American politics—always factious—is currently as dysfunctional as it has been in several decades. Is it possible to create and pass bills that seem to have strong public support? Is there some institution in American life with the political capital to forge consensus for contested policy initiatives? Sadly, the answer, in both The Limits of Legitimacy and Combative Politics, is no. Both Michael Zilis and Mary Atkinson, respectively, examine instances in American politics where one could rightly expect to see broad agreement, and yet we do not. Why? The short answer, in both cases, is the news media, and specifically the frames used in covering the Supreme Court and public policy.

I turn first to Zilis’s examination of the capacity of the Supreme Court to influence public opinion via its major rulings. At first blush, the Supreme Court seems a natural candidate to build public consensus on contested legal or constitutional issues. The Court enjoys broad public support and trust, is officially nonpartisan, possesses a unique legal expertise, and reaches decisions in a fashion seen as principled and fair. So why do its rulings not move the public toward consensus? The answer is deceptively simple: because of how the news media cover the Court.

Good reporting requires accuracy, simplicity, timeliness, and drama (via conflict). Producing such coverage is uniquely difficult when covering the Court: The subject matter is difficult, the language esoteric, and the institution unhelpful—the justices do not use talking points or distribute fact sheets. Hence, reporters are dependent upon the few accessible pieces of information offered, namely, the voting outcome, which indicates the amount of discord on the Court, and arguments in the majority opinion and dissents, which serve as frames explaining the arguments of each side. The size of the voting blocks is crucial; a closer split indicates a more contentious outcome and supplies more frames critical of the majority ruling. The closer the vote is, the more negative the coverage is and, thus, the less persuasive to the public the ruling is.

Perhaps the Supreme Court’s institutional credibility overrides negative coverage? Zilis uses a survey experiment to test the “cue” of a Supreme Court endorsement against a negative frame from a dissenting opinion. These two signals are of roughly equal strength, with Zilis finding only “minimal” opinion change (p. 139). However, lopsided or unanimous rulings produce favorable coverage, which does have the ability to “powerfully affect opinion” (p. 142). Thus, the Court’s ability to persuade is largely a function of the news coverage that it receives, which is, in turn, based on the voting split.

One might be tempted to call this explanation obvious but for the fact that no one else had offered it. This is often how persuasive works of scholarship function; the theory is so lucid and logical that it is difficult to imagine how we ever thought otherwise.

Another important contribution of this work is to help resolve a dispute in the literature as to whether the Court can persuade the public to accept or support a policy. Experiments tend to produce evidence of persuasion, while surveys do not, which is not surprising given the respective strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches. Zilis can account for both strong and weak persuasion, helping to explain the divergence in the literature.

A final point of note on The Limits of Legitimacy is Zilis’s treatment of diffuse support (stable, long-term loyalty to the institution) for the Supreme Court. According to positivity theory, the reason why the Court enjoys such strong institutional support is that exposure to the Court means exposure to legitimizing symbols and myths; thus, all press is good press, regardless of a ruling’s popularity. Studies generally take for granted that diffuse support influences policy agreement, yet a review of the literature ought to call that assumption into question. Here, it is interesting that Zilis asks us to consider whether institutional support is actually just a relatively strong attitude. “Strong” attitudes are durable, persistent, and impactful (they shape other attitudes and judgments). This is a plausible alternative conception that offers a neat explanation of when and why the Court can persuade people and also when we can expect the Court’s diffuse support to sustain damage. In the instance of the Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the author finds that attitudes toward ACA were stronger than support for the Court, meaning that it was attitudes toward ACA that affected support for the Court, which is the opposite of what positivity theory predicts.

This is a major finding, but we should accept it with the proverbial grain of salt. What Zilis calls institutional support is not the scale that has become the standard in the literature. Worried that his subjects would guess the nature of his survey experiment, he instead used a feeling thermometer measuring “highly general” attitudes about the Court, as well as a single question from the six-item scale. This leaves it very much open to question whether he can actually say that attitudes about ACA have indeed influenced levels of institutional support.

In Combative Politics, Atkinson focuses on a different puzzle: Why does the public express strong support for the components of a policy but overall disapproval of the legislation (e.g., ACA)? The answer, again, is found in the news media’s bias, framing coverage in terms of conflict at the expense of substance. Framing the policy process thusly, the public is turned off; they associate negativity with the policy, and support drops. Here, again, we have an argument that is logical and seems, in retrospect, an obvious explanation for an otherwise puzzling phenomenon.

What is more, there is some nuance and sophistication to Atkinson’s argument: The public does not react monolithically to media coverage. Low-information policy “novices” generally have weak opinions on policy and tend to believe that a clear solution exists for any given problem; thus, any congressional bickering is the product of self-serving politicians and the process turns them off. On the other hand, sophisticates understand that Democrats and Republicans differ but (apparently) are not sophisticated enough to assess how liberal or conservative a policy is. To make this judgment, they infer from the amount of partisan fighting—the fiercer the fighting, the more extreme a proposed policy must be. Since even few sophisticates are politically extreme, to the extent they believe that a policy is extreme, support will decline.

Public opinion is often difficult to make sense of, and Atkinson’s work provides a logical, empirically supported explanation of a seemingly irrational coincidence of support for a bill’s components with opposition to the bill in its entirety. This is an achievement.

While the argument is fine as far as it goes, it may not be the whole story. In particular, the account does not deal persuasively with the possibility that support for a bill may drop due to the public learning more about its drawbacks and trade-offs over the course of the debate. There is no shortage of studies documenting political learning in a variety of contexts: campaigns, campaign ads, presidential debates, as well as routine media coverage. Atkinson does not engage this scholarship. She does address the idea of public learning, but dismisses this possibility with polling data indicating the public’s dissatisfaction with media coverage (when is this not the case?) of the bill and felt they did not know enough about the plan. As further evidence, she cites purportedly low levels of awareness about key terms and provisions of the Clinton plan; for example, only 31% of Americans had heard and understood the term “managed care” (p. 104). However, placed in the context of the generally dismal state of public knowledge of political facts, this figure does not stand out as especially low, given a recent Annenberg Poll finding that 35% of Americans could not name a single branch of government. Moreover, 31% is almost certainly a much higher figure than was the case before coverage of the Clinton plan; before the plan was unveiled, it is likely that public knowledge of a semitechnical health policy term was near zero.

Furthermore, it is not surprising that in the abstract, large majorities favor provisions placing a limit on how much they must pay for insurance or requirements that employers provide insurance. In fact, absent a discussion about the policy trade-offs and potential drawbacks, it would be surprising if large majorities did not favor such provisions.

Finally, it is assumed in Combative Politics that the whole of a policy is simply the sum of its parts, but the public may not see it that way. Unimpressive on an individual level, aggregate public opinion can be surprisingly rational and nuanced. One may like strawberry ice cream, milk, and pickles, but pass on the chance to try a strawberry pickle smoothie. This critique does not derail Atkinson’s argument; it simply adds another layer that the book does not fully consider.

So, are the news media all that stands between the American people and a harmonious, smoothly functioning political culture? Of course not, but these two engaging and enlightening studies do reemphasize the power of the news media in political life.