Most research aimed at understanding television's influence on citizens' knowledge and attention to current events has focused on network news. Yet hard news constitutes only a small fraction of TV programming. The television day is filled with shows that come under the rubric of “soft news”—running the gamut from celebrity gossip to late-night comedy, afternoon talk shows, and prime-time magazines. Matthew Baum's book fills an important gap in political communication research. Baum asks what people learn about hard news from soft news programs. He argues that watching soft news programs gets people who would otherwise have little interest in foreign affairs to pay attention to international crises.

Soft News Goes to War utilizes a variety of research methods to reach its conclusions. It begins with a content analysis to show that foreign policy crises are indeed covered on soft news programs. Like television news in general, however, the coverage is episodic, concentrating on the most dramatic events and giving short shrift to context or development. Not surprisingly, soft news programs generally frame international coverage in terms of human interest. Because some kind of soft news is available throughout the day and night, however, people who turn on their TVs just to be entertained are bound to obtain a regular dose of foreign news throughout the week.

Baum takes a generally sunny view of the audience, a perspective that is still a minority in the field of communications. His public opinion data show that people who watch soft news pay some attention to stories about war and other foreign crises. The book shows that consumers of soft news programming, ranging from Letterman to Hard Copy, are even more aware of foreign policy crises than they are of high-profile domestic political events. Historically, the rise of soft news correlates with increasing levels of conflict awareness. Attentiveness to the Persian Gulf War was greater than it was to the more costly and drawn-out conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Furthermore, the net gain in awareness of the Gulf War was among the least politically involved members of the public. This is, as Baum himself puts it, “the good news about soft news.”

Finding this increased awareness among soft news consumers begs the question: Does “accidental attention” to news make citizens different kinds of actors in politics? The book presents support for the hypotheses that soft news provides viewers with an entrée into hard news. This finding is in line with previous research, which shows that TV's dramatic story lines encourage learning about difficult topics (W. Russell Neuman et al., Common Knowledge, 1992). In other words, the soft news “gateway” holds promise for a more informed electorate.

Baum further asks about the positions that relatively uninvolved, somewhat attentive citizens take in foreign policy crises. His content analysis shows that to make the cut as entertainment in the soft news format, foreign crises must have dramatic and compelling story lines, in which violence and death figure prominently. Small wonder, then, that his survey analysis shows that the consumers of soft news tend to shun foreign entanglement—it is a scary world out there!

The book claims moreover that soft news consumers are more likely than others to “rally round the flag” and support a president who takes them into war—a timely, if disturbing, finding. Baum argues that because Democrats already can count on support from the relatively uneducated soft news audience, Republican presidents are more likely to benefit from a soft news rally. It is fair to note, however, that the rally advantage of Republican versus Democratic presidents could have alternative explanations, such as the Republican's “issue ownership” of military and defense policy.

A number of Baum's conclusions are tentative. He lays out a series of hypotheses in the beginning of the book and puts together different kinds of survey evidence to support these hypotheses. Each analysis raises methodological questions, especially those involving historical comparisons. For example, can we compare the number of “Don't Know” respondents from face-to-face interview surveys to telephone surveys? In addition, when reaching back in history for parallel examples, the book fails to emphasize the vastly different public and media environments of, say, the Korean War and the Persian Gulf War.

In the contemporary media environment, only a few wars involving the United States can be compared to the Gulf War. Baum's examples include Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The author demonstrates a progressive attention to foreign crises in soft news based on the greater coverage of Bosnia and Kosovo, compared to the earlier actions in Haiti and Somalia. This difference may represent a progressive impact of soft news, as he argues, but it may also reflect journalists' lack of access to Haiti and Somalia. The Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts took place in Europe where plenty of freelancers provided stories to a wide variety of news outlets, including 24/7 cable news. The cable audience, which is generally small for any given timeslot, attracts large daily audiences during crises. The initial attack on Baghdad, for example, was covered live on CNN. Is it possible that the “not so interested” soft news consumers checked in with CNN as well as Oprah?

Baum's research was based primarily on 1990s data, and the television world has continued to change. The newsmagazine fad has receded (replaced by even less substantive “reality” programs), while Comedy Central's The Daily Show has become appointment television for younger viewers and has even generated a media satire spin-off, The Colbert Report. The Daily Show's popularity suggests that comedy is a powerful way to reach news avoiders. Still, surveys by the Pew Research Center do not show increased knowledge among these audiences.

Soft News Goes to War may not go far enough for researchers who would like to know about the impact of soft news on actual learning. A useful extension of this work would include experiments on the amount of learning from soft news shows that Baum only gets at indirectly with survey data. The research could also be extended to local news (often soft) and cable news.

The idea that generally inattentive members of the public can use small bits of low-cost information in making political decisions situates this book in the optimistic camp of public opinion research (e.g., Samuel Popkin, The Reasoning Voter, 1991; Neuman et al. 1992; Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public, 1992; Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. McCubbins, The Democratic Dilemma, 1998). But the findings about what people do with their soft news info-bits—rally round a war president—concludes the book on a pessimistic note. It is not clear whether we should rejoice that politically unsophisticated people have “low information rationality” (Popkin) or whether in wartime, they are as easily manipulated as what Hitler once called a “herd of sheep.” Baum's data provide comfort to both camps.