Lichter, S. Robert 1948-

PERSONAL: Born August 28, 1948, in Washington, DC; married; wife's name Linda S. (a sociologist). Education: University of Minnesota, A.B. (summa cum laude), 1969; Harvard University, Ph.D., 1977.

ADDRESSES: Home—Washington, DC. Office—Center for Media and Public Affairs, 2100 L St. NW, Ste. 300, Washington, DC 20037. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Rowman & Littlefield, 4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200, Lanham, MD 20706.

CAREER: George Washington University, Washington, DC, assistant professor of political science and research professor, 1980-87; Center for Media and Public Affairs, Washington, president and codirector, 1984-, Statistical Assessment Service, director; George Mason University, Arlington, VA, professor of communication, 2004-. Visiting professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs; visiting professor of political science at Georgetown University; What's the Story (nationally syndicated radio show), cohost.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Humanities fellow; Yale University postdoctoral fellow, 1977-78; Columbia University research fellow, 1978-85; DeWitt Wallace fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Will Solimene Award of Excellence in Medical Communications, New England American Medical Writers Association, for Environmental Cancer—A Political Disease?

WRITINGS:

(With Stanley Rothman) Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1982, with a new introduction, Transaction Publishers (New Brunswick, NJ), 1996.

(With wife, Linda S. Lichter) Prime Time Crime: Criminals and Law Enforcers in TV Entertainment: A Study, Media Institute (Washington, DC), 1983.

(With Linda S. Lichter and Stanley Rothman) The Media Elite, Adler & Adler (Bethesda, MD), 1986.

(With Daniel Amundson and Richard E. Noyes) The Video Campaign: Network Coverage of the 1988 Primaries, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Center for Media and Public Affairs (Washington, DC), 1988.

(With Linda S. Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Daniel Amundson) Watching America, Prentice Hall (New York, NY), 1991.

(With Thomas R. Dye and Harmon Zeigler) American Politics in the Media Age, 4th edition, Brooks/Cole Publishing (Pacific Grove, CA), 1992.

(With Linda S. Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Daniel Amundson) Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture, Regnery Publishing (Washington, DC), 1994.

(With Larry J. Sabato) When Should the Watchdogs Bark?: Media Coverage of the Clinton Scandals, Center for Media and Public Affairs (Washington, DC), 1994.

(With Richard E. Noyes) Good Intentions Make Bad News: Why Americans Hate Campaign Journalism, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 1995.

(With Stanley Rothman) Environmental Cancer—A Political Disease?, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1999.

(With Larry J. Sabato and Mark Stencel) Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2000.

(With David Murray and Joel Schwartz) It Ain't Necessarily So: How the Media Remake Our Picture of Reality, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2001.

(With Stephen J. Farnsworth) The Nightly News Nightmare: Network Television's Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988-2000, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including American Political Science Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Since 1984 S. Robert Lichter has been president and codirector of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonprofit research organization that conducts studies of the news and entertainment media. He shares that responsibility with his sociologist wife, Linda S. Lichter, as well as being a coauthor with her on a number of books. They met while working on a study of elites and social change that was initiated by Stanley Rothman, with whom Lichter has also written a number of volumes. Rothman is a former director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change at Smith College.

Lichter, his wife, and Rothman cowrote The Media Elite, a study in which they argue that the news is controlled primarily by socially liberal Easterners, particularly the gatekeepers of the news, media professionals who are associated with the major newspapers, such as the New York Times.

In Watching America, the three authors again collaborate, this time to analyze the contents of thirty years' worth of television programming. Neal B. Freeman wrote in National Review that their thesis is that 'while television began as an agent of social control, it has become an agent of social change. That is to say that where television once legitimized authority, as in Father Knows Best, it now undermines it, as in Miami Vice.

This theme is continued in Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture, in which Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman closely study violence, sex, female representation, business, race, work, crime, the law, and the American family. They conclude that the creators of television programming project personal viewpoints into their shows, and that these views are more liberal than those of the population at large. National Review critic James Bowman noted that in inviting the reader to recall the early offerings of television, the authors have written "a walk down memory lane for baby boomers and others who remember the peculiar charms of televison in the good old vast wasteland days."

Lichter wrote Good Intentions Make Bad News: Why Americans Hate Campaign Journalism with Richard E. Noyes. The co-authors analyze the way in which the media—network television, CNN, public television, and a few selected print sources—covered the 1988 and 1992 elections. They conclude that, rather than focusing on issue-oriented stories, the tendency was toward "horse-racism, tabloid titillation, negativism" and coverage that was even more intrusive than it had previously been. Rather than reporting the words of candidates, "journalists who were either unwilling or unable to give up their role as campaign interpreters" summarized and analyzed, then dispensed their reports reported in thirty-second sound bites.

In Environmental Cancer—A Political Disease? Lichter and Rothman question whether the public has been fully informed about the causes of environmental cancer, and propose that the risks have been exaggerated by environmental activists, media, and others who believe they have not. Dan Seligman wrote in Commentary that "the book's big news is the extraordinary gap between the views of the activists surveyed by Lichter and Rothman and the views of a random sample of scientists working in the field of environmental cancer, all of them members of the highly esteemed American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). The two groups are amazingly at odds on every major point." Louise M. Ball wrote in American Scientist that the authors "do take pains to maintain impartiality. Nevertheless, the cancer researchers come across as hard-headed realists, the environmental activists as ideologues, and the media as opportunists who sensationalize whatever falls into their grip. Most telling, however, are the authors' concluding remarks, which place the vulnerability of scientific facts to manipulation by interest groups firmly in the context of the generally poor level of scientific understanding evident among the American public."

For Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal, Lichter joins Larry J. Sabato and Mark Stencel to consider what is fair game when it comes to the private lives of public figures. They speculate that there has been more reporting on the personal misdeeds of politicians due to the greater numbers of women in newsrooms, which "demolished old-boy networks that allowed reporters to wink and ignore certain behavior among politicians, as they did among their colleagues." Mark Jurkowitz noted in the Boston Globe that the authors "make an intelligent argument."

Seligman called It Ain't Necessarily So: How the Media Remake Our Picture of Reality "a readable and even an entertaining book." Lichter, David Murray, and Joel Schwartz detail the media's poor report card when it comes to accurately reporting on things science-related, including health risks, as well as on opinion polls and statistics, and on under-reporting or completely failing to report on important developments that affect Americans, particularly because of bias (in favor of bad news), institutional arrangements, and pure laziness. They also note that stories that are not particularly newsworthy often become headlines.

P. A. Lamal wrote in Skeptical Inquirer that "one hypothesis as to why some stories are not covered is that they do not conform to a 'template'—the template being 'what editors and other people who are not on the ground have decided is The Story.' Thus, if the template is that sexual assaults pose a severe, and possibly worsening problem, evidence to the contrary will often be ignored or rejected. Another of the authors' hypotheses is that journalists—who often rely on press releases, rather than having the significance of data explained to them by researchers—can fail to understand the significance of the data."

Lichter's The Nightly News Nightmare: Network Television's Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988-2000, co-written with Stephen J. Farnsworth, studies the media's "increasingly poor job of covering presidential elections." The authors consider voter perception of the media, negativity, and other aspects of campaigns. "Yet," wrote David A. Dulio in Presidential Studies Quarterly, "the real power of their work lies in the rich data they employ." Richter and Farnsworth analyze every campaign evening news segment that aired on the three major networks during every election from 1988 to 2000. Dulio noted that "such a comprehensive analysis of network news coverage is important for many reasons, not the least of which is the wide range of topics covered, which include the informational focus of news stories about the campaign, the tone of those stories, negativity, accuracy, and bias in the media's reporting, and how the major networks' coverage compares to that of leading newspapers, public broadcasting, and even late-night comedy programs."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Political Science Review, June, 2000, Howard Margolis, review of Environmental Cancer—A Political Disease?, p. 463.

American Scientist, September, 1999, Louise M. Ball, review of Environmental Cancer, p. 464.

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July, 1997, Thomas E. Patterson, review of Good Intentions Make Bad News: Why Americans Hate Campaign Journalism, p. 156.

Booklist, December 1, 1998, Mary Carroll, review of Environmental Cancer, p. 634.

Boston Globe, July 27, 2000, Mark Jurkowitz, review of Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal, p. F6.

Broadcasting & Cable, December 19, 1994, review of Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture, p. 56.

Commentary, May, 1999, Dan Seligman, review of Environmental Cancer, p. 72; June, 2001, Dan Seligman, review of It Ain't Necessarily So: How the Media Remake Our Picture of Reality, p. 63.

Isis, September, 2003, James T. Bennett, review of Environmental Cancer, p. 515.

Issues in Science and Technology, winter, 2001, David S. Moore, review of It Ain't Necessarily So, p. 93.

Journal of the American Medical Association, November 3, 1999, James W. Allen, review of Environmental Cancer, p. 1681.

National Review, March 13, 1987, William Murchison, review of The Media Elite, p. 49; October 7, 1991, Neal B. Freeman, review of Watching America, p. 40; February 6, 1995, James Bowman, review of Prime Time, p. 71.

Political Science Quarterly, fall, 1996, John J. Smee, review of Good Intentions Make Bad News, p. 535.

Presidential Studies Quarterly, June, 2003, David A. Dulio, review of The Nightly News Nightmare: Network Television's Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988-2000, p. 453.

Publishers Weekly, April 19, 1991, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Watching America, p. 50; October 31, 1994, review of Prime Time, p. 52.

Reason, August-September, 1996, Nick Gillespie, review of Good Intentions Make Bad News, p. 69.

Skeptical Inquirer, July, 2001, P. A. Lamal, review of It Ain't Necessarily So, p. 59.

Washington Monthly, October, 1986, Jonathan Alter, review of The Media Elite, p. 56.

ONLINE

Center for Media and Public Affairs Web site, http://www.cmpa.com/ (February 16, 2005), "S. Robert Lichter."