Researchers generally agree that media frames are an outcome of what Tim Cook (in Making Laws and Making News, 1989, 169) calls a “negotiation of newsworthiness” between elites and reporters. The idea is that each side to this exchange brings a set of resources to bear on the framing of issues and events: Elites control access to information; reporters control access to the news. Since neither can exercise complete control over the process, the participants seem destined to engage in a never-ending struggle. These two recent books buttress and refine this proposition, and also challenge it in some important respects.

In their analysis of presidential news coverage, Stephen Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter analyze an extensive database of news stories. Spanning the presidencies of Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, and including coverage from the network evening newscasts, the Washington Post and New York Times, and four regional newspapers, their corpus represents more than 100,000 news articles about the federal government. The authors devote special attention to coverage of economics, foreign policy, scandal, and terrorism.

Much of what Farnsworth and Lichter find in these data supports the “negotiation of newsworthiness” concept. For instance, they observe that when reporting on the federal government, reporters pay very close attention to policy elites. There is some variance across medium and over time—television news appears to use ordinary people as sources slightly more than print news—but the numbers are still highly exaggerated in favor of officials and experts: Roughly 80% of sources on network television news are public officials and experts, and the numbers for both national and regional print news are about the same (pp. 39–40, 157–159).

Most of the essays collected by Karen Callaghan and Frank Schnell also examine politicians and other policy elites in a framing battle with one another. For example, their analysis of gun control frames in the aftermath of 9/11 shows that political entrepreneurs used the disaster to engage in an effort to reframe the issue. This activity led to changes in media frames because reporters pay close attention to such political entrepreneurs. Drawing on a content analysis of the ABC and CBS evening news, Callaghan and Schnell show that shifts in media frames of gun control closely track with the activities of policy entrepreneurs.

Farnsworth and Lichter's study also buttresses a long-standing finding that of all policy elites, the president has an extraordinary advantage in shaping media frames of issues and events. Nearly 80% of network nightly news coverage in their corpus, and 70% of national and regional print news, concentrate on the executive branch. In the aftermath of 9/11, these numbers were, if anything, slightly more exaggerated. If public officials dominate news about the federal government, then the presidency takes the lead in this exercise.

Two contributions to Callaghan and Schnell's volume take the next step to connect media frames to public opinion. Paul Kallstedt correlates American public opinion on racial policy preferences with a content analysis of Newsweek. Over a 40-year period, he finds that many factors have influenced public opinion on this issue, but “over-time drifts back and forth in public opinion on race are, to some extent, a function of the way that the national press has framed its coverage of racial issues” (p. 177). In an experimental study of public opinion regarding juvenile crime, Frank Gilliam and Shanto Iyengar demonstrate the same point. By varying news accounts, the authors succeed in stimulating different opinions about the issue.

Donald Kinder and Thomas Nelson's essay in Callaghan and Schnell turn the conventional worry about the power of media frames over public opinion on its head. They argue that strong media frames are not a problem at all; in fact, such frames are essential if ordinary people are to form opinions about most issues. Drawing on question-wording experiments inserted into the 1989 National Election Study (NES), Kinder and Nelson show that respondents were more likely to offer stable opinions when confronted with strong issue frames. Their explanation is that, on most issues, people struggle to form coherent judgments, not because they have no opinions but because they have too many. “The American political mind,” they write, “is not so much empty as it is teeming with potentially relevant considerations” (p. 105). In such situations, strong issue frames help people organize and articulate their views.

Of course, as the negotiation-of-worthiness concept implies, the media place limits on the ability of elites to define issues and events. In their contribution to the Callaghan and Schnell volume, for instance, Kim Fridkin and Patrick Kenney argue that challengers in Senate election campaigns have almost no hope of shaping media coverage of their campaign messages. Reporters either ignore challengers entirely or frame their campaigns according to criteria that lie outside their control. Perhaps more surprising, incumbents fare little better. Unless incumbents broadcast extremely negative portrayals of their opponents, Fridkin and Kenney conclude, news frames generally respond to the closeness of the election and the presence of competing campaigns (pp. 74–75). Once in office, elected officials also face a seemingly intractable hostility from the press. Farnsworth and Lichter find that, over time, roughly two-thirds of the coverage in their sample contained a negative tone. This negativity was present over time and across presidencies. As the authors point out, the majority of these evaluations were based on job performance criteria rather than personalities, but still, when reporters express hostility toward policymakers two-thirds of the time, issue framing becomes difficult, to say the least.

In another contribution to the Callaghan and Schnell collection, Teena Gabrielson demonstrates that the ability of policymakers to frame issues and events can be narrowed by still other factors. These include the public mood, partisan composition in Congress, and the organization of interests around issues. These variables contribute to what she refers to as the institutionalization of frames around particular issues. “Once a frame is institutionalized,” Gabrielson argues, “it becomes more difficult [for elites] to dislodge or replace it” (p. 87).

Taken together, these data support, and perhaps refine, the idea that elites may set the public agenda, but they do not control precisely how that agenda will be framed. Contextual variables, such as the public mood and other political actors—including the news media—have a role to play in issue framing.

Perhaps the most startling finding in these two books, however, belongs to Farnsworth and Lichter: From 1981 to 1993, news coverage of government dropped by half on network news. It recovered slightly after the events of 9/11, but even then, total coverage was 30% less than in 1981 (p. 32). These numbers are roughly the same in the Washington Post and New York Times, and even lower in regional newspapers (pp. 148–49).

The finding raises the question of why news media are paying less attention to government. Farnsworth and Lichter argue that a shrinking news hole on the nightly news is surely one cause. From 1981 to 2001, the television news hole shrank from just over 22 minutes to 18 minutes 30 seconds (p. 33). Presumably, the extra four minutes have been given to advertising, suggesting that economic forces are one explanation for the decline in coverage. There may be other factors at work as well, but the simple fact is that we do not know. Research on news production lags behind work in other areas of media analysis. It is telling, for instance, that only one of the essays in Callaghan and Schnell's collection—Michael Delli Carpini's comparison of mainstream journalists' conception of news to that of public journalism—focuses on dynamics within the news media. Even here, Delli Carpini relies on a reading of secondary sources.

The finding also implies that the negotiation-of-newsworthiness concept may be in need of some revision. At some point, the term “negotiation” loses meaning when one participant in an interaction begins to systematically ignore the other. Whether the interaction between elites and reporters has reached that point is an empirical question.

Overall, these books are excellent additions to the literature on media politics. Neither tackles perhaps the most important pattern of national political news coverage—the disengagement of reporters from officials. Indeed, in their discussion of the future of media framing research, Callaghan and Schnell do not even address the issue. Having said that, Farnsworth and Lichter's study presents one of the most systematic content analyses of national political news to be published in recent years. Moreover, Callaghan and Schnell's collection ably probes the notion of media frames—a concept that, given present trends in national news coverage, will likely remain vital to the study of news media for the foreseeable future.