Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Sotomayor Coverage Falls Off After Early Peak

Sonia Sotomayor has gone from being the biggest newsmaker the week of her nomination to not even making the top five last week, according to numbers compiled weekly by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

During the week of her nomination, Sotomayor was at the center of 14 percent of all news stories -- twice as much coverage as anyone other than President Obama since his inauguration, according to Pew. The president himself generated 7 percent of the news stories, his lowest showing since taking office. (Click here to see a list of the outlets included in the index and here for its methodology).

Newspaper and online coverage of the nomination went from 15 and 18 percent (respectively) the first week, to less than 5 percent the next, to nothing the next two weeks. Cable TV has been more attentive to the story, giving it 35 percent of its news hole the first week, but those numbers have dropped as well -- to 8 percent, then 3 percent and then nothing last week.

Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, pointed to a convergence of factors to explain the especially intense news coverage the first week and the subsequent precipitous decline. "It's the very ritualistic intense passion behind Supreme Court nominations, coupled with the judicial temperament and culling through years of judgments and then [Sotomayor's] ethnic heritage," Mitchell said. "All three coming together produced a complicated first week of coverage. There wasn't something very inherently controversial in her background that emerged, so then you saw a pretty dramatic fall-off."

Robert O'Neil, president of the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson Center for the protection of Free Expression, said the first week's coverage of Sotomayor was noticeably more intense than nearly all past nominations, save for Clarence Thomas', which became more newsworthy only when the Anita Hill allegations surfaced during the confirmation hearings.

"This one has certainly seemed to have invoked a good deal of coverage, mainly because it's Obama's first chance to nominate anyone," said O'Neil, who clerked for Justice William Brennan. "Whoever it would have been, [he or she] would have gotten a lot of attention."

O'Neil recalled that news coverage of Thomas dropped off about as quickly as Sotomayor's did. "Had there been no Anita Hill, it probably would have never revived," he said. He added that the same would likely happen with Sotomayor -- that unless some revelation of similar magnitude occurs, coverage would not return to the levels of that first week.

Mitchell predicts that "there will likely be an uptick in coverage when the confirmation process begins. If nothing major emerges out of that, it isn't likely to become a huge story again."