Politicians and the Press: Who Leads, Who Follows?

Transcription

1 Politicians and the Press: Who Leads, Who Follows? Larry M. Bartels Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University Abstract This paper examines the interplay between politicians and the press in setting the national policy agenda. The data for the analysis consist of daily counts of executive branch activities, congressional activities, New York Times stories, local newspaper stories, and ABC News coverage of Bosnia, Medicare, NAFTA, and Whitewater during the first three years of the first Clinton administration. Vector autoregressions suggest that all three media outlets (and the politicians themselves) followed the lead of the executive branch on Bosnia and NAFTA and of Congress on Medicare and Whitewater. However, New York Times coverage led political activities even more than it followed them, with especially strong agenda-setting effects for NAFTA and Whitewater. The independent agenda-setting power of ABC News was substantially less than that of the Times, but still considerable, while local newspapers tended, by and large, to follow the lead of politicians and the national news media. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, September 1996.

2 Politicians and the Press: Who Leads, Who Follows? 1 In Gans s (1979, 116) apt and often-quoted metaphor, [t]he relationship between sources and journalists resembles a dance, for sources seek access to journalists, and journalists seek access to sources. Although it takes two to tango, either sources or journalists can lead.... In Ansolabehere, Behr, and Iyengar s (1993, 234) functionally equivalent metaphor, the relationship between reporters and government officials or candidates is akin to a chess game in which each side vies for control. Kernell's historical perspective (1993, 80-81) suggests that, at least in Washington, the conflictual aspect of this relationship has increasingly supplanted the collaborative aspect: Presidents and reporters still jointly produce news, but it is no longer a collaborative undertaking.... [T]he modern relationship is one in which each side anticipates and responds to distant actions of the other.... With presidents increasingly going public and with a more assertive press, contention over control will remain a fixture of the modern system. These and other descriptions of the relationship between politicians and the press emphasize the reciprocal impact of each side s activities on the activities of the other side. However, they do relatively little to answer the question implied by Gans s formulation: who leads and who follows? Does one side in this reciprocal interaction dominate the other, or are the two relatively evenly matched? How does the nature of the relationship vary with the political context, issue area, or institutional features of the government or the press? Media scholars who quote Gans s metaphor often do not quote his own conclusion regarding the relative power of reporters and their sources (1979, 116): either sources or journalists can lead, but more often than not, sources do the leading. It is hard to see exactly on 1

3 what evidence Gans based this conclusion, or how broadly he meant it to apply. In any event, most scholars of the media and political communication have shown less interest in weighing the relative power of reporters and their sources than in establishing the reality of media impact on the output of government. According to one early observer and member of the modern Washington press corps (Cater 1959, 7, quoted by Cook 1998, 1), The reporter is the recorder of government but he is also a participant. He operates in a system in which power is divided. He as much as anyone... helps to shape the course of government. He is the indispensable broker and middleman among the subgovernments of Washington. He can choose from among the myriad events that seethe beneath the surface of government which to describe, which to ignore. In the decades since Cater dubbed the press the fourth branch of government, scholars of the media and political communication have sought, in a variety of ways, to confirm and elaborate upon his claim that the reporter as much as anyone... helps to shape the course of government. By doing so, they have begun to address the complaint of Cohen (1963, 3-4) that the impact of newspapers on the political system is more often assumed than investigated. For example, Linsky (1986) conducted a mail survey of Washington officials, interviewed three dozen senior officials and journalists in depth, and studied the role of the press in six significant federal policy decisions; he concluded (Linksy 1986, 87) that the press has a huge and identifiable impact.... Officials believe that the media do a lot to set the policy agenda and to influence how an issue is understood by policymakers, interest groups, and the public. After analyzing sixteen years' worth of presidential coverage by CBS Evening News and interviewing White House correspondents, Smoller (1990, 1, 6) concluded that Today, the big three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) are major actors in U.S. politics.... The organizational 2

4 routines of network news influence U.S. politics in a manner comparable with the influence exerted by the Constitution or the laws that govern the electoral process. Rogers and Dearing concluded from a broad review of scholarly literature on agenda-setting that [t]he media agenda seems to have direct, sometimes strong, influence upon the policy agenda of elite decision makers, and, in some cases, policy implementation (Graber 1994, 91-92). If media scholars are, by and large, much taken with the agenda-setting power of the press, many scholars of traditional political institutions seem less impressed. Indeed, one of the most careful scholarly observers of those institutions came to a markedly different conclusion about the impact of the media on the Washington policy agenda. His discussion (Kingdon 1984, 61-62) seems worth quoting at length: Despite good reasons for believing that media should have a substantial impact on the governmental agenda, our standard indicators turn out to be disappointing. Mass media were discussed as being important in only 26 percent of the interviews, far fewer than interest groups (84 percent) or researchers (66 percent). It was quite common for me to ask my standard question about what problems my respondent and others were occupied with, and to engage in a half hour of conversation before the media would be introduced, even obliquely. Media were very important in only 4 percent of the interviews. The picture with the case studies is no better. Media are somewhat important in 4 of the 23 cases, and never very important. There are no differences between health and transportation in either interviews or cases. One can find examples of media importance the Washington Post ran a continuing series on the battle over waterway user charges that probably added some significant impetus to the movement to impose a charge but such examples are fairly rare. Much more common is the instance of quite an intensive period of sensational coverage, with the policy community riding serenely above the media storm.... The media report what is going on in government, by and large, rather than having an independent effect on government agendas. Kingdon s conclusion is no isolated dissent from the consensus among scholars of American governmental institutions. Indeed, his basic finding is strikingly supported by Light s 3

5 (1982) study of The President's Agenda. Light asked 118 White House staffers from the Kennedy through Reagan administrations what were the most important sources of ideas for the domestic agenda. The media were mentioned by only 5 percent of his respondents, less than Congress (52 percent), task forces (6 percent), public opinion (27 percent), or any of the seven other sources on his list (Light 1982, 86). Light concluded (1982, 95) that, for the White House staffs, the media is not a source of new ideas; it is at best a bridge to the political environment. If Kingdon and Light are right, then the fourth branch does a good deal less than most media scholars seem to believe to shape the course of government, and probably a good deal less than the government does to shape the flow of national political news. Of course, there are a variety of plausible explanations for the divergence between their conclusions and those cited above regarding the impact of the press on the national policy agenda, including differences of theoretical focus, research methodology, and issue selection. Perhaps most importantly, Kingdon s and Light s efforts to compare the impact of the media with that of interest groups, political parties, and other important actors in the Washington community may produce a more measured perspective on the significance of media agenda-setting than if they had simply set out as many media scholars seem to do to demonstrate the reality of press impact. Actors and Issues The primary aim of my analysis is to characterize the day-to-day interactions between politicians and the press that constitute the dance described by Gans and others. But rather than characterizing these interactions on the basis of impressionistic observation or testimonials from participants in the process, as most previous scholars have done, I base my analysis on systematic measurement of the actual behavior of politicians and the press. This approach requires a good deal of abstraction and simplification, but has the compensating virtue of permitting a clearer and more concrete assessment of how successfully each side vies for control of the policy agenda. 4

6 Of course, to think of politicians and the press as two partners in a tango or opponents in a chess game is itself a great abstraction and simplification of a more complex reality. Politicians compete and cooperate with each other in a complicated game of their own. For their part, journalists are probably influenced at least as much by other journalists as by politicians. Moreover, as Cook (1998) has pointed out, the relationship between politicians and the press may be significantly shaped by the distinctive institutional routines, interests, resources, and constraints of the various players on both sides. Rather than treating politicians on one hand and the press on the other as monolithic actors, I distinguish here between two distinct portions of the Washington political community Congress and the executive branch and among three distinct elements of the national media establishment elite newspapers, metropolitan newspapers, and network television news. My choice of relevant actors reflects a compromise between realism and analytical tractability. On one hand, it seems clearly valuable to be able to capture differences in the working relationships between different branches of government and different branches of the mass media. On the other hand, both the limits of data availability and the complexity of potential interactions in a model with a large number of independent actors argues against proliferating the cast of characters more liberally than the analysis can bear. Since Congress and the executive branch are, by most accounts, the two primary components of the Washington policy community, it is fortunate for my purposes that their activities are recorded in readily accessible electronic data bases in a form that makes them fairly amenable to systematic quantitative analysis. My measure of executive branch activities is a daily count of speeches, press briefings, and other public statements by the President, Vice President, cabinet officers and agency heads, and their press secretaries and staff, derived from the Federal News Service in the NEXIS database. My measure of congressional activities is a daily count of congressional hearings, floor speeches, and other public statements by members of Congress, derived from the Federal News Service and from the Congressional Record. In each 5

7 case, my daily counts cover the first three years of the Clinton administration, beginning on 20 January 1993 and ending on 31 December The content analyses from which these daily counts were derived is described in more detail in the Appendix. To capture the behavior of the press over the same time period, I counted stories each day in the New York Times, three local newspapers, and nightly broadcasts of ABC s World News Tonight. The New York Times is, perhaps, the most influential of the small set of elite newspapers that aspire to cover national policy issues in significant depth for a sophisticated national audience. The three local newspapers the Hartford Courant, the Orlando Sentinel Tribune, and the Seattle Times are intended to represent typical middle-sized metropolitan newspapers nationwide. 2 ABC s World News Tonight is the most popular of the network evening news broadcasts, which together (still) provide most of the American public with most of its news about politics and public affairs. The daily counts of media coverage were derived from systematic content analyses, described in the Appendix, of full texts of the newspapers and transcripts of the ABC News broadcasts available in the NEXIS database. 3 To get some sense of whether and how the interrelationships among these five actors varied across policy arenas, I analyzed separately political activities and media coverage of four issues: Bosnia, Medicare, NAFTA, and Whitewater. These four issues were among the most salient in Washington during the period covered by my study, and provide a convenient mix of foreign and domestic, continuing and episodic, and legislative and more broadly political issues. 4 The summary statistics reported in Table 1 provide an overall picture of political activities and media coverage in these four issue areas during the first three years of the Clinton administration. For each actor in each issue area, the table shows the mean and standard deviation of the daily counts, the maximum number of stories or activities on any single day, and the percentage of days for which no stories or activities were recorded. 6

8 * * * Table 1 * * * It is important to note the sheer differences in size of the national policy news holes across the three media. Summing across the four policy areas, the New York Times mentioned these issues about 60 times in an average week, a typical local newspaper mentioned them about 11 times in an average week, and ABC's World News Tonight mentioned them about 7 times in an average week. However, once these differences are taken into account, there is a close correspondence in Table 1 between the total amount of coverage devoted to each issue by the New York Times and the total amount of coverage by ABC News: in each issue area the average number of New York Times mentions is roughly eight to ten times the number of ABC News mentions. Local newspaper coverage shows somewhat less correspondence, with relatively more coverage of Medicare and, especially, NAFTA, and relatively less of Bosnia and Whitewater than in the national media outlets. The descriptive statistics for executive branch and congressional activities also document a good deal of variation across the four issue areas. In both cases, average levels of activity are a good deal lower for Whitewater than for any other issue, with the executive branch about ten times more active on Bosnia than on Whitewater, and Congress about ten times more active on Medicare than on Whitewater. Given my counting procedure, there are a total of about eight congressional activities and three executive branch activities in these four issue areas on a typical day, with almost three times as many congressional activities as executive branch activities in every area except Bosnia. The graphs in Figure 1 provide some sense of the flow of media coverage and political activities for each of the four issues over the first three years of the Clinton administration. Each row of Figure 1 corresponds to a media outlet or political actor, and each column to an issue area. All the graphs in each row are similarly scaled, in order to provide an accurate picture of the relative volume of activity in different issue areas; however, the scales are different for each 7

9 kind of activity in order to facilitate visual comparison among rows without regard to differences in the nature of the specific coding schemes adopted to measure each actor s activity. 5 * * * Figure 1 * * * It is clear from comparing the columns of Figure 1 that the four issues include two that were of considerable significance throughout this three-year period, Bosnia and Medicare, and two that dominated the agenda for shorter periods of time, NAFTA and Whitewater. Bosnia consistently received more media attention, and more attention from the executive branch (but, significantly, not from Congress), than any other issue in the first three years of the Clinton administration. Medicare received moderate attention throughout the first two years, and even more during the 1995 budget battles between the president and Congress. NAFTA dominated the agenda briefly in the autumn of 1993, but largely disappeared once the treaty was ratified by Congress. Whitewater received almost no attention from press or politicians during 1993, but reemerged sporadically, especially in the national news media, throughout 1994 and 1995 as new allegations and investigations revived and expanded the original scandal. A Dynamic Model of Agenda Setting To what extent, and how, do the various flows of political activities and media coverage depicted in Figure 1 reflect responses of politicians to the press and vice versa? My approach to that question is to model the activity of each actor in each of the four issue areas as a function of the observed behavior of all five actors in that issue area over the previous seven days. This approach provides a good deal of theoretical flexibility, since it imposes relatively little restriction on the nature and timing of the presumed interactions among the various actors. Whenever one actor s level of activity in a given issue area is correlated with the recent 8

10 activities of another actor, I interpret the correlation as a response by the first actor to the recent activities of the second. For example, to the extent that congressional attention to Whitewater is correlated with recent levels of New York Times coverage holding constant recent levels of congressional and executive branch attention and local newspaper and ABC News stories I interpret the correlation as evidence of agenda-setting power by the Times. On the other hand, to the extent that New York Times coverage of Whitewater is correlated with the number of recent congressional activities again, holding constant the recent observed behavior of all the other actors in the system I attribute the correlation to the agenda-setting power of Congress. This framework can be simply represented by a vector autoregression (VAR) model, in which the current value of each variable in a system of interrelated variables is regressed on lagged values of all the variables in the system. Here, I regress the current day s count for each activity on the seven most recent daily counts of each of the five activities. The parameter estimates from these regressions are taken to represent the dynamic responses of each variable to the other variables in the system. VAR analysis is commonly employed in time-series analysis of macroeconomic data; Freeman et al. (1989) provided a good general introduction with political science examples. This same theoretical framework has been applied by Wood and Peake (1998) to interactions between presidential activities (as recorded in The Public Papers of the President) and network television news coverage (as recorded in the Vanderbilt Television News Abstracts) in three distinct areas of foreign policy: US-USSR relations, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Bosnia. 6 Wood and Peake s analysis has the advantage of covering a longer time period than the present analysis ten years ( ) rather than three. It also has the advantage of including a distinct (though not entirely independent) measure of exogenous events in these issue areas, derived from Reuters news leads from around the world incorporated in the PANDA international events data set. On the other hand, the range of issues, political actors, and media outlets is broader here than in Wood and Peake s analysis, and the daily (as opposed to weekly) 9

11 resolution of the data makes it possible to examine the dynamics of interaction among the various players in greater detail. Wood and Peake (1998, Tables 1 and 2) estimated, remarkably, that presidential attention had no significant effect on network news coverage of the foreign policy issues they examined. 7 By contrast, increases in network news coverage of all three issues produced significant increases in presidential attention one week later, with modest additional effects in subsequent weeks. These results suggest rather unequivocally that, at least for these three foreign policy issues, the press (and world events) led and the president followed. That finding is especially surprising given the conventional wisdom that Presidents lead opinion in foreign affairs and have much greater success in controlling the nation s defense and foreign policies than in dominating its domestic policies (Wildavsky 1966, 453, 448). 8 One of the aims of my analysis is to probe the generality of Wood and Peake s counterintuitive results by applying a similar theoretical framework to data from different sources, for different issues, and on a different time scale. Patterns of Interaction The first step in the VAR analysis is to verify that the activities of the various actors in the posited system are, indeed, interrelated. If they are, knowledge of each actor s past behavior will provide some leverage in accounting for the current behavior of other actors in the system. In the jargon of time-series analysis, each actor s activities will Granger cause the others. 9 Table 2 reports the relevant test statistics for 100 distinct tests of Granger causality one for each combination of our five actors current activities and the same five actors past activities 10

12 in each of the four issue areas examined here. Each entry in the table is an F-statistic for testing the null hypothesis of Granger exogeneity that all seven daily lagged values of the indicated explanatory variable have true coefficients of zero, so that the past history of that variable contributes nothing, over and above the past histories of the other variables in the model, to our ability to account for the current value of the dependent variable. Given the number of lagged values being tested and the number of observations in the data sets, the F-statistic must be greater than 2.00 to reject this null hypothesis at the.05 level, and greater than 2.63 to reject the null hypothesis at the.01 level. * * * Table 2 * * * The test statistics presented in Table 2 provide strong support for the posited interrelationships among the various political and media activities in each issue area. The test statistics provide grounds for rejecting the null hypothesis of Granger exogeneity at the.05 level of statistical significance in 79 of the 100 cases, including 15 of 25 for Bosnia, 20 of 25 for Medicare, and 22 of 25 for NAFTA and Whitewater. Leaving aside the clear dependence of each activity on its own past history, each explanatory variable has a significant impact (at the.05 level) in at least eleven of the sixteen different tests reported in the table (crossing the four other dependent variables by the four issues), and each dependent variable is significantly influenced in at least ten of the sixteen possible instances (crossing the four other explanatory variables by the four issues). Each of the five actors' behavior is clearly related to one or more of the others both as cause and as effect in every issue area. Of course, the causality tests presented in Table 2 merely indicate that the history of each variable contains some distinctive information about the future paths of the others; they cast no light on the detailed dynamics or magnitude of the implied causal effects. The actual parameter estimates for the corresponding VAR models capture the timing and magnitude of the effect of each activity on the others, but in a form that is too complex to be readily interpretable. In the 11

13 present case, the VAR parameter estimates consist of twenty distinct sets one for each of the five dependent variables in each of the four issue areas of 42 parameter estimates each seven for the various lagged values of each of the five explanatory variables plus seven indicator variables for days of the week to capture weekly cycles in media coverage and political activities. The parameter estimates and related information are reported in Tables A1 through A6 in the Appendix. Rather than attempting to interpret these 840 parameter estimates in detail, my aim here is to summarize the various dynamic relationships between media coverage and political activities. One useful way to do that is to cumulate the implied effects of each variable on each of the others over time, summarizing 35 parameter estimates in each regression in terms of five cumulative effects. However, it is important to note that the cumulative effect of each variable is not simply the sum of its seven estimated direct effects in the corresponding table of regression parameter estimates. Given the dynamic structure of the posited media-political system, each of these direct effects produces a host of associated indirect effects which must also be accounted for. For example, New York Times coverage may produce a direct congressional response the same day, but may also stimulate congressional activities indirectly by stimulating executive branch activities, which in turn prompt congressional responses a few days later, stimulating additional ABC News coverage, producing further congressional responses a week later, and so on. In principle, these reverberations can continue indefinitely. In practice, however, they tend to decay over time, so that we can account for most of the cumulative long-run impact of each activity by tracing out its various direct and indirect effects over a fairly short period of time. 10 The cumulative effects of each actor s activities implied by the parameter estimates in Tables A1 through A5 are presented in Table 3. Each entry is the sum of direct and indirect effects, cumulated over a period of 30 days, of a one-time, one-unit change in the indicated explanatory variable on the indicated dependent variable in the indicated issue area. For 12

14 example, the entry of 2.25 in the third row of the Bosnia column indicates that an exogenous increase of one executive branch activity produced, directly or indirectly, more than two additional New York Times stories mentioning Bosnia in the subsequent month. Reading across the same row, an additional executive branch activity in the area of Medicare produced virtually no response in the New York Times, while each additional executive branch activity in the areas of NAFTA and Whitewater produced, respectively, 1.84 and 3.63 additional New York Times stories in the subsequent month. * * * Table 3 * * * Another way to gauge the cumulative effects summarized in Table 3 is to convert them into standardized units calibrated by the standard deviations of the respective independent and dependent variables. The same cumulative effects presented in raw form in Table 3 are presented in standardized form in Table 4. For example, whereas Table 3 indicates that a onetime, one-unit shock in executive branch activities produced 2.25 additional New York Times stories mentioning Bosnia in the subsequent month, the corresponding entry in Table 4 indicates that a one standard deviation shock in executive branch activities (about 1.9 additional activities) produced a 1.36 standard deviation response in New York Times coverage (about 4.2 additional stories). * * * Table 4 * * * Which of these metrics will be more convenient depends in significant part upon what sort of question we are trying to answer. The absolute impact of New York Times stories on executive branch activities (or vice versa) can only be assessed on the basis of the unstandardized estimates reported in Table 3. On the other hand, the standardized estimates reported in Table 4 facilitate comparisons of effects across actors and issue areas in a way that takes rough account of differences in measurement strategies and levels of activity. 13

15 For example, the respective roles of the New York Times and ABC News in propelling media coverage of NAFTA and Whitewater might be judged by comparing the impact of each outlet s coverage on subsequent coverage by the other outlet. The estimates in Table 3 indicate that an additional ABC News story in either of these issue areas generated about 13 additional New York Times stories over the subsequent month, while an additional New York Times story generated only half an additional ABC News story. But this apparent imbalance has more to do with the size of the two outlets respective news holes and my conventions for counting stories than with any slavish tendency of the Times to follow ABC s policy leads. Indeed, the standardized estimates in Table 4 suggest a rough parity in the reciprocal interactions between the two outlets in these issue areas, with a one standard deviation shock in either side s coverage producing a substantial cumulative response of about 2.6 standard deviations in the other side s coverage. The interaction between the New York Times and ABC News and the importance of that interaction in sustaining and disseminating the influence of each of these news outlets in the broader Washington community provides a good example of how the sort of detailed statistical analysis pursued here can enrich our understanding of the dynamics of policy agenda-setting. However, since my main interest here is in the reciprocal impacts of politicians on the press and the press on politicians, the rest of my analysis will focus in greater detail upon the specific interactions in Tables 3 and 4 that reflect those specific reciprocal impacts. Media Reactions to Political Activities It should hardly be surprising that the political activities of major Washington actors play an important role in shaping the news media s policy agenda. Despite the negative findings of Wood and Peake (1998) cited above, the idea that government officials make news seems commonsensical. This is especially true for presidents, who dominate the scholarly literature on 14

16 political communication to the virtual exclusion of Congress and other actors. 11 As Ansolabehere et al. (1993, 106) put it, Contemporary presidents are at the center of national events and issues. The president is not only inherently newsworthy, but also equipped with a potent arsenal for managing the flow of news. His rhetorical weapons include presidential speeches and addresses. He can manufacture instant news by holding press conferences, news briefings, photo opportunities, private interviews, and a variety of official ceremonies. Through careful allocation of these resources, the president can wield considerable influence over what Americans see and hear about the state of their country, and when this information will be covered. Recent observers of the presidency have emphasized the extent to which the organization and activities of the modern White House are intended to magnify the president's impact on the national news agenda. In Kernell s words (1993, 80), The president s staff plans events and writes speeches with an eye to shaping the evening news story. Getting out the line for the day is, in fact, one of the principal activities of the contemporary White House staff; by one estimate more than a quarter of the staff is dedicated in some way to producing the president's public activities. If executive branch activities have no perceptible impact on the content of the network news and newspapers, a great deal of energy and effort are apparently being wasted. The cumulative effects reported in Table 3 provide some sense of the magnitude of media reactions to executive branch activities. Averaging across the four issue areas, the estimates suggest that a typical executive branch activity generated, directly or indirectly, about 1.65 New York Times mentions, 0.43 local newspaper mentions, and 0.28 ABC News mentions in the subsequent month. The timing of these media reactions is traced in Figure 2, which graphs the standardized day-by-day responses cumulated in Table 4 for each media outlet in each issue 15

17 area. * * * Figure 2 * * * Much of the variation in day-by-day responses to executive branch (and congressional) activities evident in Figure 2 is illusory a product of the relative imprecision of the various individual parameter estimates in the VAR analyses. However, the general patterns of temporal responses do contain real information about the dynamics of media coverage. For example, it is striking that in each issue area (with the notable exception of Medicare, where executive branch activities had no significant impact at all on subsequent media coverage) the apparent direct and indirect responses of all three media to executive branch activities were quite long-lived, declining fairly gradually over an entire month. This temporal pattern emphasizes the importance of indirect effects including inertia within each media outlet and agenda-setting effects of each media outlet on the news judgments of the others that contribute to the persistence of shocks attributable to the agenda-setting efforts of the president and other executive branch officials. The cumulative effects reported in Table 3 indicate that the absolute magnitudes of media reactions to congressional activities were a good deal smaller than to executive branch activities about one-fifth as large. However, since there were almost three times as many congressional activities as executive branch activities on a typical day in three of the four issue areas all except Bosnia the total impact of Congress on the media's policy agenda in those three policy areas was more than half that of the executive branch. These results suggest that Congress was a good deal more successful in influencing the national news agenda than one might have guessed from the relative prominence of the President and Congress in scholarly studies of political communication. The detailed response curves in Figure 2 suggest a possible explanation for the apparent tendency of scholars to underestimate the agenda-setting power of Congress. Whereas many of 16

18 the press reactions to executive branch activities in the figure peak almost immediately on the same day for ABC News and the next day for the New York Times the reactions to congressional activities tend to be slower peaking two or three days after the events themselves in the case of Medicare and even later in the case of Whitewater. These relatively slow and indirect media responses to congressional activities may simply be missed in more impressionistic analyses of news-making. The relative ability of the executive branch and Congress to influence the news agenda seems to vary little by news medium, but quite a lot by issue area. On Bosnia and NAFTA, all three news media were influenced strongly by the executive branch but not at all by Congress. On Medicare, this pattern was exactly reversed, with all three media influenced strongly by Congress but not at all by the executive branch. On Whitewater, both Congress and the executive branch had significant effects on all three media, with Congress predominating in each case. These same differential patterns of executive branch and congressional influence extend from the impact of each branch on the news media to the impact of each branch on the other. Congress had considerable impact on executive branch action on Medicare and some on Whitewater, but none at all on Bosnia or NAFTA. By contrast, the executive branch had a discernable impact on congressional activities in all four areas, but notably less on Medicare than on Bosnia, NAFTA, or Whitewater. It seems reasonable to ascribe these differences to the distinctive nature of the four issues included in this analysis. Bosnia is a quintessential foreign policy issue, with the Clinton administration taking the diplomatic and military initiative and Congress attempting, for the most part, to stay clear of any potential political fallout. NAFTA is a diplomatic issue with significant domestic ramifications; Congress was the arena for the crucial ratification debate in the autumn of 1993 (the prominent spike in NAFTA activities evident in all five rows of Figure 1), but generally seemed to follow the administration s lead rather than setting the 17

19 administration s agenda. Medicare is a quintessential domestic policy issue, with heavy congressional involvement, especially in the budget battles initiated by the Republican majority in the 104th Congress. Whitewater is primarily a squabble between the branches, with each reacting significantly to the other, but with Congress maintaining an upper hand in setting the media agenda, thanks in large part to its initiative in scheduling newsworthy investigative hearings. The important point here is that the various news media seem to have been in close agreement among themselves and, what may be more surprising, in fairly close agreement with the politicians as to the relative priority of the executive branch and Congress in each issue area. Moreover, those relative priorities seem to reflect nicely the respective constitutional and political roles of the executive branch and Congress. If, as is often asserted, the press now constitutes a fourth branch of government in the American system, at least it does not seem, from the evidence presented here, to have significantly altered the traditional division of labor among the existing branches. Political Reactions to Media Coverage If the idea that government activities make news seems merely commonsensical, the idea that news makes government activities is, as I have already indicated, rather more controversial. Does the media, as Kingdon (1984, 62) suggested, report what is going on in government, by and large, rather than having an independent effect on government agendas? Or is the modern press, as Cater (1959) and others have asserted, a fourth branch of government? And if so, which press? In what sense? And on what issues? My answers to these questions are based upon the same set of observable interactions between the press and politicians summarized in Tables 3 and 4. Just as the graphs in Figure 2 detailed the dynamic responses of the media to political activities implied by my analysis, the 18

20 graphs in Figure 3 detail the reciprocal responses of the executive branch and Congress to media coverage of Bosnia, Medicare, NAFTA, and Whitewater. * * * Figure 3 * * * The largest and most persistent responses evident in Figure 3 are to New York Times coverage of NAFTA and Whitewater. For each of these two issues, apparent executive branch and congressional responses to New York Times coverage peaked within a few days, but only gradually declined over the subsequent few weeks. Even a month after a story originally appeared in the Times, there were significant traces of its reverberations in the Washington political community. These patterns handsomely support the notion that, at least in some instances, the Times had an independent effect on government agendas. While these are the most striking instances of media impact on the political agenda evident in Figure 3, they are not the only ones. New York Times coverage of Medicare and Bosnia had smaller but still substantial effects on executive branch and congressional activities except for congressional activities touching upon Bosnia. ABC News coverage also had a substantial impact on executive branch attention to Bosnia, and on both branches attention to NAFTA and (to a lesser extent) Whitewater. And local newspaper coverage had a smaller but still perceptible impact on both branches attention to NAFTA, Medicare, and Bosnia. Except in the case of Bosnia, the general pattern of media effects is fairly similar for the executive branch and Congress. However, there are interesting differences in the relative sensitivity of the two branches to local and national media coverage, respectively, in the unstandardized cumulative effects presented in Table 3. Averaging across issues, a typical ABC News mention generated about two congressional activities and almost three executive branch activities in the subsequent month, whereas an increase of one in the average number of local newspaper mentions generated almost six congressional activities and only one executive branch 19

21 activity. Thus, in absolute terms, Congress was almost three times as responsive as the executive branch was to local newspaper coverage, while the executive branch was almost three times as responsive as Congress was to national television coverage. This difference squares nicely with the familiar notion that presidents attempt to represent a national constituency, while members of Congress attempt to represent a diverse collection of local constituencies. A typical New York Times mention generated about two-thirds of an executive branch activity and two congressional activities in the subsequent month, suggesting at first glance that the Times was, if anything, less influential than either local newspapers or network television news. However, it is worth recalling that the Times contained more than five times as many relevant issue mentions as the average local newspaper, and almost nine times as many as ABC News. Thus, the aggregate impact of the Times on the executive branch and congressional agendas far exceeded that of the local newspapers or ABC News, even if the effect of each story considered individually did not. Despite widespread speculation (and considerable consternation) about media decentralization and the growing irrelevance of the prestige press, the role of the Times as a premier agenda setter in the Washington policy community seems, on the basis of these results, to be safe and sound. The importance of indirect effects in bolstering this agenda-setting role can be illustrated by comparing the entries in Table 4 for the impact of New York Times coverage on executive branch activities with the corresponding entries in Table 2. The F-statistics in Table 2 indicate that New York Times coverage had a statistically significant direct effect on executive branch activities in only one of the four issue areas, Whitewater. But the cumulative direct and indirect effect in Table 4 is almost as large for NAFTA as for Whitewater, and also substantial for Bosnia and Medicare. The reason is that New York Times coverage of NAFTA and Medicare directly influenced local newspaper coverage and congressional activity in those issue areas, which in 20

22 turn significantly influenced executive branch activities. In the case of Bosnia, the effect of New York Times coverage seems to have been mediated primarily by ABC News coverage, which was directly influenced by New York Times coverage and in turn directly spurred executive action on Bosnia. While it would not be surprising to learn that politicians in the White House and executive agencies read the New York Times assiduously, they seem to be more strongly affected by other Washington policy-makers and journalists reading than by their own. Taking into account these various indirect influences, the calculations of standardized effects presented in Table 4 suggest that, on the whole, the New York Times had even more impact on the agenda of the executive branch and Congress than executive branch and congressional activities did on the Times news agenda. Thus, although there are strong effects in both directions and a good deal of variability across the four issue areas there is a quite real sense in which the results presented here support the claim that, by and large, the Times led and the politicians followed. For local newspapers the general pattern is reversed, with the effects of political activities on local newspaper coverage tending, by and large, to dominate the effects of local newspaper coverage on political activities. Finally, the reciprocal relationship between the policy establishment and ABC News appears, from my results, to be relatively evenly balanced, with reporters generally leading politicians on NAFTA and Bosnia and following them on Medicare and Whitewater. Whitewater is an especially interesting test case for the analysis of media impact presented here, because it appears at first glance to be an especially pure case of media agendasetting. The original story of the Clinton s Arkansas financial dealings was broken by Jeff Gerth of the New York Times during the 1992 campaign (Gerth 1992); and despite the fact that Whitewater disappeared almost entirely from the national political scene during the first year of the Clinton administration (as the event counts presented in Figure 1 make clear), the Times 21

23 managed to mention Whitewater more than a thousand times during the first three years of the Clinton administration. (By comparison, my three local newspapers put together mentioned Whitewater only half that often.) The results of my analysis nicely confirm that the New York Times (and, to a lesser extent, ABC News) played a substantial role in putting Whitewater firmly on the agenda of the executive branch and Congress. At the same time, however, the results highlight interesting complexities in the relationship between the press and politicians. For one thing, the standardized cumulative effects presented in Table 4 suggest that the Times fascination with Whitewater had even more impact on ABC News than on either the executive branch or Congress and that ABC News coverage in turn had more impact on the Times than on either political actor. Thus, Whitewater provides an example of how some media issues can reverberate through the press without achieving comparable traction in the political community. What is more, although congressional activities in this area were significantly stimulated by New York Times and ABC News coverage, the magnitudes of the standardized effects suggest that Congress stimulated media coverage of Whitewater even more than it responded to that coverage. Thus, Whitewater also provides an example of how media agenda-setting may often require active cooperation from interested politicians to achieve its full potential impact. Summary and Discussion My analysis of interactions between politicians and the press provides a more systematic and detailed picture of the dance or chess game posited by previous political scientists and media scholars. It richly confirms the basic hypothesis that each side s activities play an important role in setting the other side s policy agenda, at least in the contemporary Washington setting analyzed here. At the same time, it elaborates and extends that basic hypothesis by tracing and measuring in day-by-day detail, in four distinct policy areas, the multiple direct and indirect effects of each actor s activities on the behavior of each of the others actors in the 22

24 system. The most striking fact about the estimated effects of political activities on media coverage is how much they differ between the executive branch and Congress, and how little among the three media outlets, as our focus shifts from Bosnia to Medicare to NAFTA to Whitewater. All three media and the politicians themselves seem to have recognized a clear division of labor in which the executive branch set the agenda on NAFTA and Bosnia while Congress took the lead on Medicare and, to a lesser extent, Whitewater. More generally, the substantial role of Congress in setting the national media s policy agenda is worthy of note: although each congressional activity generated only about one-fifth as much media attention as each executive branch activity (as those activities are defined here), the fact that there were two or three times as many congressional activities on a typical day gave Congress about half as much total agenda-setting power as the executive branch, by my calculations. On the other side of the ledger, the impact of the press on the politicians seemed to vary more by media outlet than by branch of government. With the striking but fairly unsurprising exception of Bosnia where ABC News and New York Times coverage had a substantial impact on executive branch activities but none at all on Congress the general pattern of political reactions to media agenda-setting was similar. Both the executive branch and Congress reacted strongly to New York Times coverage of NAFTA and Whitewater and ABC News coverage of NAFTA; and both reacted somewhat less strongly to New York Times coverage of Medicare, local newspaper coverage of NAFTA and Medicare, and ABC News coverage of Whitewater. This general similarity in the pattern of results for the executive branch and Congress is methodologically reassuring, given the difficulty of measuring political activities in a meaningful way and the rather different approaches used here to measure executive branch and congressional activities. Of course, all of these conclusions must be considered provisional, given the rudimentary nature of the analyses reported here and the crudity of the data upon which they are based. In 23

25 exchange for the scope and sheer quantity of data necessary to support systematic day-by-day analyses of interactions among five distinct actors in four different issue areas over a three-year period, I have consciously sacrificed a good deal of nuance in model specification and, especially, measurement. While my simple counts of political activities and news stories have the significant virtues of being fairly simple to generate and fairly amenable to statistical analysis, they clearly miss much of what is important in the behavior of politicians and the press. One important concern is with the sheer reliability of the counts produced by the content analyses. For example, the counts of news stories suffer from a good deal of unreliability due to the relatively small number of ABC News and local newspaper stories in any given issue area on any given day, and my selective content analysis of only one network news broadcast and only three local newspapers; this unreliability may help to account for the fact that network news coverage and local newspaper coverage generally appear to be less influential than New York Times coverage, which is probably measured more reliably. In the case of political activities, the counts are unhappily dependent upon what the Federal News Service and the Congressional Record happen to report. Thus, the counts of executive branch activities weigh White House press briefings more heavily than seems ideal (notwithstanding the claim of Ansolabehere et al. (1993, 108) that these briefings are often the major source of hard news for the press ), and the counts of congressional activities probably assign too much weight to statements by members of Congress on the House and Senate floors and too little to more substantive legislative activities. In addition, the problem of anticipated reactions is especially bedeviling for the style of research pursued here, in which complex causal inferences are based entirely upon the temporal sequence of observed events. If a newspaper story about Whitewater precedes a congressional hearing on Whitewater by one day or one week, the vector autoregression model treats the hearing, at least potentially, as a reaction to the story. But if the headline of the story is New 24