ABSTRACT
Since the late 1960s the thesis has been put forward repeatedly in academic and public discourse that the American news media have been transformed from a relatively passive and conservative institution into an institution of opposition to political authority. This transformation, the argument continues, is in large part responsible for the well-documented decline of public confidence in political institutions 1 and, more generally, for a weakening of political authority. ‘The most notable new source of national power in 1970, as compared to 1950, was the national media,’ wrote Samuel Huntington, in a mid-1970s report to the Trilateral Commission. ‘ln the 1960’s the network organizations, as one analyst put it, became “a highly creditable, never-tiring political opposition, a maverick third party which never need face the sobering experience of governing.” 2
