Pippa Norris challenges the increasingly popular idea that cynical news and passivity of television viewing create a disengaged public. Instead, she characterizes the relationship between news media and political attitudes and actions as a healthy and reciprocal one. This relationship is called a virtuous circle in which “watching the news activates existing predispositions to vote and, simultaneously, the predisposition to vote prompts people to seek out more news” (p. 264). Political interest and knowledge also stimulate attention to news, which results in more interest and knowledge. In addition, people who lack interest give news too little attention or trust to be adversely effected by it. Therefore, the news media is judged to have a positive to benign influence on civic life.

The evidence in support of these claims is cross-national and ample but, as the author admits, falls short of proving causation. Nevertheless, the conclusions resonate with long-standing minimal and conditional consequences theories of media effects and resurrect voting behavior studies that came before The American Voter (1960). The book reminds us that any rush to scapegoat the media not only overlooks other culprits but also ignores much of what we know about attitude change and information processing (e.g., selective perception, reinforcement, and the knowledge gap). Even those who find videomalaise (Michael Robinson, “Public Affairs Television and the Growth of Political Malaise,” American Political Science Review 70 [June 1976]: 409–32), The Spiral of Cynicism (Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, 1997), and the notion that television culture has left Americans bowling alone (Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, 2000) more compelling than the “virtuous circle” (either rhetorically or substantively) will still need to consider this book's critiques. The comparisons of media systems and public opinion in numerous democratic nations and the close look at the timing of trends in media use and political behavior raise serious concerns about the media malaise thesis.

Another contribution of this book is its careful and comprehensive discussion of how media have changed over time. The five chapters in Part 2 describe trends in political communication and the structural differences in news environments of 29 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations. The complexity of the current communication systems is evidenced by an expansion of news from diverse sources and formats, which makes a broad range of news available to growing audiences. New media supplement old media, rather than replace them. For example, Internet users still read newspapers and watch television. The special attention to the Internet audience (in chap. 2 and 12) raises concerns about how many people are fully engaged in the virtuous circle, since only 4% of Internet users contact groups and officials about politics or have political discussions online (p. 270).

Chapters 7 and 8 will be of particular interest to those who study the media and elections. Norris describes an “evolutionary processes of modernization” (p. 137) in campaign communication that entails three major stages: premodern, modern, and postmodern. This discussion judges the role of the media in contemporary campaigns less harshly than do most critics. “The postmodern campaign can be seen to represent a new openness and tolerance for alternative views and multiple forms of understanding, as well as a source of anxiety and disorientation as the familiar standards are swept away” (p. 178).

In addition to building the virtuous circle argument, chapters 9 and 10 stand alone as a comprehensive study of news coverage and public attitudes about the European Union. The extensive content analyses of 189 newspapers in 15 member states from January 1995 to autumn 1997 and 10,000 hours of television coverage from six countries is impressive and illuminating. It reveals that coverage of the European Union was minimal and focused primarily on monetary policy and development. Overall, the direction of this coverage was moderately anti-Union (especially on television). This tone coincided with a low level of public support for Union membership and the euro.

A Virtuous Circle is likely to stimulate research that supports, expands, and challenges it. More attention needs to be paid to the content and consequences of entertainment media, since this book points out that heightened political participation of television news viewers coincides with lower participation rates among heavy entertainment television viewers. In addition, the one panel survey used in this book suggests more questions than it answers. Therefore, laboratory and social experiments should be conducted to get a better sense of the causal mechanisms at work. Conclusions about how media environments, political institutions, and public opinion interact could also be enriched by studying non-Western nations. The effect of news on civic life in Latin America would be an interesting contrast to Europe, given the author's brief discussion of their media and campaign systems. Finally, some scholars will likely follow the author's advice to look to systemic problems to understand political disengagement. “Blaming the news media is easy, but ultimately that is a deeply conservative strategy, especially in a culture skeptical of regulation of the free press, and it diverts attention from the urgent need for real reforms to democratic institutions, which should have our undivided attention” (p. 319).