BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, with the inauguration, an invigorated news media readies itself for a second term. May it be better than the coverage of the first term. Never has media behavior been more closely scrutinized than it has these past four years - sliced and diced by all and sundry like a frog in a high school biology class. But in this case, the frog was alive during the procedure, and even apologized when its less savory innards were exposed. Most unappetizing to many media critics: a press initially hamstrung by an aloof president with a questionable mandate; then by an aloof president with wars to wage. Just weeks after the 2001 inauguration, reporter Greg Palast was covering the disenfranchisement of thousands of African American voters in Florida for the liberal British paper The Guardian. "Where," he asked, "was the American press?"

GREG PALAST: What's missing in the US, frankly, is more courage. Once the governor of Florida says, "I did nothing. These allegations are baloney," to them, story closed. Good night. See you tomorrow. That's it. That's American news.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Courage and caution - the yin and yang of good reporting - often fell out of balance in the coverage of the president's first term -- nudged towards caution by the September 11th attacks. Right after 9/11, polls showed public respect for journalists soaring to new heights, but then it plunged again, according to Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.

ANDREW KOHUT: On patriotism, and on a number of values -- professionalism, morality - the media has taken some very big hits.

BILL MAHER: We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away - that's cowardly.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: After uttering those words on the now-defunct Politically Incorrect, Bill Maher lost his advertisers, and then his entire program. It's hard to quantify a chilling effect, but subsequent events suggest that mainstream media were growing fearful, not only of terrorists - remember the anthrax attacks at NBC? - but also of their own audiences and advertisers. During the Afghanistan war, then-chairman of CNN Walter Isaacson, ordered his staff to exercise caution in its images of civilian suffering, (quote) "We must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields, and how the Taliban have harbored the terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 innocent people." And then Phil Donahue's short-lived MSNBC talk show was killed, ostensibly because of low ratings, though they were the highest on the channel. Rick Ellis, who runs a website called All Your TV dot com, got hold of a revealing NBC internal report, though how influential it was, no one can say.

RICK ELLIS: I can quote a couple of sentences from it that "Donohue presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war," and that there was a fear that Donohue's show might become a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: War coverage provided the media's biggest breakthrough and their greatest controversy. Like every American military operation after Vietnam, the Afghanistan war was virtually unreported, because reporters were barred from the field of battle. Then the Pentagon proposed embedding reporters with the troops. Military historian Major Roger Bateman.

ROGER BATE

MAN: It's great to get reporters down there where they can't help but fall in love with our soldiers. These are 18, 19 year old kids from the Bronx, and from Nebraska, and you know, plucks at some heart strings.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Reporters would be assigned to units, but they would lose their places if they left to cover the war from the other side. Some embeds went native immediately, like CNN Reporter Walter Rodgers. Notice the personal pronoun.

WALTER RODGERS: So we pulled back for that, and as I say, when we were pulling back, we could see the area we had fought through two and a half days ago, and when we pulled back, there were lots of…

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Others, like NPR's John Burnett, recognized that it was something of a Faustian bargain, but better than nothing, as long as there were reporters placed to tell the rest of the story. But there were only a handful of unembedded reporters, and they could not move freely in Iraq.

JOHN BURNETT: And I think that's been a mistake in the coverage of this war. The importance of going back to the places that the Marines charged through and find out what were behind the smiling faces, and the importance of finding out where the bombs hit was really driven home to me just by happenstance, really. I stopped in to a small village which had been bombed by the US Air Force - 30 men, women and children were killed in their beds, as they slept.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: There was some fine newspaper reporting from Iraqi towns and villages, but many Americans relied on cable for war news. If it was unbalanced, the fault lay not with the embeds, but with editors and producers who could have supplemented their coverage, but often chose not to. The reason suggested by Ken Auletta, media writer for the New Yorker, is that Fox News was setting the agenda.

KEN AULETTA: The American flag in the, in the left corner of the screen, and it became America's network. I had a fair number of stories about soldiers in Iraq, American soldiers, saying to people - "Are you with Fox News?" and saying, when they said, "No, we're with the Washington Post," they said, "Well, we're not going to talk to you. We would talk to you if you were Fox News." So Fox News has sold this message that they are the pro-American station. Now, that means that if you're a journalist, and you criticize or you raise questions about whether American military had planned for policing Iraq, and whether they had covered not just the oil ministry but whether they had covered the Museum of Baghdad to prevent looting, suddenly you're accused of being unpatriotic. That's not unpatriotic. That's, that's Reporting 101.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In an article in The Nation, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus quoted something that Senator Eugene McCarthy once told him - that the press is a bunch of blackbirds - all are on a wire, and one will go to another wire, and when that bird doesn't get electrocuted, all the birds will go to that other wire. With a White House so secretive, and a Congress largely silent, the media were obliged to fly to those wires all on their own, while dodging charges of media bias. And only a few, Pincus among them, did. Meanwhile, the press tended to embrace what little information was at hand without much investigation. For instance, the Washington Post had to correct its initial hook, line and sinker account of the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch from behind enemy lines, and the New York Times conceded that in reporting on Iraqi WMD, it relied far too much on, (quote) "a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on regime change." Facts became even more elusive in the last quarter of the president's term, because then it was all about the campaign. Despite an avalanche of fact checking by both mainstream media and the blogs, some unsubstantiated charges enjoyed undue coverage because, in reporter's slang, they were "too good to check." It was far more entertaining to air the slanders and cover them with the fig leaf of he said/she said. [NEWS INTRO MUSIC]

MAN: We begin this hour with a display of political showmanship, gamesmanship, brinksmanship that's sure to keep the swift boat flap afloat for a few more days.

WOMAN: A lot of theater here - he said, she said and so forth. You've got some angry Vietnam veterans who are angry at John Kerry…

MAN: What his fellow Vietnam guys are saying, what they experienced with him, they contradict just about every story…

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Equal time offered the appearance of objectivity without its substance, but with so much time to fill, this became cable news' operating principle - so blatant over the last four years, that the ongoing argument within the news media over what constitutes objectivity has become a matter of public debate and some pretty pointed ridicule.

JON STEWART: You've seen the records, haven't you? What's your opinion?

STEPHEN COLBERT: I'm sorry? My opinion? [LAUGHTER] No, I don't have o-pin-ee-ons. [LAUGHTER] I'm a reporter, Jon. My job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called objectivity. You might want to look it up some day. [LAUGHTER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was from Comedy Central's Daily Show, obviously. It's worth noting that the self-styled "fake news show" has become a force to reckon with in the president's first term - not because it's fair - because it's not. Just this week, it took a John Kerry comment viciously out of context. But because it has guts. A comedy show has the freedom to call a spade a spade. Of course, sometimes it calls a spade an octopus, but for now, it's probably the best media criticism available on TV. Maybe with time, we'll get some pungent analysis without the cover of comedy.

BROOKS JACKSON: I don't despair. I just think that we've been, as journalists, outclassed by those who would spin us.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Brooks Jackson is director of Fact Check dot org - a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

BROOKS JACKSON: Whether they're elected officials or, or people seeking elective office or special interest groups, the world's just gotten to be, every year that I've been alive, a more complicated and bewildering place, and I don't think journalists' skills and the dedication of their bosses has kept up with the need to explain this world to our audiences.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Even Fox News stalwart Shepard Smith sometimes found it hard to reconcile upbeat statements from the White House with the daily carnage in Iraq.

SHEPARD SMITH: We keep hearing that the situation is, is safe enough in most areas that they'll now be able to have this election. We, you know, we get so many different stories - I mean somebody out there is telling some huge lies.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The news media are in a quandary. The last four years offers many examples of courageous, significant reporting. But the profession has been tarred by its widely reported failures, ranging from weak reporting in the run up to war to the botched 60 Minutes story on President Bush's National Guard service. It's the easy error - the 60 Minutes piece - that seems to have hurt the public perception of news media the most. That story has allowed the people who don't recognize the role of a free press in a democracy (among them the president, who has been surprisingly explicit on this point) to disparage the whole enterprise.

GEORGE W. BUSH: In all due respect, I'm not sure it is credible to quote leading news organizations about… Never mind. [LAUGHS] Anyway…

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So is the stage set for a media even more cautious and less courageous than during the first term? As Brooks Jackson suggests, no need to despair. Congress is showing signs of life, and so many eyes are bearing down on the media now, from the blogs, from the public, from within the media themselves, that even caution, taken too far, has a price. [MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD: Next week, we'll review the four year reign of FCC Chairman Michael Powell. On Friday he announced he'd be stepping down.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.