Is anyone responsible? : how television frames political issues /

Continuing earlier studies (e.g., Iyengar and Kinder's News That Matters (CH, Mar'88), of the impact of television news on public opinion, Iyengar has extended the analysis of the agenda-setting, priming, and bandwagon effects of TV news to include questions of political responsibility and accountability. Here, he explores the direct impact of "episodic" news frames, which focus on specific events or particular cases, and "thematic" frames, which place the issues and events in a larger sociopolitical context. By means of a unique and cleverly complex experiment, he manipulates TV news stories about poverty, unemployment, crime, international terrorism, racial inequality, and the Iran-Contra affair, varying the framing and the focus to reflect causes and treatment. Viewers were asked who is responsible individuals or institutions and society. Iyengar finds that TV framing does influence attribution of responsibility but only in limited ways, depending on the specific issue and prior positions. More important, he finds that TV's unswerving focus on specific episodes, individual perpetrators, and victims, to the exclusion of general thematic information, inhibits the attribution of political responsibility to societal factors, institutions, and politicians. Iyengar's research design is innovative, but his findings tell us that everyone prefers a good story about someone or some event to explanations about social institutions. The book is well written, free of jargon and statistical overload. The excellent concluding chapter tells it all, however; the rest is only for those interested in research design.-R. Cathcart, Queens College, CUNY