The President, the Press, and the War: A Tale of Two Framing Agendas

Abstract

The alignment between media and presidential framing following 9/11, as well as surrounding the Iraq war, has been criticized as an instance of “when the press fails.” We explore this idea further by comparing presidential and newspaper framing in the case of 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror.” We argue that high president/press framing alignment after 9/11, and again during the start of the Iraq war, was largely driven by institutional incentives. Thus, “failure” of the press should be expected in these cases, as in the case of other crisis events that yield a strong rally response. Because the media and the president operate under different incentives, they exhibit different framing behaviors—and different framing dynamics. The result is that, in general, the framing messages of these two institutions sometimes align, especially at critical moments, but more often differ. And in the case of major crises like 9/11 and Iraq, we should see a distinct pattern in president/press framing alignment over time—namely, high initial alignment followed by steep decay—as incentives lead the president to “stay the course” while leading news outlets to shift their framing in line with elite and public opinion. We test this idea by applying a new measure of framing alignment to over 3,400 news stories and 500 presidential papers about 9/11 and the war. We find support for our theoretical expectations, showing that, despite their immediate similarities in the cases of 9/11 and Iraq, the president and the press exhibited increasingly divergent framing behaviors over time. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): crisis definition, detailed data and coding descriptions, summary statistics, a sample alignment calculation, and additional figures illustrating frame correlation and media tone]