News Index

The sense of déjà vu was eerie. On Sept. 19, with cameras watching from above, there was O.J. Simpson traveling in a slow motorcade that would make national news. This time he was riding in a blue Dodge rather than a white Bronco, the city was Las Vegas not L.A, and the crime was kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon instead of murder.

But it didn’t take long for the breathless television coverage to take viewers back a dozen years to the murder case that divided a nation among racial lines, introduced a lengthy legal soap opera on cable TV, and created what one TV analyst called the rise of the “lawyer as celebrity.”

“Tonight the ‘Juice’ is loose,” declared Alan Colmes of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” after Simpson was freed on $125,000 bail. And the old Simpson murder case gang was back on the airwaves to talk about it.

Colmes’ Sept. 19 guests included Mark Fuhrman, the L.A. cop with the checkered record on race and Kato Kaelin, the Simpson houseguest and actor wannabee. Marcia Clark, the prosecutor in the murder case, showed up as a legal correspondent for “Entertainment Tonight.” Fred Goldman—the father of Ronald Goldman, who was murdered with Nicole Brown Simpson—made the media rounds, declaring “I don’t want to see any repeat of the celebrity game that was played during the criminal [murder] trial.”

Simpson’s Sept. 16 arrest in a strange case involving a dispute over sports memorabilia was the top story last week, filling 13% of the newshole according to PEJ’s News Coverage Index for Sept. 16-21. But there were huge discrepancies among media sectors that left no doubt this is very much a TV-driven event.

Simpson was only the tenth-biggest newspaper story last week, generating just 2% of the front-page coverage in print. And the case was only the fifth-leading story on radio, at 4% of the airtime. But his arrest was a mega-even on cable, where it filled a remarkable 33% of the airtime last week as the leading story. It was also the most covered subject on network TV (15%), and here there was a dramatic split by day part. While the case accounted for 7% of the coverage on the nightly newscasts, it filled 31% of the airtime on the more celebrity-oriented morning news shows.

Thus, at least for the first week of coverage, the Simpson case followed a pattern set in another celebrity scandal tale, the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Both stories were fueled by intense attention on cable news and broadcast network morning shows.

Simpson’s newest brush with the law was not the only big event last week to bring back old memories. ABC anchor Charles Gibson began his Sept. 17 newscast by declaring, “You’ll be forgiven if you think for a moment tonight that you’re in a time warp because we’re reporting on Hillary Clinton’s health care plan and criminal charges against O.J. Simpson. Sound familiar?”

Much of the coverage of the 2008 presidential race, the third-biggest story last week at 9%, was devoted to Democratic frontrunner Clinton’s newly unveiled health care plan. That initiative generated inevitable comparisons to her ill-fated 1993 effort to develop a national health care policy as First Lady. Another top-five story last week—the Sept. 20 demonstration in Jena, Louisiana protesting the prosecution of six black teens in connection with the beating of a white student—also created a sense of déjà vu, with some observers recalling the civil rights protests of the 60’s.

“The Rev. Jesse Jackson likened the gathering protest to historic events in Montgomery and Selma, Ala., and Little Rock, Ark,” reported a June 20 Associated Press story about Jena. The Jena protests became the fifth-biggest story last week, at 5% of the newshole.

The two other top-five stories last week involved Iraq. Dominated by coverage of a lethal shooting incident involving private contractor Blackwater, the situation inside Iraq was the second biggest story, at 10%. The Iraq policy debate, which dominated Sept. 9-14 news coverage (at 36%) thanks to the so-called “Petraeus Report,” dropped off dramatically last week. It finished as the fourth-biggest story, filling only 5% of the newshole.

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.)

More than one-third of last week’s stories about the 2008 campaign for the White House focused largely on Clinton’s Sept. 17 announcement of her new health care plan to provide insurance for everyone. With Clinton herself joking about her disastrous effort to craft a health care policy 14 years ago, media flashbacks were inevitable.

Juxtaposing images of Clinton’s announcement last week with 1993 footage of her, Brit Hume’s Fox News Channel newscast noted that “it was 14 years ago that then First Lady Hillary Clinton led the effort for her husband President Bill Clinton’s complex and bureaucratic version of universal coverage which failed to get the approval of a Democratically controlled Congress.” With talk hosts also buzzing about Clinton’s second stab at health care coverage, the presidential race was the leading topic (at 17%) in the radio sector last week.

And if Clinton conjured up memories of 1993, the arrest of Simpson made it feel like 1995 all over—at least as far as the media scrum was concerned.

On Sept. 19, NBC aired video of a shackled O.J. in a Las Vegas courtroom as part of a report on “the Simpson circus” that surrounded his arrest. The story featured demonstrators, several people dressed in costume, and as correspondent George Lewis noted, “an enormous gaggle of reporters and camera crews [and] celebrity legal analysts including Marcia Clark."

So intense was the scramble for snippets of Simpson news that at least two media outlets, Fox News and ABC, reported they had staffers on the plane that flew the former football star from Las Vegas to his home in Florida.

On the Sept. 20 edition of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” viewers learned, for example, that on that flight home, Simpson watched “Ocean’s Thirteen,” played with his puppy, ate a sandwich, and “showed no visible signs of strain.”

A dozen years ago, the coverage of Simpson’s acquittal on murder charges highlighted a deep social divide, with the strikingly contrasting images of celebrating African-Americans and stunned and sullen white audiences. What is unclear from last week’s coverage of Simpson’s arrest is whether this case will strike the racial nerve that the first trial did with anywhere near the same intensity.

One story that did illustrate deep-seated racial ills last week was the situation in Jena, Louisiana where a crowd of demonstrators estimated to be in the thousands came to the largely white town to protest the charges leveled against six black teens. News coverage of protestors marching, carrying signs, and chanting provided another dose of news déjà vu last week, harking back to an earlier and more tumultuous time in American race relations.

“It has been many years since we have seen black Americans marching in large numbers in a southern town demanding equal justice,” observed ABC anchor Gibson on his Sept. 20 newscast. “But it happened today in tiny Jena, Louisiana where thousands upon thousands came.”

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Note: On the evenings of Thursday, September 20, and Friday, September 21, CNN aired specials on the events taking place in Jena, Louisiana. Those programs were not included in this week's sample.

If General David Petraeus’ Iraq progress report triggered fierce partisan battles on Capitol Hill last week, it also generated widely mixed—and some pretty inflammatory—reviews on the talk show airwaves.

Staunch anti-war advocate Keith Olbermann, on his Sept. 10 MSNBC show “Countdown,” dismissed the so-called “Petraeus Report,” declaring that “a majority of Americans assumed going in it was a cheap sales job.”

That same day, conservative radio talker Michael Savage took a distinctly different view. “I watched General Petraeus today and I was proud of him,” said Savage. “And I watched the general take the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune from those slimy, backstabbing, anti-American scum called Democrats.”

As Olbermann pointed out, Petraeus’ Sept. 10 and 11 testimony—which generated more coverage than Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s report on the political climate in Iraq—was the most important visit to Capitol Hill by a military leader since General William Westmoreland delivered his Vietnam assessment 40 years earlier.

Much of that anticipation stemmed from the sense that Petraeus’ testimony might be a pivotal moment in battle over war policy between the Bush White House and Congressional Democrats. At the end of the week, the commentary consensus held that the general had reinforced the status quo and bought more time for the administration’s approach. But even if Petraeus changed few minds in Congress, his appearance gave talk hosts a chance to sound off on the war, loud and clear.

The debate over Iraq lit up the airwaves as the hottest-talk topic last week, accounting for 49% of the cable and radio airtime, according to PEJ’s Talk Show Index from Sept. 9-14. That was the most time devoted to the subject in 2007, barely edging out the 48% of the newshole filled by the policy debate on January 7-12, the week when President Bush initially announced the “surge.” Only two stories—the Virginia Tech shooting rampage in the week of April 15-20 (63%) and the firing of talk host Don Imus (61%) during the week of April 8-13—generated more talk conversation than last week’s Iraq showdown.

The argument over Iraq practically silenced every other subject last week. The 2008 presidential campaign was the second-biggest topic at 10%. But even some of that campaign discussion was related to Petraeus’ appearance before Congress. The 9/11 anniversary remembrances finished third at 5%, followed by immigration (4%) and events inside Iraq, which was the fifth-biggest topic at just 2%.

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.

Talk hosts have a variety of methods they can use to make their views known, including using guests as either surrogates for their viewpoint or as debate tackling dummies. But when it came to the debate over Iraq last week, many hosts did the talking themselves with a palpable sense of anger and intensity.

MSNBC “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews unsheathed some biting sarcasm in response to President Bush’s Sept. 13 speech in which he endorsed Petraeus’ recommendations and thanked “the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq.”

“Let me give you some sense of the other firepower that’s joining us in the field,” declared Matthews as he ticked off a roster of nations and how many troops they had in Iraq: Hungary (15), Japan (5), Latvia (2), Turkey (2), New Zealand (1), Singapore (1) and Canada (1). “Those are our 36 strong allies the President is talking about.”

Liberal radio host Randi Rhodes vented largely at Petraeus. “I am so disgusted with these careerist military guys,” she declared. “Every six months [they say] ‘give me six more months’…I look at Petraeus, I look at Crocker. It’s like a tag team of liars.”

From the other side of the microphone came a vigorous attack on the anti-war forces. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh made the point that Democrats and liberals seemed to be hoping for a U.S. defeat in Iraq.

“For the first time in years, the good news is leaking out, the surge is working,” said Limbaugh. “Our left is starting to lose.”

Conservative compatriot Rich Lowry, the National Review editor subbing for Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes,” echoed Limbaugh, asserting that “Democrats seem to be totally uninterested in hearing any good news from Iraq.”

Another log that got tossed on the Iraq bonfire last week was the controversial ad from the liberal group, MoveOn.org, attacking Petraeus as “General Betray Us.” The Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly assailed what he called “a smear advertisement” against the general. But appearing on “Hannity & Colmes,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina ratcheted up the rhetoric in his critique of the ad.

“Taking a man who’s lived his life with honor and integrity and accusing him of sending people to their death because of some unknown political agenda…somebody who would do that should burn in hell,” Graham declared.

The MoveOn.org furor also became part of the talk show conversation about the 2008 presidential race, with some calling for Hillary Clinton to denounce the grassroots organization’s ad.

On Lou Dobbs’ Sept. 14 CNN program, senior political analyst Bill Schneider noted that Republican hopeful Rudy Giuliani—locked in a tightening GOP primary battle—went specifically after Democrat Clinton for her criticism of General Petraeus and “her failure to condemn MoveOn.org.”

Why might Giuliani ignore his GOP opponents to lob a blast at the perceived Democratic frontrunner? As Schneider noted, Giuliani selected a target—Clinton—who is so unpopular with the Republican base that it could help him in the battle with his GOP rivals.

One motive for the Clinton criticism, Schneider added, is that “Rudy Giuliani may feel Fred Thompson breathing down his neck.”

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.

For months, expectations built around General David Petraeus’ September progress report on the Iraq war. The moment was billed, at least by some, to be a turning point in the struggle over war policy raging between the Democratic-led Congress and the Bush White House.

And by sheer numbers, the event was indeed big. The debate over the war last week commanded more inches of newsprint and more time on TV than any week so far in 2007.

Yet after the House and Senate testimony by Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, as well as a prime-time address by President Bush, some media post-mortems wondered what—if anything—had changed in the battle for control over the war.

A primary outcome appeared to be the administration getting “more time,” to pursue its policy, USA Today declared. The Washington Post reported that “what seems increasingly clear is that Washington will remain locked in an endless war over Iraq…” Said former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta: “The headline for the last week is that the war is pretty much going to be on a stay-the-course path…”

Why the long-awaited September status report on the war did not seem to prove the turning point once anticipated offers something of a lesson about the media culture today, about the art of communications, the behavior of the media, and the complexity of the war.

In retrospect, four elements seemed to help turn the event into something less dramatic. First, much of what occurred last week had already been foreshadowed, or leaked, by partisans on all sides. Second, the Administration’s placing of so much emphasis on a highly respected general in the field made challenging him, or debating the policy, more difficult last week. Third, much of the press coverage of last week’s testimony featured words like “withdrawal” and “cutbacks” rather than Petraeus’ determination to continue present policy and eschew any major reductions. And finally, the press itself offered some enterprise reporting on the eve of the testimony, which highlighted the complexities of the situation.

None of this means the story was ignored. When the week was over, the Iraq policy debate filled 36% of the newshole, as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index for Sept. 9-14, a universe that includes newspapers, web sites, TV newscasts and radio talk and news. That marked the biggest week of coverage of that subject in 2007, eclipsing the previous high of 34% from Jan. 7-12 when Bush announced the “surge” in the first place.

That number is so high it means the policy debate over the war last week was the second-biggest story of the year to date, behind only the Virginia Tech massacre, which accounted for 51% of the newshole from April 15-20.

Indeed, when combined with the second-biggest story of last week, coverage of events on the ground in Iraq, the war filled 42% of the newshole in PEJ’s Index. That was the heaviest week of overall Iraq coverage in 2007.

Iraq loomed so large last week that only two other stories filled more than 2% of the newshole. The 9/11 commemorations were the third-biggest story (5%) and the 2008 presidential campaign was next, also at 5%. The fifth-biggest story (2%) was the investigation surrounding Madeleine McCann, the four-year-old UK girl who went missing in Portugal in early May.

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.)

But it was what did not happen, amid all this attention—and why—that may be the most revealing feature of the week.

One unmistakable element was the degree to which so much of what occurred last week was already foreshadowed and even already debated in earlier leaks, comments and appearances by partisans and activists on all sides.

For much of the year, the debate over Iraq strategy—triggered in earnest by Bush’s Jan. 10 surge speech a week after the Democrats had taken over Congress—has been a leading story. For the first three months of 2007, it was the top subject in the News Coverage Index. It slumped to third place during the second quarter of 2007, falling off after a May 24 Congressional vote to fund the war without including timetables, something that was seen as a major White House victory.

But as the date of the Petraeus report drew near, coverage of the policy debate began to spike again. In the week of Sept 2-7, the scrambling to influence Washington in advance of Petraeus’ appearance was newsworthy enough to make the policy debate the leading story, at 17%. On the one hand, there was major coverage of Bush’s secret trip to al-Anbar province to tout one of America’s tactical successes on the ground. At the same time, anti-war politicians embraced the release of a highly-publicized General Accountability Office report that painted a bleak picture of progress in Iraq. All this skirmishing functioned as a preview that drained some of the suspense out of last week’s hearings while familiarizing Americans with arguments they would hear from both sides.

Another element that influenced the outcome of the coverage last week was the degree to which General Petraeus, with the unmistakable help the President himself, became the embodiment in the press of the current Iraq strategy.

The Sept. 17 Time magazine—which asked the $64,000 question about Iraq, “How Much Longer?”—splashed the image of General Petraeus on the cover. On the Sept. 13 edition of PBS’s NewsHour, correspondent Margaret Warner asked whether there had ever been “a battlefield general who played such a pivotal role for his president as General Petraeus did this week?” “Frankly, no,” responded Thomas Keaney of Johns Hopkins University, noting that in this case, “General Petraeus actually becomes the voice” of administration strategy.

None of that was by accident. According to a July Washington Post story, Bush had called Petraeus “my main man” and mentioned him at least 150 times in public remarks, And a new New York Times/CBS poll that asked who people trusted most to resolve the war found that 68% said military commanders compared to only 21% who said Congress and 5% who said the Bush administration. (In a display of mock reverence, anti-war comedian Bill Maher on HBO has begun calling the top commander in Iraq “Petraeus Maximus.”)

In Bush’s Sept. 13 speech to the nation, delivered after Petraeus’s testimony, the President waited only until the third paragraph to state that it was Petraeus and Crocker who “concluded that conditions in Iraq are improving, that we are seizing the initiative from the enemy, and that the troop surge is working.”

All that seemed to have made it more difficult for critics to use the media to challenge Bush policy. They were now challenging the respected commander in the field, the man with the most information. That may have become even more difficult to do after the liberal anti-war group MoveOn.org bought a full page ad in the New York Times last week attacking Petraeus as “General Betray Us.” The Beltway-based Politico online publication wrote of a “solidifying Beltway consensus” that the ad was a “blunder of the highest order” that made life more difficult for Democrats in Congress trying to stop the war.

When Petraeus finally did testify, much of the media coverage, in turn, focused on the troops he wanted to bring home, not the number of troops he wanted to remain in the field. To be sure, some of the message transmitted by media coverage of the Petraeus/Crocker visit to Congress was mixed. The Sept. 11 New York Times front-page headline declared, “Petraeus Warns Against Quick Pullback in Iraq,” while page 1 of that day’s Washington Post announced that “Petraeus Backs Initial Pullout.”

But more of the headlines, particularly those recounting the Sept. 10 House testimony, agreed with the Post, stressing the idea that troop levels in Iraq could return to somewhere near the pre-surge numbers next summer.

A PEJ check of about 80 newspapers on Sept. 11 that covered Petraeus’ testimony on page 1 found a solid majority of headlines (almost 50) focused on the idea of U.S. troops eventually heading home. Only about 15 of those headlines conveyed Petraeus’s message that the U.S. should be cautious about troop reductions, and give the surge more time.

One Sept 12 headline in The Day of New London Connecticut, “Bush supports Petraeus Pullout Plan,” stressed the troop withdrawal concept, focused on Petraeus as the author of the war strategy, and positioned Bush as following the advice of his soldier.

Finally, anyone looking for turning points in the media story line or in the war has to confront the fact that the situation on the ground is inherently complex. And that reality was reinforced last week by the fact that several news outlets tried to provide additional Iraq-related reporting to illuminate the debate—as if to say, they were not going to allow their audiences to be spun by political debate in Washington. They tried to use the moment for a spate of stories summarizing and taking stock of the situation.

Broadcasting from Baghdad on Sept. 10, CNN’s Anderson Cooper said Petraeus’s reports of reduced violence in Iraq are in part attributable to the 4 million displaced Iraqis and the “large scale…ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods” that have left “fewer people to kill in those neighborhoods.”

The next day, NPR’s Anne Garrels, also reporting from Baghdad, validated part of Petraeus’ testimony by reporting that the surge had made a difference now that U.S. troops were living among Iraqi civilians. “There are dramatic improvements here and this is a Sunni enclave,” she declared.

There were even a series of fresh polls that seemed to suggest some contradictory streams of public opinion.

The Times/CBS News poll found the public far more inclined to trust the military rather than the politicians, even as the top Iraq commander was in sync with the President over Iraq strategy. A Gallup Poll in the Sept. 10 USA Today found that even though 63% had confidence in the recommendations of General Petraeus, 60% favored a hard and fast timetable for withdrawal that he opposes.

All together, the week was a lesson in one of the features of the new media culture. In an age when information is so plentiful, clear and simple judgments can be harder than ever to make.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Note: Due to the President's speech on Thursday, September 13, we included that evening's O'Reilly Factor in this week's sample instead of the typical rotation which would have included Thurday's Hannity and Colmes. Additionally, due to technical recording errors, this week's sample does not include CBS News radio headlines from 5 pm on Monday, September 10, and 9 am on Tuesday, September 11.

Last week, as Idaho Senator Larry Craig seemed to waver between resigning and fighting for his job, the reception from the nation’s talk hosts on both sides of the political spectrum was largely hostile.

Craig had pleaded guilty after being arrested on June 11 in an airport bathroom by an undercover officer who accused him of trying to solicit sex. And for the commentators and pundit class, the case didn’t break down neatly along ideological lines. Democratic partisans certainly benefited from a veteran GOP lawmaker in trouble, but it was Republican forces who put the most pressure on him to end his Senate career. And it’s likely that many conservatives who otherwise supported Craig were considerably more upset by allegations of homosexual behavior than anti-Craig liberals who tend to have more sympathy for gay rights.

As further evidence of the complexity of the case, talk hosts seemed to come at it from a variety of angles.

On Fox News Channel show Sept. 5, conservative-leaning Bill O’Reilly took the pragmatic angle—Craig as political liability. “This Craig. What is this? Now he might not resign,” wondered O’Reilly with a disgusted look on his face. “What’s the matter with him? If you’re arrested and you plead guilty, you can’t govern as a senator.”

The same day, liberal talk radio host Randi Rhodes saw the scandal as an occasion to accuse Craig’s Republican colleagues as well as the senator himself of behaving hypocritically. “The people who carry the moral mantle, the people that believe in personal freedom, kicked him out of the Senate almost immediately because they found out he does some tea dancin’ in the bathroom,” she said. Rhodes added that Craig himself was “frontrunner phony. He’s in denial. He’s an anti-homosexual homosexual.”

For Ed Schultz, another liberal radio talk host more centrist than Rhodes, the issue was secrecy. “The thing that bothers me the most about the Craig thing is that something happened with law enforcement and it went unreported to the Ethics Committee or Republican leadership. [Craig] shouldn’t have the liberty…to be able to hide an arrest.”

And for his part, Fox News Channel and conservative radio host Sean Hannity seemed genuinely conflicted about whether Craig was villain or victim. “Either he’s the unluckiest guy in the world or he’s leading a double life,” Hannity said. “I can’t determine…I don’t know.”

All told, Craig’s predicament was the third-hottest topic last week. It filled 16% of the airtime on the cable and radio talk shows, according to PEJ’s Talk Show Index from Sept. 2-7. That was the same place the Craig scandal finished in the more general News Coverage Index last week. But with so many angles to seize upon and more freedom to vent their opinions, the talk hosts amplified the topic, more than doubling the percentage of newshole filled from 7% in the media overall.

The top talk subject (at 21%) was the 2008 presidential campaign that saw one major candidate—Republican Fred Thompson—officially enter the fray last week. The second-biggest topic, the Iraq policy debate (at 20%) focused on the political maneuvering in advance of Gen. David Petraeus’s eagerly awaited Iraq progress report this week. The Sept. 7 release of a new Osama bin Laden video (7% of the airtime) and immigration issues (also 7%) filled out the top-five topic roster.

The newest presidential contender Fred Thompson didn’t fare so well either last week. After months of signaling his intention to run for the White House in 2008, the former Tennessee senator finally announced his entrance on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” last week. (MSNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews observed that Thompson “slow-walked his way into the race for president.”)

Some of the early reviews were even less flattering. Conservative radio host Michael Savage on his Sept. 6 show said flatly, “I’m not excited by Fred Thompson…I don’t know why Fred Thompson is running….I have no faith in Fred Thompson.”

On O’Reilly’s Sept. 5 program, guest commentator Dick Morris noted that Thompson had opted to sit out that night’s Republican debate in New Hampshire. “He’ll go everyplace except a debate,” said Morris. “I think he’s afraid to fight...I think he’s so used to being scripted.”

On “Hardball” that same night, Matthews hauled out a quote from Republican Congressman and Rudy Giuliani supporter Peter King that took aim at Thompson’s hard-boiled district attorney role on NBC’s popular drama “Law & Order.” “Rudy is a real crime fighter,” said King. “Fred Thompson has primarily done it on television.”

A more positive assessment, and an endorsement did come from longtime Republican consultant Mary Matalin. She told “Hannity & Colmes” that she is backing Thompson because “he is a consistent conservative, he is an across-the-board conservative, and he’s a common-sense conservative.”

Finally, Michael Savage demonstrated last week that any topic can become an ideological wedge issue. On his Sept. 6 program, the host was playing a recording of renowned Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, who had died that day. Savage, an obvious fan, was clearly moved by the great tenor’s passing. (His memorial to the singer’s “supernatural voice” made his death the tenth-biggest talk topic at 1%.)

But whether he was self-conscious about playing opera music on his program or thought his listeners might be confused, Savage felt compelled to suggest that liberals would attack him for it: “I’m not trying to be pretentious here…I know what the liberals say about everything. Everything you do they try to mock. What do I care what they do? They’ll die in their own vomit anyway one day. What do I care who they are? They’re unknown, unknown bloggers. Let them die in their own vomit today for all I care.”

The Pavarotti-tribute-turned-anti-liberal-tirade lasted more than a minute before Savage soothed himself by asking to hear a clip of “La boheme.”

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 opening moments of the Sept. 7 “CBS Evening News” offered a jarring image. It was the world’s most-wanted man, the leader of Al-Qaeda—complete with his familiar white hat and now a surprisingly dark beard—delivering his latest message to America.

“He’s still alive,” anchor Katie Couric intoned. “Osama bin Laden. The most wanted terrorist in the world breaks his silence to mark the sixth anniversary of the attack on America.”

The bin Laden video tape was only one grim reminder about life in the post-9/11 world last week. A string of what in another time might have seemed disconnected stories also broke, revealing just how powerful a subtext fear about domestic terrorism has become in the news media. A sense of underlying anxiety about safety seems to permeate the news like the hole in the ozone, a threat of underdetermined but profound implications.

Three days before the bin Laden tape, on Sept. 4, anti-terrorism police arrested three suspects—reportedly connected with Al-Qaeda—plotting what news accounts called a “potentially massive” attack against U.S. targets in Germany.

The worrisome news continued when the General Accountability Office released a report last week critical of many of the nation’s security efforts. “Blistering criticism in this country tonight,” declared CNN’s Lou Dobbs on his Sept. 6 program. “Congressional investigators say the Homeland Security Department has failed to meet many of its performance targets nearly six years after the Sept. 11 attacks.”

To rattle the nerves further, a story has been circulating that authorities are looking for two men who were seen acting suspiciously aboard a Seattle ferry. Hosting CNN’s “Out in the Open” on Sept. 4, Rick Sanchez displayed a photograph of the two dark-haired “Seattle Mystery Men,” described them as “acting bizarre,” and announced that “the FBI wants to know where they are.”

Together, the three threads of the terrorist threat were enough to be the third-biggest story of last week, filling about 12% of all the coverage from Sept. 2-7, according to PEJ’s News Coverage Index. Only the debate over Iraq, on the eve of General David Petraeus’ eagerly anticipated report on the situation there, and the 2008 presidential campaign that just attracted another major candidate, were bigger news.

But the most intriguing thing may be how the terrorist threat is made up of small stories that hover and unnerve, not necessarily a single event.

Although it was only a two-day story last week—with word of a new video first surfacing on Sept. 6—bin Laden’s appearance was the fifth biggest story, filling 5% of the newshole. The foiling of the German terror plot was the sixth-top story (4%). And the broader subject of U.S. domestic terror—which included stories about the harsh GAO report and the Seattle ferry suspects—was the eighth-biggest story at 3%.

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.)

The Iraq policy debate finished first (17%) overall and was the top story among the newspaper (16%), network (22%), and radio (21%) sectors. Coverage was dominated by several developments—most notably President Bush’s surprise trip to Iraq—designed to help influence the mood and discussion in Washington in advance of this week’s critical progress report from General Petraeus. Meanwhile, events on the ground inside Iraq constituted the fourth-biggest story, at 5% of the newshole.

The 2008 presidential race, which last week included a GOP debate in New Hampshire and Fred Thompson’s long-awaited campaign entrance, was the #2 story at 12%. (It was first on cable, filling 18% of the airtime.) And the continuing saga of Senator Larry Craig—who seemed to be reconsidering the resignation that followed the news of his arrest in an airport bathroom—was the third-biggest story at 7%.

Some time has passed since those harrowing post-9/11 days of anthrax scares, ever-changing color-coded threats, and regular reports of “heightened chatter” among terrorist operatives. The subject does not dominate news nor constantly jangle nerves as it did in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington. But, as last week proved, the release of a new bin Laden video still packs a potent visceral punch. And the threat from jihadists remains a substantial part of the mainstream news diet and a subject constantly simmering at the surface of media and public consciousness.

Although there have been no attacks on U.S. soil, stories about terrorism—ranging from the foiled car bomb plot in London to intelligence reports warning about a reinvigorated Al-Qaeda—have made the weekly list of top-five stories nine weeks in 2007. And in a summer in which Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he had a “gut feeling” about an increased threat to the U.S., terrorism issues and fears have made the top-five list in seven different weeks.

Terror’s continued presence in the headlines—and inside our national psyche—may help explain one dynamic the 2008 Presidential race to date. With last week’s entrance by Fred Thompson, much of the media coverage turned to the GOP battle.

According to national horse race polls, that race is still led by Rudolph Giuliani. The former New York mayor is positioned to the left of the party’s conservative base on a number of social issues. But the man who was in charge of New York on the day the World Trade Center fell is running hard as the toughest candidate on terrorism.

On Tucker Carlson’s Sept. 5 MSNBC show, Republican Congressman Peter King touted Giuliani as the real law-and-order candidate in any contest with Thompson, the man who played a hard-boiled District Attorney on NBC’s hit series “Law & Order.”

The candidate who has “a tough record against crime and a strong record against terrorism, and who has articulated a strong position against terrorism, is Rudy Giuliani,” argued King.

In the cover story for the Sept. 9 New York Times Magazine, writer Matt Bai offered this explanation for why Giuliani has thus far defied those who say he is too moderate on domestic issues to win the GOP nomination: “Giuliani’s campaign, like his resurrected political career, is built atop the rubble of the twin towers.”

Giuliani rarely misses a chance to hammer home that point. In a Fox News Channel report previewing the Sept. 5 Republican debate in New Hampshire, Giuliani stressed that his big differences were with Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and “their approach to going on retreat in the terrorist war against us.” (Thompson skipped that debate, generating his fair share of criticism from some Republicans.)

Last week, Thompson pulled off the neat trick of announcing his White House candidacy on “The Tonight show” with Jay Leno. But in a week of continuing reminders that we live in a more dangerous world after 9/11—including the first video images purported to be of bin Laden in three years—the predicate for Giuliani’s campaign is never far from the headlines.

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Note: MSNBC did not broadcast its regular news programming on Monday, September 3, due to the Labor Day holiday. Therefore we did not include MSNBC Monday programs in this week's sample.

Several pieces of news from and about Iraq were quickly seized on by war skeptics and critics on the nation’s talk show airwaves last week.

On Aug. 22, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sharply criticized American politicians who had characterized his government as a failed enterprise. Later that day President Bush defended the war effort in a speech to war veterans invoking the divisive and touchy subject of Vietnam.

The next day, Senator John Warner, an influential Republican voice on foreign policy, said he favored bringing some troops home by as soon as Christmas. That same day the CIA released an intelligence estimate concluding that, despite some gains on the ground in Iraq, the al-Maliki regime seemed incapable of governing itself.

With the debate over Iraq policy and strategy generating major headlines after something of a summer lull, the talkers then went to work.

MSNBC “Hardball,” guest host Mike Barnicle used the Bush speech as a reason to devote the first five segments of the Aug. 22 show to Iraq. Reporter David Shuster opened his story with the following line: “Thirty five years after the United States was torn apart by the 58,000 troops killed in the Vietnam War, today President Bush reopened the wounds.” Schuster’s report, at several points, also took issue with Bush’s historical recollections of the Vietnam War and its ramifications in Southeast Asia.

That same evening, Lou Dobbs’ CNN show spent a segment discussing whether democracy was even the right fit for Iraq. In a pessimistic dispatch from Baghdad, correspondent Michael Ware reported that realities on the ground had U.S. officials softening expectations of what an Iraqi democracy might look like, “with some generals even warning that for now it might not even be the solution at all.”

On her radio program, liberal talker Randi Rhodes plumbed the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam and then took a swipe at the President. “I think if it was up to him we’d still be occupying the South, which in my opinion might not be such a bad thing,” Rhodes argued. “Quite frankly if we were still occupying Texas we could have avoided the whole Bush presidency.”

With war doubters driving the conversation, the Iraq policy debate filled 21% of the airtime last week, making it the leading topic on the cable and radio talk shows, as measured in PEJ’s Talk Show Index August 19 – 24. That’s the first time since the week of July 15-20, when Democrats held an Iraq debate all-nighter, that the subject topped the talk menu.

The 2008 presidential campaign, which had been the leading talk story for the last several weeks, was next with 16% of the talk time. A variety of campaign topics filled the time, with particular attention paid to remarks from Michelle Obama, wife of Democratic candidate Barack Obama, who said “if you can’t run your own house you certainly can’t run the White House.” The comment was largely seen as a shot across the bow of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

A range of issues touching on the immigration debate filled 9% of the talk time. Hurricane Dean, a powerful storm that hit Mexico, got 5%. And the aftermath of the execution-style killings of three teenagers in Newark back on August 4 received 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.

The talk show chatter was overwhelmingly critical of the war in Iraq last week. But that wasn’t the only argument being made. On his Aug. 22 show, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh lauded the Vietnam speech as an important “history lesson.”

“The President was on fire today at the VFW convention in Kansas City,” Limbaugh said enthusiastically. “He said, essentially, ‘all right you want to compare Iraq to Vietnam, let’s compare Iraq to Vietnam,’ and he went on a tear about the millions of people who lost their lives, innocent people, when we left Vietnam.”

One hot topic that finished just below the week’s top-five story roster was Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick and his guilty plea to animal cruelty charges. The story captured only 4% of the talk time. Considering the various elements of the saga—a celebrity athlete in trouble, salacious details, and animal rights—one might have expected the story to have a higher profile in the talk world. Why were the numbers so low?

For one thing, there, there wasn’t really much to debate on the dog fighting charges in terms of guilt or innocence. There also weren’t a lot of policy implications in the fiasco and Vick’s actions were widely seen as reprehensible.

The one area that did briefly generate some discussion was whether Vick, as a black athlete, was treated differently than his white counterparts would have been.

The Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly waded into that question on Aug. 21 when his guest, Professor Marc Lamont Hill of Temple, argued that Vick was the victim of a double standard. O’Reilly begged to differ.

“What about Pete Rose though?” O’Reilly said. “I don’t think the court of public opinion was kind to Mr. Rose when the gambling charges were leveled against him. And surely now he doesn’t have much a constituency, so I’m not sure your analysis is correct there.”

On Aug. 23, Limbaugh, devoted some time to the Vick case, but also illustrated how difficult it could be to find traction.

First, he talked about fatally injured Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro after a caller compared the killing of fighting dogs to euthanizing a horse. “Just because [horses] lose we don’t cordon them off there on the track and ‘bang, bang you’re dead,’ which is what Vick and his boys were doing,” said Limbaugh.

That segued into a conversation about the sometimes violent methods of meat production and Limbaugh’s childhood visit to a pig slaughterhouse, at which point the host noted: “But we don’t raise pigs to kill each other. We don’t do pig fights.”

There are obviously easier topics for talk hosts than the Michael Vick case.

Dante Chinni and 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.

In a foreign policy speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, President Bush invoked a war last week that he had been loathe to mention before in the four years of bloodshed in Iraq: Vietnam.

And the media stood up and noticed.

“Today, speaking before a supportive audience of veterans, Mr. Bush found a comparison to Vietnam he embraced,” declared ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz on August 22. The newscast then aired a clip of the President warning that the “price of America’s withdrawal [from Southeast Asia] was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” including those slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

By injecting the V-word into the debate over strategy in Iraq, Bush not only triggered memories of America’s most controversial war (at least before the conflict in Iraq). He also generated a heated response from several quarters, including opponents of his Iraq strategy.

The Vietnam analogy “just doesn’t make any historical sense to me,” historian Robert Dallek declared on the ABC newscast. The New York Times quoted 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s statement that “invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars.”

The President’s Vietnam comparison was only one factor that helped propel coverage of the debate over Iraq policy last week after a summer in which the subject had been noticeably more muted.

The Aug. 23 release of a National Intelligence Estimate—an important precursor of the Iraq progress report to be delivered by General David Petraeus next month—painted a mixed picture. It documented some progress on the ground in Iraq while still warning that “Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively.” On that same day, Republican Senator John Warner, a crucial voice on military matters, generated major headlines by calling on the President to start drawing down troops in Iraq.

All those developments helped make the policy debate over Iraq the top story in the media last week, as measured by PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index August 19-24. All told the argument over Iraq filled 12% of the newshole in the Index, which includes four dozen different news outlets from different media sectors. The debate over war strategy led only in one media sector (17% in cable), but it finished second in radio (16%), second in newspapers (8%), third on network TV (9%), and fourth online (7%).

This marked the first time since the week of the infamous July 17 Senate “slumber party”—when Democrats forced an all-night debate on the war—that the topic was the top story in the media. The subject received double the percentage of coverage last week that it generated (6%) in the period from May 20- Aug. 24. (That coverage slowed after a crucial May 24 Congressional vote funded the war without imposing withdrawal timetables, an outcome widely viewed as a major victory for the administration.)

The situation inside Iraq itself, by comparison, was the fifth-biggest story (5%) last week, with much of the coverage focused on the 14 U.S. troops killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash on Aug. 22. The 2008 presidential campaign, which featured a Democratic debate in Iowa, was the third biggest story at 7%. And the wrath of nature filled out the other two top-five slots, with Hurricane Dean finishing second at 8% and the storms and flooding that pounded Texas and the Midwest coming in No. 4 at 7%.

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.)

While the warm weather months may conjure up thoughts of long days, ice cream, and beaches, the news menu this summer has had more than its share of tragedies, disasters and scares. And these did not include such media perennials as shark attacks and West Nile virus. After the London car bomb plot was discovered on June 29, terrorism (and terrorism jitters) was a top-five story for the next five weeks. The tragic Utah mine cave in (No. 9 last week at 3%) has spent the past three weeks on the top-10 list. And the deadly August 1 collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis was the fourth-biggest story of the year so far.

This past week, the human tragedies came in the form of deadly storms in Mexico, the Southwest and the Midwest. And they illustrated just how aggressive television has become at covering mega-weather events.

Storms that struck Texas and Oklahoma and the flooding in the Midwest became the leading network TV story last week (15%), and the powerful Category Five Caribbean Hurricane Dean was No. 2 (13%), meaning together they made up more than a quarter of airtime. (The hurricane and the U.S. storms also filled 24% of the online newshole last week. Compare that to the 3% of front-page newspaper coverage that the two stories accounted for.)

On cable, Dean was the second biggest story last week (11%) while the Midwest flooding finished fifth at 7%.

On his Aug. 20 show, CNN’s Anderson Cooper—famous for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina—“tossed” to correspondent Gary Tuchman, standing in a red rain slicker, in Tulum Mexico. “They are battening down the hatches in this small town of 10,000 people,” Tuckman reported. An MSNBC correspondent in Mexico grabbed a coconut to warn viewers that the usually innocuous fruit could become a deadly projectile in a hurricane.

The devastating weather led the Aug. 24 CBS evening newscast, with meteorologist Dave Price telling anchor Katie Couric that the problem was caused “by a collision of two huge air masses.”

Interestingly, one story that some thought might have become bigger did not. The continuing saga of Falcons quarterback Michael Vick and his dog fighting enterprise finished as the seventh biggest story last week, and that was its biggest week to date (4% of the newshole). The big news was Vick’s plea agreement and his suspension from the National Football League. Much of the coverage has revolved around the unusual nature of the crime itself and speculation about Vick’s professional future.

Why the story has not generated more attention so far is difficult to answer. There are no sympathetic figures in this case as there often are in stories that generate big play. But some of the coverage has tried to make larger social connections here, raising the touchy subject of race.

In a story from Atlanta posted on CNN.com last week, a Vick supporter blamed the vigorous prosecution on racism and several civil rights leaders expressed support for a man who has been widely vilified for his participation in an inhumane enterprise.

“I don’t condone it at all,” said one Atlanta barber. “But the punishment is too severe. [They’re ruining] a man’s career.”

Mark Jurkowitz of PEJ

Note: CNN aired special documentaries during the evenings of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week. We did not include these specials in our week's sample, however we did include the news programs before or after these specials even if those shows did not fall into our normal rotation of programs.

The comings and goings of White House staff aren’t always a big deal in the world of media Talk Shows, but Bush Administration adviser Karl Rove was no normal staffer. The man often credited with navigating the president through two successful elections was, and is, a lightening rod for controversy. And his announced departure caught the attention of the talkers from both sides of the spectrum in a big way.

For some it was a chance to take stock of the time “the architect” spent in Washington and review his accomplishments. Others saw it as a chance to revisit the political dustups that followed his White House tenure. Still others decided to spin the story forward with a “What now for Karl” theme.

In all Rove’s resignation garnered more than 10% of the week’s talk time as measured by PEJ’s Talk Show Index for August 12-17. That made it the second-biggest talk story of the week behind the campaign for president.

CNN’s Lou Dobbs aired two packages on Rove’s legacy Monday, using Rove as a way to talk about his favorite topic, immigration. Dobbs said that despite Rove’s victories, the adviser’s immigration stance, which Dobb’s called pro-amnesty, hurt his legacy. “[Another] major exception [to Rove’s successes] is the election of 2006 in which the Republicans were swept out of the leadership of both houses and the majority of both houses of Congress,” Dobbs said. “A checkered record at best over the last three or four years for Karl Rove.”

That same night on MSNBC’s Countdown, host Keith Olbermann was having a Rove-a-palooza, devoting the shows first 20 minutes to a full review of the adviser’s time in the White House. The show offered everything from the short-term political perspective to the congressional perspective. The tone, as viewers of accustomed to Olbermann’s strident anti-Administration’s view might expect, was puckish and pleased. “I’ll be on the road behind you here in a little bit,” President Bush said in a clip from that morning’s press conference. “You all leave together, maybe you can get a discount,” Olbermann added in a voiceover.

A kinder assessment of Rove’s time was issued by conservative Pat Buchanan the next day. Subbing on MSNBC for Tucker Carlson, Buchanan wondered whether Rove belonged in the “political hall of fame” and asked what Rove’s resignation would mean to the 2008 campaign.

“Could Rove be more dangerous to Democrats, especially those with their eyes on the Oval Office, from the outside the White House?” Buchanan asked. Maybe, said liberal panelist Bill Press, “Look he’s going to have more time on his hands. He’s going to have less restrictions on his activities. God knows what he’s going to be up to down there.”

The extensive coverage of all-things-Rove and particularly the press’s attention to some of the adviser’s lesser moments, gave conservative Rush Limbaugh a chance to offer a dig at one of his favorite targets: the media. At Rove’s resignation press conference CBS White House correspondent Bill Plante shouted out at Rove and Bush as they walked away, “If he’s so smart, why did you lose Congress?”

Limbaugh offered a snappy reply: “Hey Plante, if you’re so smart how come Katie Couric is doing the Evening News?”

In the media overall last week, PEJ’s News Coverage Index showed no dominant story. In the same way, the Talk Index also showed a more balanced spread of coverage among the top stories than usual.

The 2008 campaign was the week’s biggest talk story, but it still only captured about 15% of the overall talk time PEJ monitored. It was followed by Rove’s resignation at about 11%, the immigration debate at about 7% and the Iraq policy debate at about 7%. The fifth biggest story on talk shows was the shootings of three college students in Newark, New Jersey at 6%.

Together that means the top three stories for the week captured 33% of the total talk time measure. The week before the top story alone (the 2008 campaign) captured 35% of PEJ’s Talk Index.

PEJ’s Talk Show Index, released on Fridays, 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.

Last week, the Rove story, which broke Monday, August 13th, had its big days Monday and Tuesday, when about 89% of the segments aired. Meanwhile, the campaign, again chugged along steadily as a topic almost as big at week’s end as it was at the beginning.

Absent any major campaign-related event, what was the campaign talk about? The hosts seemed most interested in playing whack-a-mole with candidates from the opposite side of the political spectrum, hitting them on any number of issues.

On his Tuesday radio show, for instance, conservative Sean Hannity went after Democratic candidate Barrack Obama for what he perceived as the senator’s attack on U.S. troops. “He’s been heralded in the news as the second coming,” Hannity said and then played a clip from an Obama speech. “So there it is, Barrack Obama claiming our troops are air raiding villages and killing civilians. How many more passes do these Democrats get before we accept that they have nothing but contempt for our armed forces?”

On Monday’s O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly focused on a campaign event from the week before – the Democratic forum on gay/lesbian issues – and the fact that almost none of the candidates supports gay marriage. “I think that’s pretty hypocritical, don’t you? If they want to court these people, pardon the pun, they should support the gay marriage thing.”

And showing how far afield hosts went for campaign topics last week, liberal talker Stacy Taylor, sitting in for Randi Rhodes, took a short detour on his show to take a swipe at long-shot Republican candidate Ron Paul. “He’s the guy who can end the war they say,” Taylor said. “Why is it we are supposed to gush and swoon every time a Republican reaches the obvious conclusion that the war in Iraq was wrong from the get go?”

All of which may be true in the eyes of Taylor and his listeners, but when a host decides to devote time to going after a third-tier candidate there is another message coming from the talk universe.

November 2008 is still more than a year away and there are a lot of hours of airtime to fill.

Dante Chinni 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 week’s biggest story, the 2008 presidential campaign, made up only 8% of the news hole in PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index, which examines 48 different news outlets.

That was the second-smallest total for a “top story” measured in 2007. (The smallest was the coverage of Campaign 2008 the week of February 25, when it received 7% of that week’s coverage).

The weekly percentage of coverage may have been small, but the campaign has been one of the top stories throughout the year and was the top story in the recently released News Index for the second quarter of 2007.

And while there was no dominant story for the week of August 12, politics played a big role as a theme.

Close behind the campaign in media attention was the resignation announcement of White House adviser Karl Rove – which made up 7% the newshole studied last week.

The Rove story was helped by the fact that the resignation announcement came early Monday morning, making it a story for the whole week studied. The coverage of the man sometimes called “the architect” of the President’s victories generally focused on the fact that he was controversial, loved and hated.

The continuing saga of the six miners trapped in Utah also remained in the top five stories of the week, also with 7% of the coverage.

The other story that generated significant attention (also with 7% of the coverage) was the growing concern about the economy and the fall in the stock market. The story grew as the week wore on, and markets around the world began to sag – about two-thirds of the coverage of the economy took place in just two days, Thursday and Friday. The bumpy economic ride was also the biggest story of the week for the newspapers and network TV shows PEJ analyzes.

The next two most heavily covered topics of the week received nearly as much coverage again. In a week that saw one of the most violent single days of the war, events on the ground in Iraq and efforts to protect the United States from terrorism both garnering 5% of the coverage.

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.)


Dante Chinni of PEJ

This week’s account of the News Coverage Index has been abbreviated to make room for the second quarter report on the results of the Index.

Note: CNN preempted its regular programming from 8:00 - 8:30 pm ET on Thursday, August 16, and Friday, August 17. Therefore, those time periods are not included in this week's sample.

At the rate the 2008 campaign is moving, one may wonder if the nation’s talk show hosts are going to run out of things to say about it before primary season arrives. With more than 15 months to go until the next presidential election, the campaign dominated the world of news talk last week.

And there was no shortage of talking points. In a week loaded with campaign events – from the Democrats meeting with bloggers at the Yearly Kos Convention, to debates in both parties to the Iowa Straw for the GOP – talk show hosts zeroed in on everything from candidate gaffes, to the compressed primary schedule, to the media’s role in the race.

In all, it turned out to be the biggest week of the year for campaign ’08 in the Talk Universe. The far-away campaign made up 35% of the airtime in talk as measured by PEJ’s Talk Show Index for August 5- 10.

No other topic even came close. The next biggest story, the Utah mine collapse that left six miners trapped captured 11% of the airtime. After that no other topic got more than 5%.

What campaign story thread were the talkers interested in?

For MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson, the topic was the power of labor in the electoral process leading into Tuesday’s Democrats AFL-CIO debate held at Chicago’s Soldier Field. He wondered if unions were turning the Democratic candidates against free trade and agreements like NAFTA. “It strikes me as a huge departure from the legacy of Clinton for some of these new candidates, or most of them, to be running against, in effect, NAFTA,” Carlson said.

Syndicated liberal radio talker Ed Schultz discussed the campaign by taking issue with comments from Republican candidate Mitt Romney about why Romney’s sons were foregoing service in Iraq even as their father gives speeches supporting the troop surge there. “[Romney] also went on to add that ‘one of the ways my sons are showing support for the nation is by helping get me elected.’ Well, nothing self-serving about that,” Schultz said sarcastically.

Meanwhile, over on Fox, the O’Reilly Factor used the swell of campaign events as an opportunity to talk about…The Factor, and more broadly Fox News. In O’Reilly’s view, the Democratic candidates, particularly Hillary Clinton, were trying to score points by beating on the news channel. “But what does that get her? This is by far and away the top-rated cable news outlet and we’re growing while the other are disintegrating,” O’Reilly promoed, “why do they want to do that? Don’t they understand that might come back and bite them in the you-know-where?”

The PEJ Talk Index measures talk shows from two media—cable news and radio. The campaign stood out even more on radio. No other story rose above 6% of the talk time measured. That story was domestic terrorism.

The mine story was almost nonexistent on talk radio, receiving less than 1% of airtime. The reasons for that are impossible to know for sure. Unlike the Minnesota bridge collapse the week before, the mine story lacks the dimension of whether Americans generally are safe as they go about their lives. There is also perhaps less of a finger pointing at government with the mine story. The mine is privately owned. The roads and bridges we travel over are public.

Also mostly absent in the talk universe last week was the rollercoaster ride of the stock market. The ups and downs combined with a sagging housing market had some economists expressing worry and pushed the Federal Reserve to pump money into markets to stabilize them. Yet, the bouncing market, which fell almost 400 points on August 9 before regaining ground the next day, registered about 1% of total air time in the Talk Index.

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.

With the campaign filling the air time, which candidate was the big winner last week? That depended on who was doing the handicapping. The fact that Hillary Clinton seemed to break further out of the Democratic pack, however, was on several people’s minds.

Liberal radio host Rhandi Rhodes had especially warm feelings for Hillary, and the candidate’s oft-replayed “I’m your girl” comment from the Democrats Tuesday night debate. The day after the event, Rhodes began her show with Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl” and played Clinton’s words from the debate over the music. “Could I be happier? No,” Rhodes said. “Big score. And it’s great because it’s not like any other candidate can steal that line from her.”

Hardball’s Chris Matthews was intrigued by Clinton’s recently discovered girl power in his debate wrap-up show on MSNBC. “If you want someone to take on the right wing, I’m your girl. She’s post feminist. She can say girl now. It’s so fascinating.”

Matthews, indeed, was so fascinated he came back to the line three nights later on Friday’s Hardball. “She might be channeling Hilary Swank here. That is what I think she is up to. I think she wants to be the million dollar baby. And girl is perfect.”

Of course, things didn’t work out so well for Swank’s character in “Million Dollar Baby,” who died, and conservative talker Sean Hannity saw Clinton’s campaign possibly headed for a similar outcome.

On his Friday show Hannity, was willing to christen Clinton the Democratic nominee, and lay out the GOP’s fight plan against her. “Let her be the candidate and let’s have this campaign run on the distinctions and the differences and the ideologies of those people who are weak on terror, weak on border security, weak on energy independence, that want to raise you taxes and nationalize health care,” Hannity said. “Let’s get it on.”

That may not be the way the Clinton campaign would define itself, but it seems likely to be the way the conservative side of radio dial sees things. And listening to those hosts there is there is distinct feeling that they relish a Clinton nomination for the material it would provide them.

From his corner, Rush Limbaugh came out swinging at a different Hillary Clinton – one that was afraid to take a bold stance. On Friday Limbaugh took issue with Clinton’s answer at a candidate forum on gay and lesbian issues. Panelist, and musician, Melissa Etheridge asked Clinton why she wasn’t more of a leader on gay and lesbian issues and Clinton carefully answered that she believed she was, and even though some may believe change wasn’t happening fast enough, Clinton and others were pushing for more .

“Phew,” Limbaugh said sarcastically. “That was bold folks. That was bold. That was Mrs. Clinton at her boldest best, wasn’t it?”

The perils of being the champ – or at least the leading contender. You get a lot of accolades, but you take a lot of punches.

Dante Chinni 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.