appeared on those two days. And last week’s outburst continued the irregular and sporadic cycle of news coverage of Iran in a year in which the hostility between Tehran and Washington increased and in which the prospects of military confrontation appears to have grown. (“The Whispers of War” was the Oct. 1 Newsweek headline warning of the possibility of Israel and/or the U.S. attacking Iran to pre-empt its nuclear weapon program.)

PEJ’s News Coverage Index is a study of the news agenda of 48 different outlets from five sectors of the media. (See a List of Outlets.) It is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics the media are covering, the trajectories of major stories and differences among news platforms. (See Our Methodology.)

For all the concern about where this confrontation is going, this was only the fifth time Iran made PEJ’s News Coverage Index’s top-five story list this year. Indeed, Iran had not even broken the top-ten story list in the three months before the week of Sept. 16-21, when Ahmadinejad’s pending trip to New York began creating a media buzz and Iran resurfaced as the eighth-biggest story.

What was it Americans then learned about Iran in the coverage? In his speech at Columbia University, Ahmadinejad denied the existence of homosexuality in his country and expressed skepticism about the Holocaust. Most of the coverage focused more on the controversy over the university visit and the outlandish things the Iranian President said than on anything else. There was considerably less coverage of the general situation between U.S. and Iran.

In some media quarters, the whole affair was treated with sarcasm. Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central show played off his UN speech against President Bush’s in a segment labeled “Showdown at the UN Corral,” which included a graphic of both men wearing big 10-gallon cowboy hats.

This was a week in which some of the actual coverage wasn’t much different than that on Comedy Central.

“The Week,” a feisty magazine that offers a compact synopsis of the world’s big events, featured a cover illustration of the smiling Iranian President wearing a New York Yankee hat and eating a Manhattan-style hot dog dripping with condiments. The headline: “Tyrant on tour.”

Liberal radio talker Randi Rhodes, not usually at a loss for words, stumbled a bit in summing up Ahmadinejad, before settling on, “he’s a whackadoodle, he’s bizarre…he’s a psycho.”

The Los Angeles Times Sept. 25 story about the Iranian President’s visit to New York focused largely on demonstrators and protestors, including some who wore Iranian flags, some who carried signs reading “Hitler Lives.”

But for those who got beyond the rhetoric, hype and deafening buzz surrounding Ahmadinejad, there were a few other stories about Iran last week that offered perhaps more about the state of affairs between Tehran and Washington.

On the Sept. 25 edition of CNN’s “Situation Room” anchor Wolf Blitzer reported on the remarks made at the UN by new French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has a considerably more hawkish position on Iran’s development of nuclear weapons than his predecessor. Using “some very, very tough words,” Blitzer noted, the new president warned that a nuclear-armed Iran was an “unacceptable risk” and a serious threat to world peace.

That same night, PBS’s “NewsHour” reported on a Senate resolution asking that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard be labeled a terrorist organization. Republican Senator Jon Kyl saw the move as an effort to reduce Iran’s ability “to directly harm Americans in Iraq.” But anchor Jim Lehrer reported that Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid warned his colleagues about “taking actions that could lead to war with Iran.”

Also that same night, ABC anchor Charles Gibson—with the caption reading “New Front Line”—told viewers that the U.S. was taking the “extraordinary step” of building a new military base in Iraq that is “practically within shouting distance of Iran.” Five miles to be exact.

“The new base is part of a bigger struggle for influence in Iraq between the U.S. and Iran,” said correspondent Terry McCarthy.

Even with those storm clouds gathering, the irresistible story last week was the not so much what is occurring in Iran and what do about it, but the objectionable nature of the Iranian president and whether he should be allowed to speak anywhere other than the U.N.

Given the already heated state of the 2008 presidential race, no coverage would be complete without the candidates weighing in.

Their answers were reported on Brit Hume’s Fox News Channel newscast on Sept. 24. Columbia alum and Democratic hopeful Barack Obama would not have chosen to invite Ahmadinejad to his alma mater, but said “we don’t need to be fearful of the rantings of somebody like Ahmadinejad.” Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton also tried to have it both ways, saying she ventured no opinion on Columbia’s invitation but then added, “If I were the president of a university I would not have invited him.”

Republican Fred Thompson issued a statement that “Columbia gave a public forum to a tyrant to spread his lies and deceit.”

GOP frontrunner Rudy Giuliani similarly declared that “it makes no sense to give him this kind of forum, to give him this kind of dignity.”

With everyone eager to get their two cents in on Ahmadinejad, the media had an easy story to tell about Iran last week. But the trip, and the coverage of it, are now over.

What the candidates might do about Iran if elected is harder to answer, and harder to cover.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Note: MSNBC aired a presidential debate on the evening of Wednesday, September 26. That time slot was not included in this week's sample.

Asked about media interest in O.J. Simpson’s arrest after the sports memorabilia showdown in Las Vegas, Fox News Channel contributor Jane Hall sounded a disapproving note.

“It’s O.J. the sequel,” Hall said on the “O’Reilly Factor.” “It’s pure entertainment. Obviously there’s an appetite for it [but] I’d love us to start looking away.”

On MSNBC, host Dan Abrams seemed a lot more embracing. After anchoring several segments on the Simpson saga, Abrams enthusiastically introduced Kato Kaelin, the old O.J. houseguest and murder trial pseudo-celeb.

“When O.J. does something bad, I would think that’s good for Kato Kaelin,” Abrams ventured. “The good old days Kato, the good old days.”

Whatever one thinks of the coverage of Simpson’s latest brush with the law—which includes charges of kidnapping and assault with a deadline weapon—the media couldn’t resist last week, and the talk media was even more aggressive.

On the same week that the case was the biggest story in the general News Coverage Index, it was an even bigger deal for America’s cable and radio talk hosts. According to PEJ’s Talk Show Index for Sept. 16-21, the topic filled 21% of the talk air time, topping the 2008 Presidential campaign (18%) and the continuing policy debate over Iraq (13%). Rounding out the top-five talk topics were the tasering of a student in Florida (fourth at 6%) and tensions with Iran (6%) sparked, in part, by the New York visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

There was a big difference in how the Simpson case played in cable talk versus radio, two variations of the commentariat with differing shadings. With their attraction to celebrity and crime and with an endless roster of legal talking heads to rely on, the cable talk shows in PEJ’s sample devoted almost 140 minutes to the topic last week. (MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson dubbed Simpson “the father of modern cable news.”) But the talk radio hosts—who tend to favor more politically and culturally polarizing subjects—only spent about eight minutes on Simpson. That would seem to suggest that the deep racial divide that was exposed in his 1995 murder trial, has not surfaced as an issue, at least to this point. (The Washington Post published a Sept. 27 poll indicating that the opinion gap about Simpson between whites and blacks is now narrowing noticeably.)

The favorite topic among talk radio hosts last week (and the third-biggest subject on cable talk) was the presidential race. And the conversation focused largely on one of the talkers’ favorite targets/subjects. Between the new health care proposal she unveiled on Sept. 17 and other aspects of her campaign, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton generated more than half the talk segments.

Naturally, the tone was sarcastic or cheering, depending on the political shading of the host.

On his Sept. 17 show, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh went after Clinton, among other ways, by referring to her previous attempt to craft health care policy as First Lady in 1993 as “Hillary-care, national socialized medicine.”

Liberal talker Ed Schultz had a considerably different view, declaring that by igniting a serious conversation, “the Clinton plan is off to a flying start.” Schultz described Clinton’s Sept. 17 speech on health care as “good,” and “detailed” with plenty of “meat.”

PEJ’s Talk Show Index, released each week, is designed to provide news consumers, journalists and researchers with hard data about what stories and topics are most frequently dissected and discussed in the media universe of talk and opinion—a segment of the media that spans across both prime time cable and radio. (See About the Talk Show Index.) PEJ’s Talk Show Index includes seven prime time cable shows and five radio talk hosts and is a subset of our News Coverage Index.

The treatment of both the Simpson and presidential campaign stories illustrates a pattern that occurs often in the talk genre. The hosts take several major stories in the general News Coverage Index (O.J. at 13% and the campaign at 9%) and amplify them even further.

Many weeks there are also topics that get more modest play in the general coverage that are seized on by certain hosts—and they often provide insight into how the talk genre functions.

Last week, there were three such examples. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s new memoir “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World” generated only 1% of the general news coverage and was not among the top-10 stories. But, given the political impact of some of Greenspan’s musings, it was the seventh-biggest talk topic last week at 4%.

Pundits of all stripes jumped on Greenspan’s eye-catching assertion in his book that the war in Iraq was “largely about oil.” (Greenspan later explained he was not saying the administration’s motive for war was oil.)

“‘No blood for oil’ chanted the enemies of war,” said MSNBC’s Chris Matthews as he opened his Sept. 17 “Hardball” show. “Now a major voice declares ‘it was about oil.’’’ Taking a markedly different tack, MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson basically said “so what?”

“I think this war should have been about oil,” he said. “I wish it was about oil. We’d have lower gas prices.”

The news that Dan Rather was suing his former employers at CBS for $70 million was barely a blip on the media radar screen last week, finishing well out of the top-10 story list on the general news index. But during his stint in the anchor chair, Rather sometimes incurred the wrath of conservatives for what they saw as liberal bias. And a key element in his suit was a controversial “60 Minutes II” story alleging favorable treatment of George Bush during his military service. So given that political baggage, Rather was the #10 story (at 3%) on the Talk Show Index with radio hosts particularly interested.

Rush Limbaugh heaped scorn on Rather’s lawsuit, telling his listeners that be it “elected Democrats or drive-by-media, these liberals keep opening the door and bloodying their nose before they can get through the doorway.”

Yet liberal Randi Rhodes lauded Rather’s assertion that he was a victim of CBS’s efforts to appease the Bush administration, declaring that “he makes a really unbelievable case about the interference by corporations and government in the reportage of what we like to think is real news.”

Finally, the video of a University of Florida student being tasered after trying to ask questions of Senator John Kerry received wide circulation in the media last week. But the story was largely treated as a passing curiosity, and, at 2%, failed to make the top-10 list of more general News Coverage Index stories.

Yet in the talk show universe, the taser episode was treated as a civil liberties issue and finished as the fourth-biggest story last week. The incident also seemed to do the impossible—it unified some of the most partisan conservative and liberal voices on the talk radio airwaves.

On her show, Rhodes decried the tasering of a “kid who was exercising his Constitutional rights.” From the right-side of the spectrum, Michael Savage was even more vocal.

Calling the campus police “fascist,” Savage declared that “I don’t want to live in a country where even a left-wing student gets tasered for asking a question…This was outrageous.”


Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Top Ten Stories in the Talk Show Index

Top Ten Stories in the broader News Coverage Index

Click here to read the methodology behind the Talk Show Index.