I want to thank Terrence Chapman for his insightful comments. The core of our respective arguments is similar: We both find that public opinion can shape international affairs in important, and perhaps unexpected, ways. Nevertheless, he offers some constructive criticism that has prompted me to think more deeply about my work.

Chapman's main critique is that my theoretical understanding of media coverage is underdeveloped. In particular, he claims that I do not offer a compelling explanation of what drives media coverage of foreign affairs. Do presidents set the media agenda on foreign affairs? Are presidents constrained by media coverage set by other actors? Is media coverage event driven? As Chapman notes, each causal pathway is apparent in my work, which leads him to question if I have an answer to what causes the ebbs and flows of media coverage across the five stages of decision making.

I do have an answer, which, I admit, is not entirely satisfying. My answer is that it is complicated. It would be nice, for the sake of theoretical clarity, if the causal arrow always ran the same way—that is, if presidents always caused media coverage, or if presidents never caused media coverage. However, the truth is that political life is more complicated than that. As I point out in my theory chapter, media coverage is sometimes endogenous to presidential leadership and sometimes acts as an exogenous constraint upon the White House. So, is there any way to predict which way the causal arrow will point? To a certain extent, I believe there is. However, the answer may not be as neat as we would like.

Chapter 2 of my book incorporates the extant literature to posit hypotheses about media coverage/public attention at each decision stage for foreign policy crises and noncrises. It is there that I attempt to untangle whether media coverage is likely to be endogenous or exogenous to presidential leadership. At the agenda-setting stage, for example, I draw on Matthew Baum's work, which shows that presidents highlight politically popular foreign policies yet “go private” on controversial policies. Whether presidents can go private depends, in part, on whether oppositional groups can attract media coverage. And whether oppositional groups can attract media coverage hinges on a number of factors, such as finding an appropriate hook on which the media can hang a story. In short, media coverage is conditional in a way that necessitates a look at the details.

Although I do not want to minimize the importance of what causes media coverage, I do think it is more important to recognize that media coverage does vary systematically across the decision stages. The evidence shows that the American public pays more attention to some aspects of foreign policymaking than to others. For crises, this means that public attention peaks at the implementation stage; for noncrises, attention tends to focus on the decision stage. Because my research is ultimately concerned with whether presidents listen to the American public, and because high issue salience tends to motivate presidents to listen to the public, we should expect to find the imprint of the public on foreign policy most clearly at the implementation stage of crises and the decision stage of noncrises.