Why are Americans disgusted with their government? One reason is that the national news media are relentlessly, corrosively negative in their coverage of political leaders, argues Patterson, a professor of press and politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

In 1992, according to his content analysis, 60 percent of the news coverage given presidential candidates Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, and incumbent George Bush was negative in tone. In 1960, by contrast, 75 percent of the news coverage of John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon was positive. It's not that Kennedy and Nixon were political paragons, Patterson says, because "the tone of election coverage became steadily more negative [after 1960] regardless of who was running." Politicians left and right alike were objects of the media's scorn.

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