Reading reports of the recent Pew Poll of Americans attitude on media coverage of the Royal Wedding, I was amused to read the 64% of Americans surveyed thought the news media were giving too much coverage to the Royal Wedding (25% said the wedding got the right amount, and 4% said too little).

This from a celebrity besotted country which recently elevated “Hurricane Charlie” to constant rotation in the 24-hour news cycle. (In the week of March 7-13 Charlie Sheen made the top 5 news makers in a Pew Project for Excellence report, along with President Obama, Muammar Gaddafi, Scott Walker and Peter King). Don’t even get me started on the death of Michael Jackson and the decades long train wreck that was Anna Nicole Smith. The media isn’t putting this stuff out absent an appetite for it. Viewer heal thyself.

Far be it for us at CMPA to defend the plague of “infotainment” that has affected the media, but 1 million people in the streets of London, not to mention international interest, seems to warrant heavy coverage, not withstanding the ongoing crises across the globe.

The current GOP field of could-be, would-be and wannabee presidential candidates has been trumped by a new contender with enough celebrity wattage to put them all in the shade. A Pew Research Center poll released April 21 shows that Donald Trump is the most visible Republican candidate among both Republican voters and the general electorate. In fact more voters named Trump as the candidate they’d heard the most about than all the other GOP contenders combined.

This is hardly surprising, considering the burst of media attention that has accompanied Trump’s testing of the waters, and in particular his embrace of the birther controversy, with calls for President Obama to release his birth certificate. In a search of media hits derived from about 4,000 newspapers, blogs and television and radio stations tracked by Newslibrary.com, the New York Times “Five Thirty Eight” blog reports that Trump accounted for 40 percent of all coverage of Republican candidates in April; no other candidate gained more than seven percent of the coverage. (This search was limited to references that linked candidates’ names to their candidacies, to avoid coverage of topics such as Trump’s reality show.) Continue reading at the CMPA website.

One other thing the two CMPA studies had in common was that the coverage was mainly negative – toward both political parties in 2010, and now toward Obama’s Libya policies. Not only were a majority of sources critical of the speech, most of the supportive comments came from Democrats or the President himself. By contrast, over three out of four comments by non-partisan sources were critical. For a fuller account of the coverage, see Kurtz’s article Obama’s Speech Bombs.

Kurtz argues that coverage of the speech is a portent of hostile media coverage in the future:  “the reaction to the speech could become the template for continuing carping about Obama’s kinetic military action, more commonly known as war.” Whatever the future brings, it’s notable how much has changed since presidents could depend on a favorable reception to televised speeches justifying military action abroad. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could depend on at least a brief uptick in the polls whenever they took to the airwaves to rally public support for their Vietnam War policies. These days it’s harder for a president to get the public’s attention, and harder still to get the media behind the message.