PRESIDENT BUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, with grateful hearts we honor freedom's defenders and our military families, represented here this evening by Sergeant Norwood's mom and dad, Janet and Bill Norwood. [APPLAUSE}

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And the applause went on and on and then it happened. The military mom and the new Iraqi voter seated directly in front of her reached across the seats to hug. It was the dramatic highlight of this year's State of the Union Address, and along with the wagging of purple fingers, the Democrats' uncharacteristic boo. The speech itself and the Democratic response, it was all fodder for the pundits who gathered for the ritual of post-event deconstruction. David Brock, a self-described ex-conservative and founder of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America did some quantitative analysis of TV's post-speech punditry. Specifically, he told us, his group tallied the cable news networks' talking heads according to ideology.

DAVID BROCK: The most striking result was that on MSNBC you had a real disproportionate mix in terms of guests. You had 11 conservative guests and only 2 progressives in the 7 pm to 12 am timeslot. Whereas, in comparison, CNN's coverage was much more balanced. And Fox's was even better than MSNBC's.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, did the pundits represent, say, a wide variety of views within the parties? Or did they just represent the extremes, or what?

DAVID BROCK: There didn't seem to be a wide diversity of views within the conservative perspective. For example, there is conservative division on the war, but you didn't really hear that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what about on Social Security?

DAVID BROCK: One of the things we looked at in terms of the Social Security debate was language that's used by the media in terms of describing the President's program. We had three specific examples from MSNBC where a host and two reporters were using personal accounts terminology, rather than privatization. So clearly there's a trendline toward the media conforming somewhat to what the Republicans at this point prefer to call their program. This has been an ongoing controversy back to 2002 when Republicans apparently, as a result of their polling, decided that privatization wasn't a popular term, and as they started to shift the language toward personal accounts.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It will be interesting to hear what the reporters do with the new phrase that was presented last night by Harry Reid in the Democratic response when he referred to something as the birth tax. That's a new bit of liberal rhetoric that I'm sure he's hoping will eventually take over.

DAVID BROCK: Yeah, that was actually interesting because I think for the past few years there's been a lot of progressive attention to the reality that conservatives have succeeded in many ways in branding their programs more successfully than progressives have. And so, for example, the death tax. The birth tax that Senator Reed referred to seemed to be an effort to do exactly that, to try to create a phrase that might be evocative and then might echo through the media to make a point more clearly than in some cases progressives have been able to do in the past.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I wonder if you're doing a little bit of rhetoric management yourself, David. I mean, mostly we use the term liberal. I know that you like to use the word progressives. A lot of people do on the left, prefer to use the word progressives because liberal has become a pejorative.

DAVID BROCK: Well, I think that's right. I think, at least going back to the Clinton Administration, Democrats, many Democrats anyway have started to use the word progressive as opposed to liberal, and that seems to be the accepted language at this point on the Democratic side.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's go back to the State of the Union's most signature moment, I guess, which was the hug between the mother of a Marine who had died in combat and an Iraqi woman who had the opportunity to vote for the first time. There was some debate, I guess, whether that was spontaneous or stage managed. What was the general view from television?

DAVID BROCK: Well, I think I did see on MSNBC that that question was raised by Chris Matthews who was suggesting in a kind of skeptical way that a lot of things in politics are choreographed. I don't think anybody knew that that was the case, but that was some speculation. And then Ron Reagan, Jr. was--the only one I saw, although I couldn't watch all six simultaneously--who raised a question about the tastefulness of using a really emotionally loaded moment to make a political point. But, of course, you know, that's been going on for years. I think the Reagan White House is really credited with beginning to do that. And so that was the only place I really saw that discussed.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, it's funny because David Corn, writing in the very progressive Nation magazine, said here was Bush's story of sacrifice, liberty and freedom; sentiment, sincere sentiment, was in full sync with spin." So do you think it was generally perceived on television to have been a great successful moment with a minimum of naysaying?

DAVID BROCK: Overall, yeah. I mean, I think that on the theatrics of it, there was unanimity that it was a very effective speech. In terms of naysaying, you know, one thing we noticed was that the factual claims of the President really weren't contested very much across all the cables. During the Presidential debates the cables all ran fact checked segments. After the State of the Union address there didn't seem to be an awful lot of factchecking going on in terms of the President's speech, but much more commentary about the style of the presentation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Does it leave you with hope for the American media establishment, or not so much?

DAVID BROCK: I think not so much. Something really needs to be done to address the consistent imbalance where you just don't hear strong progressive voices very often on these cable channels. And even though the cables have lower ratings than the networks, they do have a highly influential and politically attuned audience. And I think that means the playing field isn't yet level.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. David Brock, thank you very much.

DAVID BROCK: Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: David Brock is founder and president of Media Matters for America. [MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD: Coming up incendiary wildly popular and very unprofitable, is Al Jazeera up for sale? Also the meaning of mainstream media and crossing swords over crossfire. [MUSIC]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from NPR.