Congress, the Press, and the Public.

"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 representatives. Overall, though it sometimes may seem otherwise, matters of policy are by far the dominant part of congressional coverage.

Now the bad news. Public distaste for Congress is growing, and the more people know about the institution, the less they seem to like it. Contempt goes up with education--as does support for term limits--and C-Span viewers are more critical of Congress than non-viewers. The authors speculate that the congressional process itself causes this, that viewers find the procedures confusing and pointless and the voting process boring. But I think they underestimate the intelligence of the C-Span audience, which is balanced almost equally among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. These people are far more likely than the general public to contact a member of Congress, make a political contribution, or even read a daily newspaper. C-Span recorded an 80 percent increase in viewership between 1988 and 1992, so the network must be doing something right. And 98 percent of C-Span viewers who were registered to vote in the 1992 presidential election did so. This may be the most intelligent, seriousminded, politically interested audience available anywhere. Because C-Span coverage is an unmediated transmission of congressional proceedings and campaign events, if this viewership is turned off on Congress, it probably is not due to cynical journalistic coverage.

One thing these essays point out repeatedly is that candidates, including incumbents, campaign for Congress by unremittingly bashing the institution. In fact, an important reason incumbents continue to be reelected while Congress slips lower and lower in public esteem is because the veterans portray themselves as "local politicians, Washington outsiders, and staunch critics of Congress." Since George Wallace began the trend in 1968, candidates for president, the House, and the Senate have mocked, scorned, and abused Washington even as they begged for money and votes to get there. Former Congressman Mickey Edwards once said, "It would be very helpful if we let some of our colleagues know they serve no useful purpose by denigrating an important institution in this country in order to make a few points back home politically." So blame some of the declining reputation of Congress on the habits of its own members.

In their determination to lay the blame for declining public support of Congress at the doorstep of a scandal-mongering press, the authors--mainly Ornstein and Mann--over-reach and weaken their case. "Among groups of journalists," they say, "radio talk show hosts emerge as the most hostile to Congress." Now, some radio talk show hosts, like Diane Rehm of WAMU in Washington, undeniably are journalists, but she is no Congress-basher. But would you consider another Washington-area talk show host, G. Gordon Liddy, to be a journalist? Rush Limbaugh insists he is not a journalist, nor are most of the hundreds of local market Rush imitators across the land who mindlessly bash politicians, Congress, Washington, and Bill Clinton.

"Coverage of the House banking scandal," the authors insist, "was as overdone and distorted by The Washington Post as it was on radio talk shows." How can anyone who would write such a sentence imagine himself to be qualified to evaluate the media's coverage of Congress?