The Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings ignited an outpouring of newspaper coverage concerned with both individual motives and the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. This printed coverage represents a resource that can be examined to test important questions about the relationship between newspaper coverage and the structure of communities or cities where those papers are printed.

Using a newspaper database, locally generated articles published from October 7, 1991, through December, 1992, were analyzed in twenty three major newspapers representing a geographic cross-section of cities in the United States. A content analysis technique evaluated both the "amount of attention" an article received in a paper and the "direction" of the article (favorable, unfavorable or balanced/neutral regarding Anita Hill) to yield a single score for each newspaper. Those scores were compared with a variety of city characteristics to test hypotheses associating several aspects of community structure with reporting variations.

Employing correlation and multiple regression analyses, a few key factors were found strongly associated with reporting legitimizing Anita Hill's testimony. Occupational status , along with college education, are the major aspects of community structure linked to reporting favoring Hill; in particular, the higher the percentage of professionals in a city, or the higher the percentage of college graduates, the greater the likelihood Hill will be covered favorably. Curiously, percentage females in the workforce has a more modest relation to favorable coverage of Hill. Nor does percent voting Democratic in the last presidential elections, a measure of political partisanship, have any significant relation to pro-Hill coverage. From a newspaper/community structure perspective, therefore, the Thomas-Hill hearings appear less a "gender" or "partisan" issue than a "professional" and "educational" issue, of concern to men as well as women.

Among other findings, the higher the percentage of city residents below the poverty level, or the higher the percentage of those who report frequent devotional reading, the less favorable the reporting on Hill. Both correlation and multiple regression analysis, however, clarify that negative factors account for very little proportion of the variance compared to the positive factors "buffering" population segments from economic dislocation: presence of professionals and high levels of education.

Studying the Thomas-Hill hearings confirms the importance of focusing on the community structures that surround newspapers in order to explain variations in reporting on critical events. In particular, archival data comparing newspaper databases and city characteristics are significant in exploring variations in political reporting.