Congress, the Press, and the Public.

• Author: Bode, Ken

"Congress-bashing has become a media pastime." That is the thesis of this collection of essays written mostly by academics and edited by two of Washington's stud-duck analysts of Congress: Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein.

In an era when it has become fashionable, especially among politicians and professors, to blame the press for excessively negative coverage, cynical assumptions about congressional ethics, and emphasis on rumor and scandal over issues and institutional process, the authors come up with some interesting findings.

Public support for Congress, as everyone knows, is at ground level, and the authors insist that the media's focus on celebrity, scandal, and sensationalism is one important reason. They are probably right. It should be remembered, however, that they write of a period that produced the S&L debacle, Speaker Jim Wright's forced resignation, numerous congressional indictments and convictions for bribery and other matters, a variety of sexual escapades, the John Tower and Clarence Thomas confirmations, Iran-contra, midnight pay raises, check-kiting at the House bank, check-dodging at the House restaurant, and the Keating Five--to name just a few. Obviously, journalists are going to cover scandals like these, and this coverage is bound to affect the way the public views the institution.

But first, the good news. Karlyn Bowman and Everett Carll Ladd show that over the past 50 years, people have begun to pay more attention to Congress and feel they know more about it. Herb Asher and Mike Barr measure varying levels of public support for the institution, and find that when Congress is actually functioning effectively in a highly public way, support goes up substantially. Over the past 20 years the two high-water marks of public support were in 1974 on the eve of the Nixon resignation, and in 1991, during the congressional debate on the Gulf War.

Examining the coverage of Congress from 1972 to 1992, Robert Lichter and Daniel Amundson find that 67 percent of all stories in that period focused on policy, not on scandal. Another 15 percent involved congressional investigations (of things like corporate pricefixing), seven percent involved election campaigns, and five percent covered confirmation hearings or were profiles of individual members. Scandal coverage did rise near the end of the period, but so did the number of scandals--in 1989, network newscasts raised questions about the ethical conduct of 47 senators and...