Kathleen Hall Jamieson has been analyzing the media and political rhetoric for more than two decades. It does not go too far to say that her critical observations about political advertising and campaign coverage have influenced both the research agenda in political communication and the behavior of the press itself. One of the central elements in her analysis is media “framing” of political coverage. The Press Effect (coauthored with Paul Waldman) is the best work yet on this topic. This is because Jamieson has been able to refine her argument about why reporters adopt frames and the consequence of those frames.

Jamieson and Waldman argue that reporters view the world through lenses, “the shifting perspectives that color what reporters see of the world at a given moment” (p. xii) and use the metaphor of frames to describe “the news coverage that results from those views” (p. xiii). They assert, “By choosing a common frame to describe an event, condition or political personage, journalists shape public opinion” (p. xiii). The actual mechanism of choice is still a bit fuzzy, but reasons for using frames and the consequences to political discourse of adopting them are illustrated in a lively fashion.

For the authors, frames come about because of the natural need to provide coherence to a story. The choice of the frame will determine what kinds of questions the reporter needs to answer to complete the narrative, and what things need not be bothered about. This can occur simply because the main story is so important, an incidental falsehood is not worth attention—as in their example of the unidentified young woman who “testified” that she had seen Kuwaiti babies tossed from incubators by Iraqi soldiers at the outset of Gulf War I. Knowledge that it was the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter (a member of the royal al-Sabah family disposessed by the Iraqi invasion) who made the claim might have under-mined its credibility. Instead, the story was successfully shopped to Amnesty International, who retracted it soon after the war. It was also adopted and embellished upon repeatedly by President George H. W. Bush to reframe the issue as a moral one and defuse opposition coalescing around the “no war for oil” position. The adoption of human rights as the operative frame solidified support for the war in Congress and further diminished the need for reporters to exercise their primary function as custodian of the facts. Other atrocities occurred in Kuwait, but this central metaphor was a lie that could have been easily discovered at the time.

The idea that a consensus frame emerges as parts of the story are selected and repeated in the media is central to Jamieson's theory of the dynamics of media influence. Factual inaccuracies that remain uncorrected become part of the historical memory of reporters and stand some chance of further repetition when news stories are researched at a later date, particularly when they have been distilled as metaphors that can be communicated in sound bites. Consensus frames emerge because old information must be capsulized as “the news” rolls on. The fact that the consensus frame is a product of give-and-take between political actors and reporters provides the space for rhetorical competition. Jamieson's previous works, notably Dirty Politics (1992) and numerous books and articles coauthored with colleagues, have illustrated this process vividly.

The central story of The Press Effect is how Republicans won the rhetorical wars during the 2000 general election and its aftermath. For example, in the 2000 general election, the frame that developed was, in the shorthand of late-night comedy, Dumbo versus Pinocchio. The central question in the evaluation of George W. Bush was whether he was smart enough to be president. This meant that Bush's misstatements of the truth were ignored, but that his lack of knowledge and malapropisms were highlighted. Al Gore was expected to be knowledgeable. The media's long-standing description of him as “wooden” fused with accusations that he embellished the truth to produce the Pinocchio analogy. Jamieson and Waldman suggest that the stereotypes appealed to the amateur psychologist in reporters by promising to reveal something of value in understanding the candidates' characters. They find that both characterizations “stuck.” Across time, survey respondents were more likely to say that the term “honest” fit Bush, but not Gore, and “knowledgeable” fit Gore, but not Bush. They argue that in this case, however, the implication that Bush was “dumb” was perceived as one that could be remedied by a good staff, while the implication that Gore was a chronic liar was perceived as irremediable: “Once the untrustworthy lens was locked in, any move on Gore's part could be interpreted as a cynical attempt to hide his true self” (p. 42).

It is not possible to do justice to Jamieson and Waldman's meticulous account of the meltdown of the media “soothsayers” on election night, or to their detailed coverage of the 36 days afterward. Bolstered by a rich collection of empirical data on media coverage and the public response, they argue that the “rhetorical dexterity” of the Bush campaign “created a climate on the Sunday morning talk shows more hospitable to the Republican case …, elicited polling questions biased to the assumption of a Bush win, and may have helped overcome the ideological reservations of the five conservatives on the Supreme Court who ended the count” (p. 129). In subsequent chapters, they show how consensus media frames switched dramatically in the aftermath of 9/11. George W. Bush developed gravitas; throwing out the first ball in the third game of the World Series demonstrated courage (in the face of strategic leaks concerning terror threats), rather than frivolity. The operant frame of the media's reanalysis of the Florida vote changed from “who really won” to “the system worked.”

Jamieson and Waldman conclude by listing a series of principles that will help redirect journalism toward what they view as its central task—custodian of the facts. Media coverage of events since the book was completed, such as the “D. C. Sniper” episode and “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” serve to underscore the importance of a return to these principles. A principled press will help public discourse, but it will not end the war of words, because as E. E. Shattschneider pro-posed in Semi-Sovereign People, “the definition of alternatives is the supreme instrument of power; the antagonists can rarely agree on what the issues are because power is involved in the definition. He who determines what politics is about runs the country” (1960, p. 68).