Cascading Network Activation Model - shore-app3’s diary

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Political Communication, 5–432, 2003

ISSN: 1058-4609 print / 1091-7675 online

DOI: 10.1080/10584600390244176

Robert M. Entman is Professor of Communication and Political Science at North Carolina

State University, Raleigh.

This article draws on material published in the forthcoming Projections of Power: Framing

and is used with permission of the University of Chicago Press.

Address correspondence to Robert M. Entman, Department of Communication, Box 8104,

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA. E-mail: entman ncsu.edu

Cascading Activation:

Contesting the White House s Frame After 9/11

ROBERT M. ENTMAN

President Bush s initial frame for the attacks of September 11, 2001, overwhelm-

ingly dominated the news. Using that frame as a springboard, this article advances

a coherent conception of framing within a new model of the relationship between

government and the media in U.S. foreign policy making. The cascading activation

model supplements research using the hegemony or indexing approaches. The model

explains how interpretive frames activate and spread from the top level of a strati-

fied system the White House to the network of nonadministration elites, and on to

news organizations, their texts, and the public and how interpretations feed back

from lower to higher levels. To illustrate the model s potential, the article explores

the frame challenge mounted by two journalists, Seymour Hersh and Thomas Fried-

man, who attempted to shift the focus from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia. As hege-

mony theory predicts, 9/11 revealed yet again that media patrol the boundaries of

culture and keep discord within conventional bounds. But inside those borders, even

when government is promoting war against terrorism, media are not entirely pas-

sive receptacles for government propaganda, and the cascade model illuminates de-

viations from the preferred frame. As index theorists suggest, elite discord is a nec-

essary condition for politically influential frame challenges. Among other things, the

cascade model helps explain whether that condition arises, and how journalists can

hinder or advance it.

Keywords

September 11

framing, indexing, hegemony, media and foreign policy, media and war,

On the morning after the terrorist assaults of September 11, 2001, President George W.

Bush spoke. The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against

our country were more than acts of terror, they were acts of war, he said. This will

require our country to unite in steadfast determination and resolve.. . . This will be a

monumental struggle of good versus evil, but good will prevail. 1 In these remarks and

many others, Bush defined a problem in simple and emotional terms as an act of war

and identified its clear cause as an enemy that was evil. Bush, Vice President Rich-

ard Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other officials used these same words

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416 Robert M. Entman

many times in the days and months following September 11; George W. Bush invoked

evil fully five times and war twelve times in his State of the Union speech on January

29, 2002.

Repeating these terms was part of the Bush administration s strategy of framing

September 11 to unite the country behind its solution: a war against terrorism and,

initially, military intervention to topple the Taliban government of Afghanistan. The

administration might have identified other enemies, chosen other ways of interpreting

and responding to the attacks than a global war on terror, but the president sought

immediately to close them off. Before the first stage of war commenced, it was vital to

convey an unambiguous and emotionally compelling frame to the public. Then, when

combat in Afghanistan began, it could receive virtually unanimous assent from Congress

and the media and overwhelming public approval. Reminding the public of the evil

helped to maintain their support; merely mentioning the word could cue a whole series

of conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings about September 11 and promote

the deference to presidential authority that typically occurs during wartime.

Calling the post-9/11 policy a war on terrorism was a contestable but effective

framing choice, contestable among other reasons because Bush did not do what virtually

every president before had done to certify the country was truly at war. Rather than

calling for sacrifices from the civilian population, proposing tax increases to cover costs,

or bolstering the Veterans Administration, he did the very opposite, urging Americans to

consume more, asking Congress to cut taxes and VA services. In essence, Bush s fram-

ing strategy sought the best of both worlds politically: the advantages of heightened

deference, without the disadvantages of having to alter his domestic agenda or of impos-

ing politically unpopular costs on the average American.

President Bush s initial frame for September 11 overwhelmingly dominated the news.

Using that frame as a springboard, this article attempts to develop a coherent conception

of framing within a new model of the relationship between government and the media

in the foreign policy process. Because it summarizes a portion of a much larger study

Entman, 2004, it cannot offer a full elaboration of the model. Instead, it illustrates the

model s potential by exploring aspects of policy debate in the U.S. after 9/11.

Two journalists, Seymour Hersh and Thomas Friedman, mounted a challenge, at-

tempting to shift or at least supplement the focus to include not just Afghanistan but

also Saudi Arabia. Even in a time of one-sided domination by the White House line, the

post-9/11 period provides an intriguing opportunity to see how journalists working against

the White House line can influence news coverage and elite and public thinking. Before

discussing the frame contest itself, though, it is necessary to explain the concept of

framing and detail the new model.

Frames and Cascading Activation

The major schools of thought on media and foreign policy cluster around hegemony

e.g., Augelli Murphy, 1988; Herman Chomsky, 1988; Rachlin, 1988 and index-

ing Bennett, 1989, 1990; Mermin, 1999; cf. Robinson, 2002. Although offering many

insights that help to guide the present study, these approaches are based mostly on

events before 1991. Not surprisingly, they cannot account fully for changes in interna-

tional politics and media behavior since the end of the Cold War. Neither describes

the precise mechanisms by which government s preferred interpretations of new foreign

events and issues get translated into specific choices of politically consequential words

and images in the news. And although indexing quite convincingly emphasizes elite

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Contesting the White House s Frame After 9/11 417

opposition as a vital determinant of whether the news will deviate from the White House

line, it does not explain fully why leaders sometimes choose to contest the White House

frame and other times keep quiet, or just how much elite opposition will arise. Nor do

previous models delineate comprehensively the public s role in the larger system of

communication linking presidents, elites outside the administration, journalists, news texts,

and citizens. Building particularly upon the work of Hallin 1986, Bennett 1989, 1990,

and Mermin 1999, this article introduces the cascading activation model.

Framing and Frame Contests

Framing is the central process by which government officials and journalists exercise

political influence over each other and over the public cf. Riker, 1986. Successful

political communication requires the framing of events, issues, and actors in ways that

promote perceptions and interpretations that benefit one side while hindering the other.

Understanding how frames work allows us to measure the distance between the White

House s preferred versions of foreign affairs and the ways the media actually report them.

Framing entails selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues, and mak-

ing connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation,

and/or solution. The words and images that make up the frame can be distinguished

from the rest of the news by their capacity to stimulate support of or opposition to the

sides in a political conflict. We can measure this capacity by cultural resonance and

magnitude cf. on resonance Miller Riechert, 2001; Snow Benford, 1988. Those

frames that employ more culturally resonant terms have the greatest potential for

influence. They use words and images highly salient in the culture, which is to say

noticeable, understandable, memorable, and emotionally charged.2 Magnitude taps the

prominence and repetition of the framing words and images. The more resonance and

magnitude, the more likely the framing is to evoke similar thoughts and feelings in large

portions of the audience. The Bush administration s recurring use of words such as evil

and war in framing September 11, paired in many media reports with searing images of

the burning and collapsing World Trade towers, provide a textbook example of high

magnitude, high resonance framing. Resonance can sometimes overcome the need for

magnitude. Some words and images possess sufficient resonance to impress themselves

on public consciousness without requiring a significant number of exposures: airliners

flying into the World Trade Center on September 11, for instance.3

Substantive news frames4 perform at least two of the following basic functions in

covering events, issues, and political actors:

Defining effects or conditions as problematic

Identifying causes

Conveying a moral judgment of those involved in the framed matter

Endorsing remedies or improvements to the problematic situation

For September 11, the problematic effect was of course the death of thousands of civil-

ians in an act of war against America; the cause was terrorists; the moral judgment

condemned the agents of this assault as evil; and the remedy quickly became war against

the perpetrators. All four of these framing functions hold together in a kind of cultural

logic, serving each other, with the connections cemented more by custom and conven-

tion than by the principles of valid reasoning or syllogistic logic. The two most im-

portant of these functions are the problem definition, since defining the problem often

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418Robert M. Entman

virtually predetermines the rest of the frame, and the remedy, because it promotes sup-

port of or opposition to actual government action.5

Frame Dominance and Contestation

The framing of a given actor, issue, or event during a defined time period can be ar-

rayed along a continuum from total dominance by one frame to a completely even-

handed standoff between competing frames. Sometimes, one among the potential frames

of a situation so thoroughly dominates the media that alternative readings become virtu-

ally irrelevant to politics. In these cases, the dominant frame produces extraordinarily

one-sided survey results, and these in turn discourage dissenting politicians from speak-

ing out, thus cementing the hold of the one frame. Complacent views of America s free

press notwithstanding, especially in covering foreign policy it is not uncommon to find

overwhelmingly dominant frames in the news. Such is the case with the initial framing

of 9/11.

Figure 1 diagrams the continuum of frame contestation. Frame parity describes the

condition that free press theories prefer: two or more interpretations receiving something

like equal play. Parity requires not merely that the news provide bits of unrelated infor-

mation critical of the administration s frame scattered throughout the coverage. To reach

frame parity, the news must offer a counterframe that puts together a complete alternative

narrative, a tale of problem, cause, remedy, and moral judgment possessing as much

magnitude and resonance as the administration s. Availing themselves of such diverse,

clashing, and equally well-developed understandings, a democratic citizenry can in theory

freely and intelligently choose. As already suggested, frame parity is the exception, not the

rule. More frequently, frame contests occupy the left sector of the continuum, falling

somewhere between complete frame dominance and a degree of contestation.

This discussion does not pretend to capture the eternal and fixed essence of political

framing but is instead itself a heuristic, a shortcut guide to dealing with what might

otherwise be the unmanageable complexity of news texts. The concepts and terminology

proposed here constitute one attempt to reduce confusion and imprecision in the schol-

arly literature about the nature and functions of framing. It is not the only way to, as it

were, frame framing.6

Cascading Activation

Lodge and Stroh 1993, p. 248, emphasis added observe that the process of bringing

thoughts and feelings to mind works through the mechanism of spreading activation.

This idea of spreading activation plays a central part in the cascade model. Thus, a new

report showing a picture of Osama bin Laden has great cultural resonance, and will

likely reactivate an American s negative feelings, bringing to mind conscious or uncon-

scious memories of the burning World Trade Center, the heroes of the fire department,

and so forth. The spreading activation of thoughts or nodes within an individual s

mind whether a Congress member, a reporter, or a citizen 7 has parallels in the way

Figure 1. Frame contestation continuum.

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Contesting the White House s Frame After 9/11419

ideas travel along interpersonal networks and in the spread of framing words and im-

ages across the different media. The model is designed to help explain how thoroughly

the thoughts and feelings that support a frame extend down from the White House

through the rest of the system and who thus wins the framing contest and gains the

upper hand politically.8 Figure 2 illustrates the cascading flow of influence linking each

level of the system: the administration, nonadministration elites, news organizations, the

texts they produce, and the public.

Using the metaphor of spreading activation does not assume precisely analogous

processes at every level of the cascading system. Spreading activation of interpretations

within individuals knowledge networks is a largely automatic and unconscious psycho-

logical process, whereas the spread of interpretative schemas within and across other

levels of the system is rarely automatic or unconscious.9 What is analogous across the

levels is the existence of networks of association: among ideas, among people, and among

the communicating symbols words and images. The usefulness of the metaphor thus

rests in its highlighting of the similarities in the ways ideas activate and spread from

one location on the network to others, often quickly and with little trouble, but other

Figure 2. Cascading network activation.

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420Robert M. Entman

times with considerable conflict internal/mental, interpersonal, interorganizational, or

rhetorical.

Just as with real-world cascading waterfalls, each level in the metaphorical cascade

makes its own contribution to the mix and flow of ideas, but the ability to promote the

spread of frames is also highly stratified, both across and within each level. As is true of

actual waterfalls also, moving downward in a cascade is relatively easy, but spreading

ideas higher, from lower levels to upper, requires extra energy a pumping mechanism,

so to speak. Ideas that start at the top level, the administration, possess the greatest

strength. The president and top advisors enjoy the most independent ability to decide

which mental associations to activate and the highest probability of moving their own

thoughts into general circulation. The administration is distinguished from the other elite

network that joins Washington insiders who do not work in the executive branch: mem-

bers of Congress and their staffs, and sources from the community of Washington policy

experts and lobbyists former government officials, think tank denizens, university sages,

interest groups, and public relations firms. 10 The network of journalists consists of

reporters, columnists, producers, editors, and publishers who work for the important

national media. They communicate regularly with colleagues inside and beyond their

own organizations. Informal networks of association among news organizations also set

up a cueing system that runs roughly from the pinnacle occupied by the New York

Times and a few other elite outlets to other national media, to regional newspapers, and

to local papers and television stations. Administration figures and other elites maintain

social and professional contact with upper-tier journalists, exchanging information off

the record and on, at receptions, conferences, and elsewhere. This interface between

journalists and elites is a key transmission point for spreading activation of frames, and

it is not always easy to determine where the line between elite and journalist should

be drawn, or who influences whom. Arguably, a few top editors, correspondents, and

editorialists exercise more sway over the spread of ideas than all but the most powerful

public officials.

Representation of the public in this process flows in both directions. The cascade

model clarifies the hierarchy: Public opinion is typically a dependent variable, although

it sometimes feeds back to influence elites. In spreading ideas from the public up to

where they affect thinking of elites and the president, the main road is through the

media. If the news creates impressions that the idea is held widely and intensely by

large swaths of the public, it can affect leaders strategic calculations and activities.

However, this perception of where the public stands itself becomes a matter of framing,

an object of political power and strategy. If, say, elites are contending over an adminis-

tration decision and the White House can disseminate the notion that public opinion

favors the president, that perception can help delegitimize and silence the opposition.

This helps explain why, in so many cases, nonadministration elites fail to contest the

White House frame but also why, when conditions permit, elite opposition does some-

times arise and spread down the cascade to news texts and the public and perhaps up-

ward to alter the calculations of the administration.

All parties to this process operate under uncertainty and pressure, with mixed mo-

tives and varying levels of competence and understanding. All are cognitive misers

Iyengar McGuire, 1993; Sniderman, Brody, Tetlock, 1991 who work in accor-

dance with established mental maps and habits Fiske d Taylor, 1991; Marcus, Neuman,

MacKuen, 2000 and rarely undertake a comprehensive review of all relevant facts

and options before responding. Few political leaders or journalists have the time to do

that, and even fewer members of the public have the inclination.11 The implication of

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these cognitive limitations is that what passes between levels of the cascade is not

comprehensive understanding but highlights packaged into selective, framed commu-

nications. As we go down the levels, the flow of information becomes less and less

thorough, and increasingly limited to the selected highlights, processed through schemas,

and then passed on in ever-cruder form. The farther an idea travels between levels on

the cascade, the fainter the traces of the real situation are whether the actual percep-

tions, goals, and calculations of the president way at the top, or the true mix of public

sentiments moving from the bottom back up to policymakers.

In summary, let us consider exactly how the cascade model builds upon and supple-

ments previous approaches. First, it acknowledges variation and stratification within the

levels of the system. By no means always a unified actor, the administration includes a

variety of players, and disunity has significant implications for media coverage.12 Differ-

ent administrations act differently, and that too affects media responses. Sometimes a

congressional party puts up a unified front most often, the Republicans, other times it

is all over the map typically, Democrats, and disunity here also affects the news and,

particularly, the ability to carry out strategies of frame contestation. Moreover, all elites

are not equal: Some individuals in Congress or the media, for instance, can get attention

for their ideas far more easily than others. Second, the cascade model helps explain

whether elite dissent emerges. As indexing theorists have shown, open discord among

American leaders usually breaks out before the news deviates significantly from the

White House line. But we need to understand better why such disagreements arise in

some cases and not others, and the role the media play in triggering or suppressing

them. Third, the cascade model provides guidance on exactly what information in the

news is critical to politics and policy-making. Applying the concept of framing within

the cascade model helps identify and separate the important information from all of the

other data and noise that flow among policymakers, journalists, and citizens. In its full

application, the model allows us to avoid treating every assertion of assent or disagree-

ment in the news as equivalent, and to see in more detail exactly which aspects of the

White House line attract dissent and which earn acceptance. It also provides a means of

systematically analyzing visual, not just verbal, information see especially Entman, 2004,

chap. 3. Finally, the model illuminates the way news feeds back information about the

public to officials, and thereby influences their actions.13

Elites heavily influence media, which in turn significantly shape public opinion

that is why the public occupies the bottom level of the cascade, after all. But this model

also offers insight into the significant potential influence of perceived and anticipated

public reactions on what leaders say and do. And here again, it turns out to be crucial

that the information about public opinion that moves back up the cascade to leaders

travels in the form of frames Entman, 2004, chap. 6.

What, then, explains just how thoroughly the White House s preferred version actu-

ally flows down and dominates thinking and communication at each level. A full dis-

cussion is beyond the scope of this article, but in brief compass, the cascade model

identifies four variables that, acting together, can explain the emergence and outcomes

of frame contests. These are motivations; power and strategy deployed by the adminis-

tration and other elites ; and cultural congruence.

Motivations shape all participants responses to foreign affairs those of leaders,

journalists, and the public in predictable ways. Consider as one example the motiva-

tions that drive journalists. To control the news message, the White House must package

frames in ways that comport with the motivations of media personnel and organizations

see, e.g., Bennett, 2001; Cook, 1998; Entman, 1989. News organizations and personnel

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422Robert M. Entman

are driven by economic pressure and incentives; professional customs, norms, and prin-

ciples; and normative values. The latter include self-images as guardians of democracy,

and they may at times modify or overcome the restraining force of the economic pres-

sures and professional norms.

Whereas motivations pull mental associations into the minds of elites, journalists,

and citizens, power and strategy are the external forces that may push the activation of a

particular set of mental connections. Presidents power to influence other elites and the

media arises above all from their control over the government apparatus and especially

their authority over the military, which allows them to control facts on the ground that

shape policy. Nonetheless, presidential power varies among different administrations and

at different times, depending particularly on the president s perceived popularity and

effectiveness Edwards, 1990; Entman, 1989. Congressional elites also possess power,

rooted in their legislative prerogatives. Sooner or later all presidents contend with the

fact that Congress members and staffers and, to a lesser degree, experts and former

officials have a capacity to push opposing frames because they can influence policy

and thus enjoy a smaller degree of legitimate access to news organizations. Although

journalists possess less ability to shape news frames than members of the administration

or elite networks, they do have some independent power, arising from their capacity to

ask questions and to decide precisely which words and images to assemble and transmit.

As for strategies, deliberate, planned activation of mental associations is the prov-

ince mainly of elites. Word choice, information distribution and withholding, and timing

are among the strategic resources that help lend the White House and executive branch

greater control over framing than congressional or other elites, although they too engage

in strategic manipulation. Strategically maladroit administrations, such as the Carter and

Clinton White Houses, often found news frames spinning out of their control. Poor

strategy creates a power vacuum that opposing elites and journalists may enter with

their own interpretations. On the other hand, inventive presidential strategy can endow

frames with extra energy needed to penetrate down the levels.

Journalists do go through some strategic thinking in deciding how to frame their

stories, though their goal is rarely to exert power over outcomes. Rather, they seek to

produce good stories that protect and advance their careers and that accord with their

self-images as independent watchdogs who must provide a degree of balance to stories

see Althaus et al., 1996, and Althaus, 2003. An important if partial exception involves

investigative journalists, pundits, and editorial writers, who may strategize in hopes of

shaping policy, as indeed was true in the case discussed here. Members of the public do

little if any strategizing in deciding what positions to adopt on foreign policy cf. Sears,

2001, on citizens general disregard of self-interest in taking policy positions.

Finally, the substance of a news event or issue matters. How well its interpretation

comports with the political culture helps to determine whether the White House will

face a frame fight. Cultural congruence measures the ease with which all else equal

a news frame can cascade through the different levels of the framing process and stimu-

late similar reactions at each step. The more congruent the frame with schemas that

dominate the political culture, the more success it will enjoy. This is where the cascade

model most importantly supplements earlier theoretical approaches.

The most inherently powerful frames are those fully congruent with schemas ha-

bitually used by most members of society. Such frames have the greatest intrinsic capac-

ity to arouse similar responses among most Americans. On the other hand, for many

events or issues, culturally dominant schemas suggest conflicting or unclear interpreta-

tions. Framing of such ambiguous matters depends more heavily on motivation, power,

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Contesting the White House s Frame After 9/11423

and strategy. Finally, when it comes to news of matters incongruent with dominant

schemas, common culture blocks the spread of many mental associations and may dis-

courage thinking altogether.14 Figure 3 illustrates how these distinctions can be arrayed

along a continuum, with an imaginary tipping point where contradictions among dominant

schemas start to become dissonant or perhaps too complex for most people to handle

and therefore call forth a blocking response. September 11 was a case of congruence,

with the 9/11 terrorists quickly assimilated to the common schema of Islamic terrorism.

Ambiguity, however, has become far more common than it was during the Cold War.

Such military involvements as those in Somalia, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia offer

examples where dominant cultural schemas yielded contradictory understandings and

impulses. An example of an incongruent matter, one highly dissonant with common

culture, would be the 1988 incident in which a U.S. naval vessel shot down an Iranian

civilian airliner, killing 290 people. Research shows the media frame discouraged any

dissonant interpretation one holding the U.S. as morally culpable, as wantonly murder-

ous, for example. That was how the American media had depicted the Soviet Union

when its forces similarly and mistakenly destroyed a Korean passenger jet five years

earlier Entman, 2004, Chap. 2.

Contesting the Frame: The Villains of 9/11

For the purposes of this article, just one implication of the cascade model will be as-

sessed: Even where habitual schemas mark an easy path for spreading activation of

familiar mental associations, there is some room for contesting the administration s frame.

To be sure, motivations, culture, power, and strategy converge to drastically reduce im-

pulses to challenge during large scale combat operations in which U.S. forces appear to

be winning a speedy, relatively low-cost to America victory in pursuit of culturally

congruent objectives, such as the two wars in Iraq 1991 and 2003 and in Afghanistan.

Popular wars aside, however, journalistic motivations embodied in independent, watch-

dog self-images and ideals often encourage a move toward questioning government

authority more than was the habit during the Cold War. Indeed, even during popular

and seemingly successful wars, the media now pounce upon any signs of failure or

quagmire and in doing so may be applying their own evaluative criteria as much as

indexing elite opposition Entman, 2004, chap. 5. This move parallels a general fall in

institutional authority and prestige and a rise in public cynicism, sentiments that the

media both reflect and help to spread Jamieson Cappella, 1997; Patterson, 1993. In

this epoch, arguably, it is good or at least acceptable business and professional practice

for journalists to challenge the government line, at least to a point.

Figure 3. Cultural congruence and elite, media, and public responses.

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424 Robert M. Entman

These forces were clearly evident during the Clinton administration, whose defense

policies the media consistently challenged and at times vociferously condemned, some-

times for undertaking military interventions, sometimes for not intervening and some-

times for both. Unfortunately for Clinton, his administration coincided with the period

of particular confusion and ideological drift after the Cold War. Add ineffective use of

power and strategy on the part of the administration and disunified congressional Demo-

crats confronting relentlessly aggressive and mostly unified Republican elites, and media

motivations to include foreign elites critiques. The result: unsupportive coverage during

the Clinton years, even of successful interventions Entman, 2004, chap. 5 little evi-

dence indeed of hegemonic control.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, gave the second President Bush an opportunity

to propound a line designed to revive habits of patriotic deference, to dampen elite

dissent, dominate media texts, and reduce the threat of negative public reaction to

work just as the Cold War paradigm once did. In his 2002 State of the Union address,

George W. Bush defined terrorism as a global threat requiring a unified front of civi-

lized nations making war against an adversarial axis of evil that sponsors terrorism.

Like the communists of yore, the terrorists, driven by irrational ideology and opposed to

freedom and capitalism, conspire in secret and brutalize their own people and therefore

have no compunction about assaulting perceived enemies such as the United States. If

events seem to support this Manichean division of the world into enemy and friend, evil

and good, U.S. elites might together once again sustain an anchoring paradigm compa-

rable to the Cold War particularly if the United States remains at war against terror-

ism indefinitely cf. Livingston, 1994.

The general cooperation interrupted by spells of skepticism that did characterize

media responses to the Bush administration after 9/11 is instructive in this regard. In the

aftermath of September 11, Democrats took great care to publicly support the president s

problem definitions and remedies in Afghanistan. That meant the media themselves had

to take the initiative in challenging the administration, albeit in limited ways cf. Carr,

2003. The relative weakness of news organizations resistance to the Bush frame as

compared with their defiance of Clinton reflected in part the unifying impact of Septem-

ber 11, but it also illustrated the difference in potential media influence when a strategi-

cally skilled Republican rather than a less adroit Democrat holds the White House. The

discussion of what to do after Afghanistan traces the growing effectiveness of George

W. Bush s effort to tame the media by building a new paradigm around a war on terror-

ism demanding patriotic deference, while also revealing how media occasionally push

against these efforts. Although at first, claims about the need to target the Saudi regime

in the war on terror sank beneath the waves of celebration over Afghanistan, leaving

little trace on the news or public discourse, the challenge to the dominant frame did not

die entirely. It picked up steam to become more a part of mainstream news discourse a

few months after Hersh and Friedman first activated the link between terrorism and the

Saudi elite.

The Frame Contest

Seymour Hersh s 2002 article described the extensive support financial, cultural, and

otherwise that the Saudi leadership had given to Islamic extremism and terrorism. Hersh

suggested that it was no coincidence Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/

11 were Saudis, and pointed toward the need to recognize that this putative ally was

quite possibly a more critical target for American attention and perhaps wrath than

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Contesting the White House s Frame After 9/11425

Afghanistan. Thomas Friedman, probably the most influential foreign affairs columnist

in American journalism, published two essays 2001a, 2001b in the New York Times

that in much briefer terms raised serious questions about Saudi Arabia and included

assertions that the royal family itself had links to terrorism.

The fate of the Hersh/Friedman challenge was explored by looking for all mentions

of the word Saudi within five words of terror ism, ist in the Nexis Major Papers

library. This search, for the period October 1 through November 30, 2001, yielded 682

hits. Stories appearing in non-U.S. media, letters to the editor, and passing references

that did not clearly refer to the topic were excluded. That reduced the total number of

codeable items to 110. The vast majority of hits fell under the passing reference exclu-

sion. An example of a passing reference would be Al-Qaeda, Saudi-born Osama bin

Laden s terrorist network.. . . Such a reference simply conveys that bin Laden was

born in Saudi Arabia, and without implying anything larger about Saudi Arabia s re-

sponsibility for terrorism. A similar search was conducted on Nexis transcripts of the

ABC, CBS, and NBC news programs including such shows as Prime Time Thursday

and Nightline. This search yielded only 1 hit, so it was expanded by looking for all

appearances of the word Saudi within 25 words of terror ism, ist, which yielded 20

codeable items.

Only 25 of the 110 items explicitly linked the Saudi royals or government with

terrorism and thus might have activated a counterframing mental association. None ap-

peared before the first Friedman column on October 5. Interestingly, most 19 appeared

on editorial rather than news pages. It seems that news routines were not particularly

compatible with the counterframing problem definition. Of the nation s most influential

papers, only the Washington Post mentioned the matter on page 1. Tracking journalists

response specifically to the lengthy Hersh piece in the New Yorker also reveals that this

attempt to spread a new, counterframing idea fizzled. Searching Nexis s Major Papers

library for Hersh and Saudi during the same two-month period yielded just three

items, op-ed pieces by three local writers in regional papers, that went into any detail on

Hersh s findings. Arguably, these were the only U.S. newspapers out of 27 U.S. papers

in the Major Papers file offering readers a genuine opportunity to ponder and make

sense of the Hersh counterframe. As for television, four of the 20 stories explicitly

connected Saudi officialdom and terrorism. The rest of the television coverage skirted

the issue. Nightline, for instance, devoted an entire show to the role of the Saudis in the

war on terror November 8 without mentioning the Saudis own link to terrorism, fo-

cusing instead on whether Saudi leaders were doing enough to help the U.S. war effort.

It is safe to conclude that the counterframe did not spread across America s news

texts. The editorial pages of newspapers, freer of the constraints of standard newsbeats

and news definitions that render journalists dependent on official discourse, paid a bit

more attention to Saudi officials link with terrorism and offered more complete and

more resonant discussions of the counterframe. But editorials do not spread new thoughts

on their own. The counterframing themes need to activate and diffuse on the news

pages and in television news, where the majority of Americans might see them and

where elites perceive that the public will learn about them and possibly change their

views. Such diffusion would have required not merely the push of journalists themselves

but also political elites interested in contesting the dominant problem definition, causal

analysis, moral judgment, and remedy. In the early months of the war on terrorism, few

such elites spoke up. Instead, in the aftermath of military victory in Afghanistan, the

Bush administration began focusing attention on Iraq as the next problem to be rem-

edied in the war on terrorism.

Page 12

426Robert M. Entman

The cascade model suggests some explanations for elites quiescence on Saudi Arabia,

though they have to be speculative given the absence of data on elites and journalists

thinking and motives. On substantive grounds, one might have expected the Saudi con-

nection to be an inherently potent basis of elite opposition. Even after the 2003 war and

occupation, no persuasive evidence emerged that Saddam Hussein s regime gave signifi-

cant aid to al-Qaeda, or that it transferred weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.

In the meantime, as Hersh 2002 and others e.g., Baer, 2003 have discussed, the

Saudi elite and vast royal family tolerated and funded not just terrorist organizations but

a worldwide network of schools and mosques preaching hatred of the West and moder-

nity, and helping recruit new members for al-Qaeda and its ilk. Iraq s contributions to

anti-American terrorism were paltry by comparison, as the CIA s own analysts, among

others, concluded see, e.g., Hersh, 2003. But Iraq was an easier sell, and Saudi contri-

butions a tough one, in major part because cultural congruence favored attention to Iraq

and Hussein. They were already familiar enemies and conjured resonant memories readily

linked to the terrorist threat. Indeed, despite the complete absence of evidence, polls

showed that majorities of Americans came to believe Saddam Hussein was personally

involved in the 9/11 attacks.15 Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, had long been con-

structed as a moderate Arab regime and an ally of the U.S. Elites, especially Congress

members, lacked incentive to pursue the Saudi connection, because it was perilously

close to the tipping point between ambiguity and dissonant incongruity. As many of the

editorials noted, treating Saudi Arabia as an enemy would threaten oil supplies and raise

the cost to Americans of their beloved gas-guzzling cars and SUVs. The Bush adminis-

tration deployed its power over the policy-making machinery, and its public relations

strategic skills, to magnify the threat posed by Iraq, and tilting against that particular

windmill would have been foolhardy for Democrats in Congress. Lacking elite sponsors

to create newsworthy actions that might have enhanced the magnitude and resonance of

the notion, the Saudi connection remained obscure.

Three things happened to raise the visibility of the Saudi issue by promoting elite

dissent and media attention in the summer of 2002. First, the Washington Post broke a

story on August 7, 2002 Ricks, 2002, that an expert who briefed the U.S. Defense

Policy Board the previous month essentially made the Hersh-Friedman argument to this

secretive and powerful advisory group. The membership consists of experts and former

officials at the highest level, including former secretaries of State and Defense the likes

of Henry Kissinger, Harold Brown, and James Schlesinger. This piece resulted in a

flurry of news referring to allegations that Saudi Arabia supported terrorism.

Second, on August 15, 2002, families of 9/11 victims filed a lawsuit naming Saudi

Arabian royals among the defendants, alleging their culpability in the terrorist attacks.

The lawsuit generated some coverage, most briefly mentioning the Saudi-terrorism link,

but some using the text of the lawsuit to provide far more detail on the connection than

had previously appeared. Moreover, in a bit of intertextual networking, the lawsuit was

cited in stories that mentioned the Defense Board briefing, and vice versa.

Third, in part because of Saudi Arabia s adamant opposition to U.S. military action

against Iraq unlike its support for the first Gulf War in 1990–1991, the Saudi problem

became entangled with this increasingly controversial follow-up remedy for terrorism.

This led to such coverage as I m With Dick. Let s Make War. a sarcastic Times

column by Maureen Dowd, which began as follows:

I was dubious at first. But now I think Dick Cheney has it right. Making the

case for going to war in the Middle East to veterans on Monday, the vice

Page 13

Contesting the White House s Frame After 9/11 427

president said that our goal would be. . . a government that is democratic

and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic and religious

group are recognized and protected. O.K., I m on board. Let s declare war

on Saudi Arabia. Let s do regime change in a kingdom that gives medieval

a bad name. August 28, 2002, p. 19A

Just prior to this column s appearance, leading Republicans outside the administration,

including former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and former Secretaries of

State Lawrence Eagleburger and James Baker, had launched a seemingly coordinated

attack on the Iraq war option. In so doing, they apparently echoed sentiments voiced

within a divided administration by Secretary of State Colin Powell and others Wood-

ward, 2002. Even House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Senator Chuck Hagel, con-

servative Republicans, also voiced skepticism. Republican stalwarts wrote opinion

columns and appeared on talk shows urging that Bush reconsider the policy. All in all,

for a couple of months during the summer of 2002, Republicans behaved more like the

typically fractious Democrats Purdum, 2002. Some of the news and editorial reaction

used the GOP wrangling to bring up not only the Saudis failure to support the Iraq

option, but also the perhaps more direct peril to America posed by Saudi support of

terrorist groups and ideologies.

A Nexis search of major U.S. newspapers came up with 40 items from August 1–

31, 2002, that explicitly linked Saudi Arabia and terrorism. Of these, just 12 appeared

on editorial pages, compared with 28 news stories. This contrasts with the 25 items

published during two full months October and November after Hersh and Friedman s

lonely campaigns to raise the Saudi connection s salience, most 19 editorial opinion

rather than news. It seemed that the Saudi-terrorism link had finally become newswor-

thy enough to spread down to the public. In fact, a poll taken by a Republican firm

found the unfavorable rating for Saudi Arabia increased from 50 in May to 63 in

August 2002 Marquis, 2002; Fabrizio et al., 2002, suggesting that the negative public-

ity was attracting more public attention. Television news did not respond much to these

developments.16 Of the three major broadcast networks, only NBC on the Today Show

and Dateline mentioned the Saudi-terrorism link during August 2002, and none of the

nightly news shows even referred to the trillion-dollar lawsuit by the 9/11 families.17 But

Dateline August 25 did feature a long story detailing Saudi support of terrorism. With

an audience far exceeding that of any newspaper, Dateline offered millions of American

households vivid detail about the connection.

Conclusion

Although the lineage of the frame challenge appears traceable to Hersh s and Friedman s

own enterprise, the belief that Saudi Arabia contributed to the problem of terrorism

attained enough energy to spread across the news only after some leaders began echoing

that linkage back to the media. Among others, senators from both parties, including the

Democratic candidate for vice president in 2000, Joseph Lieberman, publicly attacked

Saudi Arabia. When in the summer of 2002 the extraordinary public debate pitting Re-

publican leaders against each other erupted over Iraq, Saudi refusal to provide vital

access to military bases for use as staging areas, and their general uncooperativeness,

brought into relief the frame challenge that Hersh and Friedman had started.

It was the Iraq war debate, though, that occupied center stage in the coverage. The

Saudi problem was probably never destined to be more than a sidelight, albeit a nagging

Page 14

428 Robert M. Entman

one from the Bush administration s perspective, but the intense opposition to Iraq did

for a time gain significant media attention. Although pressing for a focus on Saudi

Arabia would have been too great an ideological and political leap for most Republican

leaders, arguing against Bush s concentration on Iraq was not. The media may actually

have overrepresented elite skepticism about Bush s Iraq war plans in the summer of

2002, although it later moved to celebrating the war itself Entman, 2004, chap. 5.

According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs CMPA, 2002, a conservative

media research organization, during the period July 1–August 25, 2002, 73 of sources

quoted on ABC, CBS, and NBC news programs criticized the administration s Iraq

strategy, as did 71 of the sources quoted in the New York Times. Tellingly, 53 even

of Republican sources quoted were critical. Judging by the CMPA findings, far from

serving as an administration mouthpiece, the leading media lent credence to the op-

position by conveying, or perhaps even exaggerating, the scope of elite unrest over

Bush s plans.

Since the CMPA study did not measure magnitude or resonance, or look at other

media, this conclusion must be regarded as tentative, but if it is valid, the cascade model

would offer some insight. Despite the Bush administration s general strategic skill and

ultimate success in turning media coverage toward acceptance of its war on terrorism

frame and, in particular, its definition of the problem after Afghanistan as Iraq rather

than Saudi Arabia, something like frame parity over going to war unilaterally against

Iraq did arise during summer 2002. The unusual spectacle of open internecine warfare

within the Republican elite made it happen, but the media s apparent tilt did not reflect

open dissent from Democratic elites, who remained largely mum, or even from a majority

of Republican foreign policymakers, but rather journalists own professional motivations

to seize on administration discord and to balance White House frame dominance when

cultural ambiguity permits, as it did that summer. For during that time, the link between

the policy of war on Iraq and unchallengeable cultural precepts such as patriotism and

national interests remained murky.

The White House did not stand still for this situation. It deployed not just public

relations skills but its power over the government apparatus to reassert frame control.

For instance, it created a Pentagon unit to produce intelligence findings more supportive

of the Iraq-terrorism link than the CIA had offered Hersh, 2003. The Bush administra-

tion was ultimately successful, yet the pressure of media, internal dissent, and foreign

dissent forced it to alter its plans for unilateral and quick military intervention Wood-

ward, 2002. Bush had to wait during a long round of U.N. inspections, which embar-

rassingly found no evidence to support his claims about Iraq s intentions and capabili-

ties, followed by a failure to obtain U.N. approval for invasion. This failure in turn

imposed real diplomatic and economic costs on the U.S. The media alone certainly did

not cause this setback for the Bush administration, but they did contribute to the cascade

of thoughts and events, constraints and choices, with which the White House had to

contend.

This article does not argue that the period after September 11, 2001, or the particu-

lar case of the frame challenge over Saudi Arabia prove the validity of the cascade

model. Rather, it asserts that the new model can supplement well-established findings

and insights of research using the hegemony or indexing approaches. As hegemony

theorists would predict, 9/11 revealed yet again that media patrol the boundaries of

when government is promoting war, media are not entirely passive receptacles for

government propaganda, at least not always, and the cascade model illuminates deviations

Page 15

Contesting the White House s Frame After 9/11429

from the preferred frame. As index theorists suggest, elite discord is a necessary condi-

tion for politically influential frame challenges. The cascade model helps explain whether

those conditions arise and how journalists can hinder or advance them.

Notes

1. September 12, 2001.

2. This is not to imply that all effective frames must stimulate emotion, only that words or

images for which the culture s common schemas evoke strong emotional responses have a greater

probability of influencing more people than other words or images, if only because emotional

stimuli typically receive more attention from otherwise distracted, apolitical citizens Marcus,

Neuman, MacKuen, 2000. Scholars have shown that the cognitive and affective realms are

thoroughly intertwined e.g., Graber, 2001; Kuklinski, 2001; Lodge Taber, 2000, pp. 212–213;

Marcus, Neuman, MacKuen, 2000 ; emotion is not the opposite of rational thought but its

frequent companion.

3. See Kuklinski 2001 ; experimental work Gilliam Iyengar, 2000; Mendelberg, 2001

confirms the power potentially exerted by a single exposure to a racialized visual stimulus, for

instance. Yet, research on media effects typically relates amount of exposure directly to opinions,

neglecting that a single experience with the right kind of message can yield strong impacts cf.

Shrum, 1996. By the same token, media content studies typically only measure magnitude by

counting the repetitions of a message, often without including prominence for example, page 1

or page 22, let alone cultural resonance.

4. Procedural framing also pervades foreign news see Entman, 2004.

5. Often the same set of news stories simultaneously frame related events, issues, and

actors. Coverage of September 11 framed an event as an act of war, an issue war against

terrorism, and actors the Taliban, al-Qaeda, bin Laden.

6. For more on framing theory, see Entman 2004, Gamson 1992, and Reese, Gandy,

and Grant 2001.

7. This portrayal represents my synthesis of Lodge and Stroh 1993 with Taber, Lodge,

and Glathar 2001 ; Kintsch 1998 ; Kuklinski 2001 ; Lodge and Taber 2000 ; Sears 1993 ;

Jervis 1993 ; and Fiske and Taylor 1991 ; cf. Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991. Lodge

and Stroh s 1993, pp. 247–248 theory of schemas and long-term memory applies nicely to the

impacts of news frames: The basic characteristics of long-term memory are 1 node strength, the

inherent strength or accessibility of a node that determines the ease with which it is brought to

mind; 2 belief strength, the strength of association between connected nodes; 3 affective tags,

the evaluative weight of each node; and 4 the implicational relation believed to exist between

connected nodes.

8. See Wolfsfeld 1997, 2003 for related discussions of frame contests.

9. Scott Althaus personal communication pointed out the importance of this distinction.

10. See Manheim 1997 on strategic public relations and media coverage of foreign na-

tions and events; see Coleman and Perl 1999 on international policy networks; cf. Cook 1998.

11. As Sobel 2001 and others suggest, perhaps 5 –10 of the general public follows

world politics with some care. This segment s opinions may exert more influence on government

officials than the public as a whole, but discerning the actual state of informed opinion is diffi-

cult, as surveys rarely focus on that group.

12. Robinson 2002 emphasizes policy certainty or what might be termed unity

within the administration as a key variable. If an administration is internally debating a policy, it

opens the way for mediated dissent to influence its actions, according to Robinson. But once the

administration has come together, media criticism or elite disputation rarely make much differ-

ence. Robinson provides a useful synthesis of the hegemony and indexing models, one compat-

ible with much of the discussion here.

13. Studies in the subfield of public opinion and foreign policy typically take only brief

glances at the media. Exceptions include Page and Shapiro 1992 and Sobel 2001.

Page 16

430 Robert M. Entman

14. These categories of congruent, ambiguous, and incongruent can be compared to Hallin s

1986 formulation of three spheres in public discourse: consensus, legitimate controversy, and

deviance.

15. Los Angeles Times poll, April 2–3, 2003, accessed May 17, 2003, at www.pollingreport.com/

iraq.htm.

16. On the other hand, the popular fictional television drama about the White House, The

West Wing, did feature a subplot in which the United States had to deal with Qumar, a two-faced

Middle Eastern country, putatively allied with America, that oppresses its citizens and supports

anti-American activities. On the show, the United States stood up to Qumar, demanding a change

in its policies. Baum 2003 explores the possibility that entertainment television significantly

affects American public opinion on foreign affairs.

17. CNN does not appear to deviate markedly from the three broadcast networks. Accord-

ing to a Nexis search for September 11 and lawsuit, only twice did CNN s around-the-clock

news mention the families suits and the Saudi defendants during July or August 2002 Fox

News gave the matter a total of one mention.

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Cascading Activation: Contesting the White House's Frame After 9/11

1 Robust Network Routing under Cascading Failures Ketan Savla Giacomo Como Munther A. Dahleh Abstract We propose a dynamical model for cascading failures in.

Entman, criticizing hegemony and indexing models presents an important model in media policy relation, relating to foreign news, especially emphasizing what has.
564 CHAPTER 19. CASCADING BEHAVIOR IN NETWORKS In this way, considering individual choices with explicit network structure merges the models of the past.
The cascading activation model supplements research using the to the network of Cascading Activation: Contesting the White House s Frame.
Spreading activation is a method for searching associative networks, neural networks, or semantic networks. The search process is initiated by labeling a set of.

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Cascading Activation: the White House to the network of nonadministration elites, this article introduces the cascading activation model.

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