BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm BROOKE GLADSTONE.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. This week, in advance of the second George W. Bush administration, the White House began that storied post-election dance known as the cabinet shuffle. One of the biggest changes, of course, was the resignation of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who for many on the left was considered one of the administration's very few voices of reason. Then the president announced his choice for a replacement: Condoleezza Rice. Rice will be the first African-American woman to serve as America's face to the world, and it solidifies her position as one of the most powerful women on the face of the earth. Well, if that's the case, we thought Martin Walker should tell us what the earth thinks. Martin is editor in chief of United Press International, and he joins us often to review headlines from around the globe. Martin, welcome once again.

MARTIN WALKER: Hello there.

BOB GARFIELD: Let's start with Colin Powell. How did they react to his resignation?

MARTIN WALKER: The broad view, certainly in Europe, was that "Europe Loses a Friend." Germany's Die Welt, which is a fairly conservative newspaper and often very supportive of President Bush, said "For Europeans, the American secretary of state was the John Kerry of the Bush administration, the last hope on that side of the Atlantic, and a man who stood for a reasonable and measured foreign policy." Tagesspiegel, another German paper, said "Powell was the only class act in the Bush administration. The only person who will be missed on both sides of the Atlantic. The only man in Bush's team on whom the Europeans felt they could count. The problem is that since September the 11th he became just a naked instrument in the hands of the holy warrior, Bush." For the Financial Times of London, it was "a tragic figure, and Powell's career had some of the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy. He was torn between his soldier's loyalty, his sense of duty, and his evident dislike of the unilateralist policies he was being asked to carry out," and that "Powell, to be frank, had lost most of his international standing after presenting to the United Nations evidence of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to be all together reliable."

BOB GARFIELD: Well, how delighted the secretary must be to be sympathized in Europe as a pitiful figure. But what about in the Arab world? Was he viewed as the good cop among bad cops there as well?

MARTIN WALKER: To a degree. I mean one of the things you have to realize is that even in the Arab world and even in Israel there are people who took this broadly European point of view. The mass market Israeli Tag Blinder Yediot Ahronot, for example, said that Powell's resignation "holds four more years in which the same old zealot sect will control Washington and the world." Another of the columnists in the same paper called him "the only moderate voice in the Bush administration -- the dove in the cage of hawks has finally raised his hand in surrender." In the Arab press, we had some rather over-heated reactions. In As-Safir of Lebanon, "Now we see that Bush in his second term will make us long for the Bush of the first term, just as Bush, Jr. made us long for Bush, Sr. and just as Bush, Sr. made us long for Reagan. This is a black day in world history. There are capitals in Europe and the Middle East which at this very term are planning to dig trenches and open up their bomb shelters."

BOB GARFIELD: And along comes Secretary of State designate Condoleezza Rice. Tell me what the reaction is to her.

MARTIN WALKER: Surprisingly, there's been a certain amount of guarded welcome for her. In one of the most liberal papers in Europe, in Holland's Zwolse Courant they say, "Well, remember it was Condoleezza Rice who reportedly advised the president in a memo just after the elections to aim for closer ties with Europe and new peace initiatives with the Middle East." Other newspapers, Germany's Berliner Zeitung, says "It really is a remarkable feature of George Bush that he turns out to be very much more progressive than anybody might have thought in his appointments. We have now had two African-Americans, one of them a woman, appointed to the job, which is the face of America to the rest of the world. This has to be seen as hopeful." However, Israel's Maariv, I was very struck, said "Condoleezza Rice comes from a place where black is black and white is white -- not in the racial sense, but in the biblical sense. She comes from a region where the church instills in its faithful simple truths of good and evil. Where Europe sees a freedom fighter, people like Rice see a terrorist with a Kalashnikov." Russia, Novie Izvestia, "The coming four years the U.S. president, it is clear, will carry out an even harsher foreign policy. He has placed his own personal bodyguard in the White House in the key positions." From Turkey's Cumhuriyet, "By preferring Rice to Colin Powell, and by raining death on Fallujah, George Bush gives new messages -"everything will be worse."

BOB GARFIELD: Martin Walker is editor in chief of United Press International. Well, Martin, as always, thank you very much.

MARTIN WALKER: My pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Powell's standing in the administration had slipped long before he resigned his commission this week. Consider his Time magazine cover on September 10th, 2001. He as depicted half in shadow. The headline was a plaintive question: "Where Have You Gone, Colin Powell?" Still, as late as 2002, some 88 percent of Americans regarded the secretary of state with favor.

GLENN KESSLER: In fact, taking the secretary of state's job was a bit of a risk for him, cause he had an unbelievable image. Sky high approval ratings, more popular than the president of the United States. Colin Powell cares deeply about the image that he has. Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler said that it was because of that image that Powell found himself before the United Nations in February 2003 presenting damning, and in hindsight, deeply flawed, evidence that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction.

GLENN KESSLER: He was selected to give that speech because he was the most respected member of the administration around the world. [TAPE PLAYS]

COLIN POWELL: The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources. Some are U.S. sources, and some are those of other countries. [TAPE ENDS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Immediately after Powell's masterful presentation at the UN, a Newsweek poll showed the highest support for war in more than a year -- a full 10 percent increase over two weeks earlier. And what happened after now WMD were found? His numbers gradually slipped into the high 60s, where they remained as of a CBS New York Times poll in April this year. But that still meant that one of the most thwarted secretaries of state in history was far and away the most popular member of his administration. Why did the public cling to its faith in Powell when the rest of the cabinet's numbers continued their downward slide?

CLARENCE PAGE: Colin Powell is one of those media unshakables who, even when something resembling a negative image comes his way, it bounces right off, better than Teflon.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page.

CLARENCE PAGE: Colin Powell rose up in the '90s to prominence at a time when we really needed some black heroes. The man seems almost too good to be true, but we want him to be true. And he is a guy who fits the role. He has an unblemished record, wonderful family life, worked his way up, immigrant family - I mean, you name it. He is an iconic figure, larger than life. I mean, people tell me whether they like Powell's politics or not, they just can't get enough of him.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Last spring, I began my research on the media management of Colin Powell by plugging search words into the databases of Lexis Nexis and Google News. I tried "Powell and polls," "Powell and public opinion," "Powell and the media," and came up pretty much with zip about his image. Then I typed in "Powell and good soldier." After that, the deluge. The phrase was everywhere. After his resignation this week, it was back. [TAPE PLAYS]

WOMAN: One of his legacies would definitely be being more of a moderate in the administration, really favoring hands on diplomacy, but at the same time really being a good soldier and carrying out the president's policies. [TAPE ENDS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was CNN last week. Here's New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman last April on All Things Considered. [TAPE PLAYS]

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: He was clearly the good soldier who marched in the direction that his leader ordered. Powell seems to be a tortured figure, you know, when it comes to this war. [TAPE ENDS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The public knew about the good soldier's private torment because of a steady stream of press leaks resulting in scores of newspaper accounts with unnamed sources attesting to Powell's lonely struggle for multilateralism. In May, a long piece in Vanity Fair chronicled the tug of war over his UN testimony. The June issue of GQ had a story about him called Casualty of War. GQ reporter Will Hilton said Powell's people encouraged him to write the piece and even supplied sources. One source, Powell's chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, is quoted as saying the secretary is "tired, mentally and physically" and most likely would not serve a second term. But the State Department was angered by Hilton's story, because they say he broke the ground rules set for the interview. Hilton denied the charge. Glenn Kessler.

GLENN KESSLER: They were upset because they said some of those interviews were not to be on the record. They were to be with no names attached. It raised a bit of a curtain on the process that the State Department has used to tell the story of Colin Powell in a way that is advantageous for him.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Kessler says the process involves seeding the press with comments from anonymous colleagues that the secretary could later deny if he chose. For instance, Powell shrugged off some assertions made in Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack for which Powell is widely assumed to have been a source. Thus, the saga of the stoic secretary leaked out while he remained the good soldier. Later, Powell changed his approach by openly defying administration policies. He condemned some actions of Ariel Sharon. He said the president had been fully informed of the Red Cross's concerns about Abu Ghraib long before those photos surfaced, and he denounced the UN speech he formerly defended. [TAPE PLAYS]

COLIN POWELL: It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong, and in some cases, deliberately misleading. [TAPE ENDS]

JAMES MANN: The public image of Powell is the straight up guy, but the reality is he's also a real Washington operator.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet. He says the public also saw Powell as a dove, but that's not entirely true either.

JAMES MANN: You have to keep in mind that this is a guy who was Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, who in the 1980s supported Star Wars, supported aid to the Contras. He took the lead in supporting American military intervention in Panama in 1989. He's a, he's a pretty hawkish guy within the general overall spectrum of American foreign policy. Personally, I think the public identifies him as a dove, but then can't quite figure out why he stays on in the administration when it goes off in different directions.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you think the answer to the burning question -- why didn't he leave? -- is simply that he didn't really disagree as much as the public thinks he did.

JAMES MANN: That's exactly right.

CLARENCE PAGE: I think the public has short memories when it comes to the details.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page.

CLARENCE PAGE: His iconic image is strong enough that it will weather this storm, just as he's weathered the storms of the My Lai controversy, of the Iran Contra controversy, of the first Gulf War where critics said he pulled out too soon --we should have gone all the way to Baghdad.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But Page says Powell was a passive figure in those controversies. True, Powell drafted an official denial of what came to be called the My Lai Massacre, but he said he didn't know the real story until much later. True, he knew about Iran Contra, but he was on duty in Germany when the scandal broke. True, he didn't pursue Saddam to Baghdad in the first Gulf War, but he said no one favored that course. True, he stayed loyal to the administration against his better judgment, but he suffered. Page once wrote that, quote, "Powell knows how to play the media as well as John Coltrane played the tenor sax." But, that said--

CLARENCE PAGE: I like the man. I believe him. I believe that he is a man of character and integrity. In short, he's got my vote if he runs for president. [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He's not the only one. Colin Powell is the very model of the principled outsider, even if he is a skilled operator, and a dove, except when he's a hawk. A simple, complicated man who always seemed to be telling the truth, even when his words were ambiguous, even when his words came through proxies, even when he offered no words at all.

BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, unpacking the values vote, what to call the Christian right, and the weird calculus behind FCC fines.

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

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [TAPE PLAYS]

HOWARD STERN: This is the beginning. Sirius Satellite will rule. This will be the dominant medium in the future because there's no government interference. [CHEERS, APPLAUSE] It's the beginning. [TAPE ENDS]

BOB GARFIELD: That was Howard Stern at a lunchtime event Thursday in New York to promote Sirius Satellite Radio, his future radio home. Also Thursday, Sirius named former Viacom president Mel Karmazin as its new CEO. Government interference, of course, has been the thorn in Stern's side throughout his tenure in terrestrial broadcasting -- the thorn he says finally pushed him to satellite. And, as if to prove his point, just a few days after he announced his move last month, the FCC levied its largest fine ever for indecency on TV. Fox stations were ordered to pay a collective 1.2 million dollars for an April episode of the now-defunct reality show Married by America for a scene that involved strippers and-uhh . . . whipped cream. The FCC said it was responding to complaints from offended citizens -- 159, to be exact.

JEFF JARVIS: I thought that was ridiculous on its face right there, that 159 people could decide what the rest of us millions would watch. And in fact, by the way, the millions had already decided they didn't want to watch Married by America, and it was canceled.

BOB GARFIELD: That's Jeff Jarvis, founding editor of Entertainment Weekly and current blogger-in-charge of buzzmachine.com. Jarvis wondered who these 159 offended viewers were.

JEFF JARVIS: I filed a freedom of information act request with the FCC, asking to see all 159 complaints. And I just got it back, and they admitted to me in the letter, "Well, it wasn't actually 159. It was 90, cause there were a lot of CC's. And those were written by just 23 people." And then I examined the actual complaints that the FCC sent me, and all but 2 were virtually identical. Which is to say that only 3 people in America took the time to sit down and write a letter to the FCC. What the heck are 5 people on the FCC or 3 bozos out there in the country doing dictating to the rest of us what we can and cannot see and hear on our media?

BOB GARFIELD: Do you have any reason to think that the FCC knew that there were, in fact, but 3 actual authors of complaints to the agency?

JEFF JARVIS: Absolutely, yes. In fact, I talked to an FCC flack, and he acknowledged that these things are, are xeroxed like this.

BOB GARFIELD: So that would raise the question of regulatory good faith, wouldn't it?

JEFF JARVIS: Well, yeah. It's first a question of the Constitution, but then it's a question of really stupid enforcement, and this is a political act. This is done to assuage people out there and say we're going to go cover up America. Well, that's not their job, and they shouldn't be doing that.

BOB GARFIELD: Let me talk to you about the general problem of the coarsening of the culture. Is there no point at which you believe the government has the right to make an example of somebody?

JEFF JARVIS: No! Why would the government do that? The marketplace will do that. People already said they didn't want to watch Married by America. CBS, next time around, with the Super Bowl is not, believe me, going to allow a single inch of breast flesh to be shown, because the marketplace won't let 'em, and they'll lose money. I trust the people. I do not trust the government with that, and neither did the founding fathers. That's why we have a First Amendment. So the answer to your question is a simple and absolute no.

BOB GARFIELD: So three prigs or three persons legitimately aggrieved essentially astro-turfed the FCC, and the FCC, which in every other respect is deregulatory by nature, sprung into action and levied this fine. All right, so it's kind of comical and horrible at the same time, but what does it mean?

JEFF JARVIS: I think it's very illustrative of what's happening in the media right now. We're all assuming there's a great big gigantic moral Army out there that's taken over America. Well, it actually reminds me of an old Foreign Legion film where you maybe have 3 soldiers, and about 200 helmets stuck up on poles over the wall of the fort, so they look bigger than they are. We're not a Bible-thumping nation. And the problem in media is that is being assumed, that somehow we got taken over by the God squad, and that's a dangerous characterization that's being made as conventional wisdom in media. We in the media should not be in the business of spreading conventional wisdom. We should be in the business of questioning conventional wisdom. It's not as if it's America at war with itself, red states versus blue states. Let's question that. It's not as if a moral Army has taken over America. Let's question that. Instead, what we've seen in the media is that it's been accepted and xeroxed over and over and over again till it becomes accepted wisdom. And it's not right.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Jeff. Well, thanks very much.

JEFF JARVIS: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Jeff Jarvis authors the blog buzzmachine.com.
BOB GARFIELD: So why have so many in the media come to proclaim that the presidential election turned on a vast gulf in moral values between red states and blue? The answer is to be found in exit polls where voters were asked what one issue most influenced the way they cast their ballots. They were given seven options: taxes, education, Iraq, health care, terrorism, the economy, and the now famous moral values, which netted the highest response at 22 percent. But the Pew Center for the People and the Press which also tracks voting patterns had doubts about including the option moral values in that election night questionnaire. Andrew Kohut is Pew's director.

ANDREW KOHUT: If you had put it along with a list of other things like Rising Anti-Americanism and other grab bags, Foreign Policy Problems, it would be more of an apples to apples comparison.

BOB GARFIELD: And so Pew went back a few days later to 1200 voters with the same multiple choice questionnaire. Sure enough, it got approximately the same results. But then, Kohut says, Pew polled a similar sample group in an open-ended survey without any options to choose from.

ANDREW KOHUT: We said to them: What issues were on your mind when you were casting a ballot a few days ago? And we got quite different answers. Only 9 percent volunteered moral values. Another 5 percent mentioned social issues such as homosexuality or abortion. And I think even the 9 percent was an overstatement, because this buzz word phrase moral values was used so frequently in the days following the election, when our polling was done. When we asked people who made the choice moral values in a followup question, what did you mean -- they were talking about the candidates' religious beliefs or stem cell research or homosexuality -- moral values is code. You shouldn't put code in questions.

BOB GARFIELD: So it wasn't just a question of triggering a response from suggestible people. It was a question of pressing a hot button that was designed to generate a certain response.

ANDREW KOHUT: Precisely. If you had asked a question that dealt with specific issues, you would not get that kind of response. There were other big drivers of the vote that are far more important than moral values. It was Iraq, it was the economy, it was terrorism, it was health care, and to a much lesser extent it was issues such as stem cell research or gay marriage or abortion.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, that's a key, because you at Pew, on an ongoing basis, keep your finger on the pulse of the American electorate, and you're saying that Americans' embracing of moral values hasn't dramatically changed over the years.

ANDREW KOHUT: That's right. We saw the same attitudes toward abortion in the exit poll on this election as we saw four years ago and eight years ago, essentially. This was an electorate that was not more church-going than the electorate four years ago and eight years ago. It was an electorate that took a moderate view on gay couples. But the press latched on to the story. We saw the same thing back in 1994, when the Republicans surprisingly took control of the Congress after 40 years. The press wrote: This is the Republican revolution. Well, that was bunk. What the exit polls showed was that there was discontent with the way the Democrats were controlling Washington -- not an ideological shift. And in this election, it's more about a public being comfortable with Bush's leadership rather than risking a vote for Kerry.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, we've seen a few op-ed pieces re-thinking this assumption that there was this great moral gulf, and yet myths are very difficult to explode. Do you think in the end, when this campaign is examined, that we'll ever get away from the notion that this was the morality election?

ANDREW KOHUT: The media writes the first draft of history. I think what the actual historians say will probably be quite a bit different. The problem these days is we only rely on one exit poll, unlike the 1980s when each of the networks would do their own exit polls, and we'd have different takes on questions, and that really runs the risk that the error inherent on one survey is going to have such an overwhelming impact on the way we look at the electorate. And hopefully, in the future, the resources will be available to have different takes and different kinds of research examinations that might provide some perspective on findings like this.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, Andy, as always, thanks very much.

ANDREW KOHUT: You're welcome.

BOB GARFIELD: Andrew Kohut is director of the Pew Center for the People and the Press.
BOB GARFIELD: Perhaps history will determine that the so-called values gap was a myth based on misleading exit poll data. But even if the values gap is a myth, it's still likely that the media's knowledge gap about the American electorate is all too real. Peter Johnson, media columnist for USA Today, interviewed news managers in the midst of some heavy soul searching.

PETER JOHNSON: They were so sure that Kerry and the Democrats were going to win, that when they lost, I think it has set off a whole bunch of soul searching that a lot of people in the media had never done before, and I think that it's going to continue for the next couple of months.

BOB GARFIELD: And what form do you think it's mostly likely to take?

PETER JOHNSON: I think you're going to see major news organizations fanning out around the country, like they did during the election, only instead of talking to political operatives, they're going to talk to so-called real people. At the New York Times, I talked to the editor there, Bill Keller, who said he'd like to consider re-opening the Kansas City Bureau, and he's thinking about doing more stories on how demographic shifts in the plains states have affected life there. I've also heard, for instance, over at NBC that the Today Show is thinking about possibly going on the road and trying to figure out how either united or divided the country is. That's an example of the type of thing that I think people are soul searching about.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, I can't help but remember 9/11 and the resolution by the major networks and the print press as well to start paying more attention to the world at large and being less parochial and less focused on domestic news, which, you know, they did for about five to seven minutes and then--

PETER JOHNSON: No, no. I would disagree on that. I would say eight to nine minutes on that, Bob. [LAUGHTER]

BOB GARFIELD: It is fair to observe that whatever soul searching they did then has long since been erased?

PETER JOHNSON: Yes. I think it's fair to assume that, and I think that all of this that you and I are talking about may have that shelf life as well. On the other hand, who knows? I think that they'd be well-served by getting out into the countryside.

BOB GARFIELD: So you're not rolling your eyes over this determination by the networks and others in the press to fan out to at least get a little more perspective.

PETER JOHNSON: I think we'd get a lot better journalism if they actually saw how Americans eat and how they live and how they sleep and how they go to work each day, and we'd also start finding out a lot more about the homogenization of America and how a lot of towns and cities look exactly the same these days, because of big business. So, all those stories, I think, are important. For a lot of producers and a lot of editors, they find their stories one block away or one floor away. They don't even bother to go to Staten Island. They don't even bother to go to Rockland County, which is right across the Hudson River. And so I'm very hopeful that they actually will get out there, and they actually will spend some time with people, because those same people are the people who voted for George Bush and said screw you, major media.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Peter, thank you so much.

PETER JOHNSON: Bob, nice talking to you.

BOB GARFIELD: My old friend Peter Johnson writes about media for the Life section of USA Today.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Regardless of what pundits say determined the election, there is now a potentially decisive voting bloc to reckon with -- a religious conservative voting bloc. But what to call it? ABC's Peter Jennings. [TAPE PLAYS]

PETER JENNINGS: I just want to make one observation about, about terminology. I'm not sure that you're going to hear a lot of new terminology this year you haven't heard before, but evangelical Christian is what people used to call, unfortunately, the Christian right. [TAPE ENDS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why unfortunately? As Tim Noah recently asked in Slate, "What's wrong with calling the Christian Right the Christian Right? It's unquestionably Christian and invariably conservative." According to Steven Waldman, editor in chief of Beliefnet.com, the problem isn't with the word Christian; it's with the word "right."

STEVEN WALDMAN: The Religious Right was a term that the religious right was fine with when it was created in the late '70s, and then liberals counter-attacked, by pointing out certain negative aspects of the movement and started to make conservatives feel like maybe they didn't want to be called the religious right any more. And so now conservatives are trying to re-define it in a different way to remove some of the baggage.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dr. Richard Land is president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country.

RICHARD LAND: For instance, I don't consider myself a member of the Christian right, although I certainly would be considered by many neutral observers as a member of the Christian right, because I am a person of traditional religious values and I am a Protestant, evangelical Protestant.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He, like apparently Peter Jennings, prefers the word evangelicals to describe the voting bloc in question. The problem is that more than a quarter of self-described evangelicals did not vote for Bush. Among them, liberal white evangelicals and many of the black ones. I put the question to Dr. Land: There is a certain amount of political diversity within the evangelical movement. You would still prefer that term to be applied to the voting bloc of observant Christians who voted for President Bush and his conservative agenda rather than the term Christian right.

RICHARD LAND: Yes. I think 3 out of 4 is sufficient to make it the term of definition.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mmmmm. Really?

RICHARD LAND: Yeah.

BOB GARFIELD: Three out of four of whites.

RICHARD LAND: Well, African-Americans make up about 12 percent of the population, so it would still be about two thirds of evangelicals.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Recently, a woman named Sarah called NPR's Talk of the Nation to complain about misrepresentation. [TAPE PLAYS]

SARAH: Yeah. I'm an evangelical Christian, and I did not vote for Bush in this election, and if we have a concern as evangelicals about the environment, well Kerry was a much more promising candidate as far as that's concerned. [TAPE ENDS]

STEVEN WALDMAN: Evangelical Christian is a religious term; not a political term.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Beliefnet's Steven Waldman.

STEVEN WALDMAN: It's obviously gotten a bit confusing, because most evangelicals are conservative, and so they all tend to get lumped together now as one political movement.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What to do, what to do? Reporters want to be politically correct, but they also want to be accurate. Some point to the succession of words like Negro, Black and African-American to describe a group that has carried a lot of baggage-laden terminology over the years, but in the shifting political winds, we still knew who we were talking about. With "evangelicals," the current term of choice, it's not so clear exactly who we mean. Waldman says that Beliefnet applies different terms to different evangelicals.

STEVEN WALDMAN: We talk about traditional evangelicals, and then we invented a whole new term called "freestyle" evangelicals who are theologically evangelical, meaning they have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, they have declared that he is their savior and often have had a born-again experience, but they're politically more moderate. And that is a whole different kind of political dynamic than the conservative evangelicals, the ones that we used to call the religious right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: John Green, director of the Bliss Institute for Applied Politics, says that context should dictate the terminology.

JOHN GREEN: I think if one is trying to describe a group of people as objectively as possible, then it's useful to not use their language, but rather to use external language that is descriptive and would be easily understood by everyone. On the other hand, if one is trying to explain their position and their understanding of themselves, then perhaps their own language is very useful.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In quotes.

JOHN GREEN: Yes, in quotes. Right. [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention.

RICHARD LAND: Religious Social Conservatives is probably the best and most inclusive and most accurate term. Religious Social Conservatives.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He's almost certainly right; that describes who these people are and what issues -- for example, abortion and gay marriage -- motivate them to vote for certain candidates. But the phrase is a bit cumbersome, as is Waldman's suggestion.

STEVEN WALDMAN: Maybe we should borrow from Prince, and instead of calling them evangelicals, we can call them the group formerly known as the religious right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Meanwhile, in place of the out-of-favor Christian Right, the media are opting more and more for the broader term, "evangelical," and Land prefers. It's appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, and you'll keep hearing it on ABC. The fact is, as Waldman notes, most reporters live in a bubble and don't really know who this group is. So they're permitting its most vocal members to set the terms and the political message that comes with them. [MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, how CIA malcontents feed the media beast, and how movie spies and real spies feed off each other.

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

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. We have an update from the "journalists facing jail time file." Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine await an appeal of contempt charges stemming from their refusal to name the White House official who leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame. The cases have been combined, and a hearing is scheduled for December 8th. Meanwhile, Jim Taricani moved one step closer to the clink. An investigative reporter from Channel 10 News in Providence, Rhode Island, Taricani refused to name the source of a videotape that showed a city official taking a bribe. We spoke with Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press, about the case.

LUCY DALGLISH: They asked Taricani, finally, "who gave you this tape?" He said "I'm not going to tell you." So, last summer, he was cited with civil contempt and fined a thousand dollars a day. Then, a couple of weeks ago, there was a status hearing in the case, and Judge Torres from Providence brought him in and said "I've forced you to pay a fine. It's obviously not compelled you or induced you to testify. I don't want to send you to jail, because you've had a heart transplant, and you have a pacemaker. But, you know, things have gone too far. Enough is enough. And you will be tried for criminal contempt."

BOB GARFIELD: After Taricani was convicted Thursday, Channel 10 News issued a statement saying "No reporter should have to pay such a terribly high price for honestly and legally reporting the news." His sentencing is scheduled for December 9th. He's expected to receive a six month jail term. And the beat goes on. [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: One of the week's top stories involves the men and women who keep the secrets at the CIA. On Monday, two high level CIA officials resigned, following a string of others in recent weeks. It seems that the new CIA chief, Porter Goss, former chairman of a House oversight committee and CIA case officer, is clearing out the malcontents, and, in so doing, may be hurting the agency's ability to impartially inform the president. But the way the story has unfolded tells us just as much about the workings of the often inscrutable press as it does about the CIA. Jack Shafer, who writes the PressBox column for Slate, has anatomized the coverage, and he joins me now. Jack, thanks for coming on.

JACK SHAFER: Happy to be with you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how has the CIA story played out on the front pages?

JACK SHAFER: Well, there's an old journalistic cliché that reporters have the ultimate power -- the power to choose who they'll be co-opted by. And in reports about the CIA, your most reliable and probably most blabbing sources are sources inside the agency who might not like what the agency is doing or the direction it's taking. In the way that the story has been played out, Porter Goss is some sort of barbarian who's come to somehow compromise the independence and integrity of the CIA.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How likely do you think it is that the leakers actually went to the papers, rather than the papers going to the leakers?

JACK SHAFER: There was probably a good bit of both. You have to remember that this really started after he was confirmed, and it looked as though there might be a Kerry presidency. And so I think that a lot of the people in the CIA figured what do we have to lose? We'll just keep him from messing with our crib for the next three months. And what's interesting is that it seems as though Porter Goss and the Bush administration really didn't rumble back against any of the dissenters within the CIA until after Bush won the election, and then it's pretty apparent to me that Goss sent his proxy, Senator John McCain to go out and sort of fight the PR battle on his side.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how did the entry of John McCain into the story change the shape of the coverage?

JACK SHAFER: Well, for one thing, it gave a very articulate, authoritative and very sympathetic voice to Porter Goss's concerns. John McCain is one of the biggest press darlings there is. I mean you put a journalist next to him, and you have a swooner, within minutes. And so, it really did change the complexion early this week when he's striking out and, and calling the culture of the CIA "dysfunctional," and that it needs to be uprooted, and Porter Goss is just the man.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You said that the media have a stake in this story. What is it?

JACK SHAFER: They benefit primarily by leaks. If the CIA were truly the secret intelligence agency that it was supposed to be, and people zipped their lips and did not talk about their business, we'd know practically zero about the CIA. So journalists have a vested interest in keeping the information coming; of there being disgruntled CIA officers to come and talk about their concerns about the agency. One of Goss's primary criticisms of the current CIA is that it leaks too much; it talks too much out of turn. And what he wants to do is establish a kind of discipline there, and that very much is not in the interests of journalists who, who like to hear from all sorts of different factions.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: When confronted with this information, how do you think the press ought to cover it? What's your principal criticism of the way this story has been handled?

JACK SHAFER: Every new director of Central Intelligence who's come in with a new plan to clean up whatever mess there might be in the CIA, to change the course of the CIA, has had to deal with the same problem. You know, the cord wood starts to scream very, very loud as it's carried towards the fire. So one of the things that I'd like newspapers to do is place this in a stronger context --that what you have is battling bureaucracies. You don't see that portrayal of Goss anywhere in the press -- that perhaps some of his ideas are very good.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's talk about the role of anonymous sources that you mentioned. I know that this is a particular bête noire of yours, and it seems that despite efforts to stem the flow of the unnamed source, it still seems to direct the coverage, not just of this story, but practically every story that originates in Washington.

JACK SHAFER: Anonymous sources are sort of like fire ants -you can pour insecticide on them, boiling water, you can nuke them, and they only seem to reproduce and spread further and further. It seems like these opening efforts by both the Washington Post and the New York Times to reduce the number of anonymous sources in their papers have resulted in the increase. [LAUGHTER] I wrote a column this week, about a 1400 word page one story, in the New York Times this week about Condoleezza Rice, and it had 22 different anonymous sources. That worked out to one every 64 words. [LAUGHTER] Which is a little bit over the top.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, I spoke to New York Times assistant managing editor and standards editor Allan Siegel after he issued some new rules or I guess they were clarifications of old rules regarding the uses of anonymous sources back in March, and he said that they were strongly discouraged, but -- and we have a clip. [TAPE PLAYS]

ALLAN SIEGEL: The more important the information is, the more tolerant we have to be about the inability to put names on it, and then there are things all the way down the line to public relations people for companies who are just trying to cover their backs sometimes, when they won't let you use their names, and there we quite simply should refuse to take information. [TAPE ENDS]

JACK SHAFER: My view on this is that many reporters use anonymous sources as a crutch. If the reporter wants to stick his neck out and do his own diagnosis and say morale at the CIA is very, very bad, and here are the reasons why, and he's asserting it as a truth, even if his sources insist on being anonymous, I'm fine with that. Then he's responsible for the information. But they, they basically created a story in a vacuum and did not place it in a context. They did not explain that the CIA has not been doing a good job for the last 10 or 15 years. They did not explain that all of Porter Goss's new ideas about how to run the agency are not preposterous. Too many reporters are happy to do a sort of grab bag of anonymous carping and call it a news story.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Jack, thanks a lot.

JACK SHAFER: Hey, thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jack Shafer writes the PressBox column for Slate.
BOB GARFIELD: America's intelligence community has indulged in much finger-pointing in the wake of 9/11 and the president's badly informed case for war. But the seeming incompetence of the CIA is not only worrying; it's also rather shocking, and that's because it contradicts everything that books, television and especially the movies have led us to believe about how spies operate and what they can really accomplish. Some experts say that's a problem for the intelligence community too. NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.

JIM ZARROLI: For most of his life, Danny Biederman has been collecting props and mementoes from TV shows and movies about spies -- things like the leather pants that Diana Rigg wore in The Avengers or a Walter PPK hand gun from You Only Live Twice. A few years ago, Biederman got a phone call from none other than the CIA, which wanted him to display his entire collection at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. At first, Biederman couldn't believe that serious, real life intelligence professionals would be interested [GET SMART THEME UP AND UNDER] in the shoe phone used on Get Smart.

DANNY BIEDER

MAN: It was fascinating to me to discover that, in fact, many of the people working for the CIA and I'm sure other intelligence organizations in the United States love spy movies. They love spy thrillers, and in fact many of the people who I met actually disclosed to me that the reason they joined the CIA was because they grew up, like I did, on James Bond and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and I Spy and The Wild, Wild West.

JIM ZARROLI: Biederman, who's written a book called The Incredible World of Spy-Fi, grew up in the 1960s, the heyday of spy stories. They had been part of popular culture for a long time before that, stretching all the way back to the days of James Fenimore Cooper. But in 1962, a new kind of spy was born -- a spy for the Cold War. [MUSIC FROM JAMES BOND MOVIE, DR. NO] Based on Ian Fleming's novel, Dr. No introduced the movie audience to James Bond, the suave government agent who lived like a playboy and had a license to kill. He took on the Communists with ingenuity, double entendres, and a seemingly inexhaustible support of high tech gadgets. [TAPE PLAYS]

DR. NO: You were admiring my aquarium.

JAMES BOND: Yes. It's quite impressive.

DR. NO: A unique feat of engineering, if I may say so. I designed it myself. The glass is convex, 10 inches thick, which accounts for the magnifying effect.

JAMES BOND: Minnows pretending they're whales, just like you on this island, Dr. No.

DR. NO: It depends, Mr. Bond, on which side the glass you are. A medium dry Martini, lemon peel, shaken, not stirred. [TAPE ENDS]

JIM ZARROLI: Gary Hoppenstand is a professor of American studies at Michigan State University.

GARY HOPPENSTAND: What it did is it sort of made use of the Cold War kind of culture and paranoia that was in place in the late '50s and early '60s in terms of basically creating a super hero, and I use that term exactly. I mean James Bond is a kind of comic book super hero, cast as a spy.

JIM ZARROLI: Hoppenstand says that, unlike previous spy characters, Bond appealed to both male and female audiences and was wildly popular with both. Over the next few years, the series inspired an endless parade of imitators in TV and the movies, shows like Mission Impossible and Secret Agent. There were even female Bonds, like Emma Peel of The Avengers and Honey West, who hid smoke grenades in her earrings. [SPY SHOW THEME MUSIC] There was often something tongue in cheek about these shows. On The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Robert Vaughn played an agent for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, doing battle against a shadowy international group called Thrush. His boss was played by Leo G. Carroll. [TAPE PLAYS]

LEO G. CARROLL: We have to find her, before Thrush stumbles on to her.

ROBERT VAUGHN: We'll find her.

LEO G. CARROLL: Yes. Please. Do that, Mr. Solo. [MUSIC] [TAPE ENDS]

JIM ZARROLI: Within a few years, the genre tipped into parody, with Get Smart and the Matt Helm movies and burned itself out. In the '70s, revelations about CIA abuses changed the image of the spy in the popular imagination, and spy stories became much different in tone. Fred Hitz is a former CIA official who recently wrote a book about spy fiction called The Great Game. He says spy novels from that era often betrayed a moral ambivalence about spying. It's exemplified, he says, by the works of John Le Carre.

FRED HITZ: By the time the Cold War comes around, Le Carre has developed the view that the bureaucracy itself, the mechanism -- Control, MI-6, Headquarters -- is just as guilty of playing dirty tricks on its own people as it is in pursuit of the holy grail of espionage information from the Soviets. And his turn of the screw was to say hey - in, in, in terms of human qualities and behavior and loyalty, there's not a dime's worth of difference between the way the Soviets go about it and the way we do it, if we adopt their tactics.

JIM ZARROLI: In John Le Carre's Smiley's People, the protagonist, George Smiley, realizes that a former Soviet informant was allowed to die by the British government. [TAPE PLAYS]

GEORGE SMILEY: Vladimir was the best source we had on Soviet capabilities and intentions. He was close to their intelligence community and reported on that, too.

MAN: Oh, damn it, George; that whole era is dead.

GEORGE SMILEY: And so is Vladimir. And I wish to God we got half his courage and one tenth of his integrity.

MAN: George, we're pragmatists. We adapt. We are not the keepers of some sacred flame. [TAPE ENDS]

JIM ZARROLI: Le Carre's ambivalence about the spy world was echoed in American spy fiction, in stories like Three Days of the Condor and the Robert Ludlum books. The real threat facing the hero is no longer the Communists but murderous forces within the CIA itself. More recently, Tom Clancy has re-invented the spy story once again. Michigan State's Gary Hoppenstand says Clancy's protagonist, Jack Ryan is a heroic figure, and though he does battle with interfering politicians, he never doubts the morality of the CIA's mission. Hoppenstand says Clancy's personality is the antithesis of James Bond's.

GARY HOPPENSTAND: That is, he's a family man, he's not this, this 007 agent with a license to kill, that he's not trying to bed every beautiful woman around. He's very serious and dedicated in terms of what he wants to do for the U.S. government. I mean the CIA loved him. The CIA now were the good guys, rather than the bad guys.

JIM ZARROLI: But Fred Hitz says for all of the changes that have taken place in the spy genre, movies and books have left many people with an unrealistic sense of how spies work and what they can accomplish.

FRED HITZ: It's the James Bond image, the Q device that people think of that permits you to pierce a wall with a sensory system or look over buildings to, to surveil a target that we assume our spies can do. We also assume that our human source collectors, our on-the-ground spies, are able to gain entry to any circle if we work hard at it, and that remains to be seen.

JIM ZARROLI: In the current war on terror, U.S. intelligence operatives have had trouble penetrating a world that is culturally and politically very different from their own. Hitz says people who've seen a lot of spy movies probably wouldn't recognize real intelligence activity.

FRED HITZ: Drudgery, painstaking detailed work, much of which is tangential to the real decisions being made but is -- has to be pursued in the hope that there's a nugget there that'll guide the policymaker.

JIM ZARROLI: And by focusing on the derring-do and glamour of espionage work, Hitz says, people may be overlooking the really interesting spy stories out there. They include the breaking of the enigma code during World War II when a large team of mathematicians and intelligence agents were gradually able to crack a Nazi code machine that was once thought to be impenetrable. And they include the Robert Hansen story. Could Hollywood ever have imagined that a mild mannered conservative CIA agent who sent his kids to Catholic schools was secretly cavorting with a stripper and spying for the Soviets? In the espionage world, Hitz says, truth is very much stranger than fiction. For On the Media, I'm Jim Zarroli. [THEME MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York, and Mike Vuolo, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director, and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Anne Kosseff and Neil Rausch. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts and MP3 downloads at onthemedia.org, and email us at onthemedia@WNYC.org. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.