Chicken or egg?

The Press Effect Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories that Shape the Political World Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman Oxford University Press, $26, 240 pp.

As news outlets multiply and scatter public attention in more individualistic directions, to make generalizations about journalism becomes chancy, if not foolhardy. This new media environment demands sustained, critical scrutiny, as well as open minds.

These characteristics help make The Press Effect by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman a valuable guide for understanding the political dimensions of contemporary communications. Their close analysis of specific cases and stories leads to a comprehensive argument about modern media in public life.

Jamieson and Waldman identify six distinct roles the press plays in American politics: storyteller, amateur psychologist, soothsayer, shaper of events, patriot, and custodian of fact. Each role receives detailed analysis.

Throughout, the authors focus on two metaphors: the "lenses" reporters use in covering stories, and, more important, the "frames" that result from journalistic narratives, what the authors call "the structures underlying the depictions that the public reads, hears, and watches." According to Jamieson and Waldman, these lenses and frames are critical to the citizenry's knowledge and opinion of political affairs and those who participate in them.

The Press Effect concentrates by and large on stories from the summer of 2000 through the beginning of 2002. The majority of its research deals with the 2000 presidential election, the Florida voting imbroglio, and George W. Bush's presidency before and after September 11, 2001.

According to the authors, since gaining the Republican nomination in 2000, Bush has been a serial beneficiary of press frames. The story line that journalists established two years ago for the White House race paired an inexperienced and not terribly informed Bush with an exaggeration-prone know-it-all, Al Gore.

As Jamieson and Waldman evaluate coverage of the 2000 campaign, they note that Bush's lack of preparation came to be perceived by the public as less troubling than Gore's press-propelled reputation for strategic dishonesty. A president can always recruit experienced advisors and a brain trust, but it is much more difficult to think that someone who is regarded as untrustworthy will reform after election day.

The authors write that once reporters lock in a conclusion about a politician's fatal flaw and "construct a coherent story about the candidate's identity with it as part of the plot," the facts themselves are more likely to fade while their psychological meaning comes to the fore. Multimedia repetition only makes matters worse. In the case of Bush and Gore, it resulted in "different standards when it came to truth-telling." One candidate's slips of the tongue proved less consequential than the other's alleged "deliberate fabrications."

In dealing with the postelection turmoil in Florida, Jamieson and Waldman study Sunday-morning network television's public-affairs programs during the five weeks following the election. Seeing the press as a "shaper of events," the authors again demonstrate how Bush gained an advantage from the frame journalists created in their reporting.

While the Gore campaign cast what was happening as the official "count" of all the wayward ballots, the Bush organization stressed the word "recount," a strategy that suggested that the albeit slim lead reported on election night would prevail. Republicans also emphasized that the absentee ballots from abroad were "military ballots," a tactic aimed at gaining sympathy should challenges arise. "The Bush frame captured elite opinion," The Press Effect argues, and the news media, by and large, became messengers of a consistent viewpoint.

Meticulous attention paid to the transcripts indicates that, after the second week, the rhetoric of the Sunday programs began to accept a Bush presidency as inevitable. Subsequent broadcasts reinforced this take, helping to shape public thinking: "With the media elite of the Sunday shows presuming that Bush was all but president-elect, the five decisive [Supreme Court] justices in the Bush v. Gore decision were in respectable company when they stopped the count and took the case on the assumption that Bush would be disadvantaged if the count were to proceed."

Jamieson and Waldman make much of "the patriotic lens created by September 11" and how that affected press performance, especially in relation to Bush and the depiction of his presidency. Bewildering and legitimate ambiguity over the subsequent media-sponsored studies of the contested Florida vote received passing attention at best in this new political climate, and the president himself was now seen in a more favorable light. Garbled syntax no longer seemed worth much (if any) attention, and questions about inexperience went unasked, given the circumstances and the newly adopted "patriotic frame."

Among its many virtues, The Press Effect resoundingly puts to rest the mindless cliches of partisan media bias favoring one side--the left-liberal perspective. Serious research shows many other factors shape what reporters do and what the public knows. This scholarly yet accessible critique argues that "the most critical obligation of journalists is to act as the custodians of fact." Those facts, slippery and murky though they may be, shouldn't be forced into closed, unbreakable "frames" that prevent people from seeing the complicated reality of this nation's political life.

Robert Schmuhl is professor of American Studies and director of the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author, most recently, of Indecent Liberties (University of Notre Dame Press).