A bear in the woods? Threat framing and the marketplace of values

Security Studies

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 452-488

  Thrall, A Trevor ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34548514826     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410701547915     Document Type: Article

References (143)

1. See, for example, Chaim Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War," International Security 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004);
2. Joseph Cirincione, "Not One Claim Was True," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (January/February 2005);
3. Paul Pillar, "Intelligence, Policy, and theWar in Iraq," Foreign Affairs (March/April 2006);
4. John Prados, Hookwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold the War (New York: Cite 2004);
5. Seymour Hersh, "Who Lied to Whom?" The New Yorker, 31 March 2003;
6. Seymour Hersh, "The Stovepipe," The New Yorker, 27 October 2003;
7. Joseph Cirincione, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, George Perkovich, and Alexis Orton, WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, January 2004);
8. Jeffrey Record, Bounding the Global War on Terror (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2003);
9. Kenneth M. Pollack, "Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong," The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2004.
10. Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation."
11. Jane Kellett Cramer, "Sounding the Tocsin Redux: Persistent Patterns of Threat Inflation in the Marketplace of Ideas" (paper presented at the International Studies Association, Honolulu, Hawaii, 2005).
12. John Gray and G. W. Smith, eds., John Stuart Mill On Liberty: In Focus (London: Routledge, 1991), 40. In arguing against British censorship laws some years earlier, John Milton provided one of the most famous quotations for this view in his pamphlet, Areopagitica (1644): "And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"
13. Important early arguments about the connection between the marketplace and peaceful foreign policy include Jeremy Bentham, Works of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Russell and Russell Oxford University Press, 1999)
14. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983);
15. James Mill, On Liberty of the Press for Advocating Resistance to Government: Being Part of an Essay Written for the Encyclopedia Britannica, 6th ed. (New York: Free Speech League, 1913). Modern work on the democratic peace also emphasizes this process.
16. See, for example John Owen, "How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace," International Security 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1994). Democratic theory and work on deliberative democracy, in particular, has focused heavily on the notion that enlightenment via debate will lead to consensus.
17. See, for example, James S. Fishkin, The Voice of the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995);
18. Jon Elster, Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For an excellent review and experimental investigation of the impact of deliberation on public knowledge and opinions
19. see Jason Barabas, "How Deliberation Affects Policy Opinions," American Political Science Review 98, no. 4 (November 2004).
20. Ernest Bevin, cited in Ole Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 5.
21. Stephen Van Evera, "Primed for Peace: Europe after the Cold War ", International Security 15, no. 3 (Winter 1990/91): 27.
22. Jack Snyder and Karen Ballantine, "Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas," International Security 21, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 6.
23. See Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation." Kaufmann identifies this as a direct cause of market failure in the case of the Iraq war.
24. Snyder and Ballantine, "Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas," argue that the development of media independence and journalistic norms of objectivity is central to the market's healthy functioning.
25. Economic analyses of the marketplace of ideas include Gary Becker, "A Theory of Competition among Pressure Groups for Political Influence," Quarterly Journal of Economics 98, no. 3 (August 1983): 371-400.
26. More general but more influential among political scientists is Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957).
27. Even one of the harshest critics of modern marketplace imperfections, Jurgen Habermas, argues that people will tend toward consensus given a healthy "public sphere".
28. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
29. For arguments about imperfections specific to the American marketplace, see W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion, 6th ed. (New York: Longman, 2005);
30. Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality (New York: Wadsworth, 1993);
31. Robert M. Entman, Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);
32. Edward S. Hermann and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, updated ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).
33. Snyder and Ballantine, Νationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas," 12.
34. Snyder and Ballantine do an excellent job describing conditions leading to market imperfections. They too, however, assume that Western markets tend not to share these problems. Likewise, see Van Evera, "Primed for Peace." Surveying the chances for war in post-Cold War Europe, Van Evera argues that the spread of democracy and the concomitant development of an independent marketplace made Europe "primed for peace."
35. Previous work on threat inflation has not ignored the role of values entirely, but it has improperly relegated them to a secondary role. Snyder and Ballantine, for example, identify competing nationalist values as a key factor in marketplace outcomes. Nonetheless, their model assumes more economic rationality within Western marketplaces than is called for in my view. I seek here to redress the imbalance. On the role of values in determining opinions, see George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
36. For an argument that partisan attachments stem not from rational calculation of "interest" but from group identification, see Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist, and Eric Shickler, Partisan Hearts and Minds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
37. On the role of emotions, see Donald Kinder, "Reason and Emotion in American Political Life," in Beliefs, Reasoning, and Decision Making: Psycho-Logic in Honor of Bob Abelson, ed. Roger C. Schank and Ellen Langer (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994).
38. See also Neta C. Crawford, "The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotions and Emotional Relationships," International Security 24, no. 4 (Spring 2000): 116-56.
39. Samuel Huntington makes the same claim in his most recent work. Civilizational and individual identities, he argues, are the primary source of views about the good society and national security. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996);
40. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).
41. My argument here builds on the general theory of symbolic politics first laid out by Murray Edelman in Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (New York: Academic Press, 1971).
42. An important application of Edelman's approach to national security issues is Stuart J. Kaufman, The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
43. John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12-13.
44. For an excellent discussion of how critical interpretation is to the formation of opinions, see James H. Kuklinski and Norma L. Hurley, "It's a Matter of Interpretation," in Political Persuasion and Attitude Change, ed. Diana C. Mutz, Paul M. Sniderman, and Richard A. Brody (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
45. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 95.
46. Van Belle proposes a theory to explain the democratic peace that rests largely on this process. See Douglas Van Belle, "Press Freedom and the Democratic Peace," Journal of Peace Research 34, no. 4 (1997).
47. Finding fault with the news media's performance on this score is a cottage industry within the field of political communication. Few of these studies, however, question whether the most important purpose of the media is to transmit factual and analytical information regarding the claims of elites. For an extended critique of how the news falls short of rational and deliberative ideals, see the discussion of information biases in Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion, chap. 2.
48. Public opinion researchers often distinguish valence issues, those accepted as unquestionably good by the public and thus not subject to debate (security, health, safety, etc.), from position issues, those on which people tend to take divided stands. For a discussion pertinent to foreign policy opinions, see William Schneider, "Conservatism, Not Interventionism: Trends in Foreign Policy Opinion," in Eagle Defiant: United States Foreign Policy in the 1980s, ed. Kenneth A. Oye, Robert J. Lieber, and Donald Rothchild (Boston: Little, Brown 1983).
49. The twist here is simply the recognition that each group in society may have its own set of valence issues, some of which are not shared by the rest of society, and that tension between groups over these issues is common. Scholars of nationalism have noted such intergroup clashes over valence issues. An example would be prosperity for the Kurds, seen clearly as a positive valence issue among Kurds but likely not seen that way by other Iraqis. On the tendency of nationalist leaders to make outrageous but ultimately unfalsifiable claims about valence issues (such as God loves Serbia best), see, for example, Stuart Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001);
50. Stephen Van Evera, "Hypotheses on Nationalism and War," International Security 18, no. 4 (Spring 1994): 5-39;
51. Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991).
52. On how consistently American opinions diverge over competing values, see Lakoff, Moral Politics.
53. John Zaller has called these the "mainstreaming" and "polarization" effects. See John Zaller, Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, chap. 6.
54. More broadly the elite cues literature provides a range of evidence that mass opinion follows elite cues. See also, for example, Richard Brody, Assessing the President: The Media, Elite Opinion, and Public Support (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
55. Larson applies this argument to explain support for military intervention. See Eric Larson, Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for U.S. Military Operations (Santa Monica: Rand,1996).
56. This is particularly true for the United States where the ethos of objective journalism (or what Edward Jay Esptein calls "news from nowhere") is especially strong. In European democracies, there is a greater tradition of partisan news, though television news in those countries reflects the same objective approach seen in the United States. On objective versus partisan news, see Paul H. Weaver, "The New Journalism and the Old: Thoughts after Watergate," The Public Interest, Spring (1974);
57. Edward Jay Epstein, News from Nowhere: Television and the News (New York: Random House, 1973);
58. Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
59. On the partisan nature of mass media news in developing democracies, see Snyder and Ballantine, "Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas." Snyder and Ballantine indirectly support the argument made above. They show convincingly that nationalist (that is, non-objective) media have the capability to mobilize the predisposed audience to great heights. Understandably, they do not consider the flip side of this dynamic more pertinent to Western democracies, namely, that objective media focused on factual issues have less independent influence on public opinion and mobilization.
60. W. Lance Bennett christened this behavior "indexing," and has argued that the media have operationalized the principle of objectivity to mean "report what elites say" rather than to mean that journalists should seek the truth of a situation.
61. See W. Lance Bennett, "Toward a Theory of Press/State Relations in the United States," Journal of Communication 40, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 103-25;
62. Jonathan Mermin applies the indexing theory against cases of military intervention in Jonathan Mermin, Debating War and Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
63. Judith Miller, quoted in Michael Massing, "Now They Tell Us," New York Review of Books 51, no. 3 (February 2004).
64. On the emergence of impacts of adwatch stories, see Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen H. Jamieson, "Broadcast Adwatch Effects: A Field Experiment," Communication Research 21, no. 3 (June 1994): 342-65.
65. On the importance of partisanship in moderating the impacts of advertising, see Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar, Going Negative: How Attack Ads Shrink and Polarize the Electorate (New York: Free Press, 1995)
66. Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation," 8-9.
67. Cramer, "Sounding the Tocsin Redux."
68. Snyder and Ballantine, "Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas," 10.
69. Zaller, Nature and Origins, 313.
70. Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 356.
71. Wittkopf has labeled those sharing this set of beliefs about security "hardliners" and the general worldview supporting such beliefs "militant internationalism." See Eugene R. Wittkopf, Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).
72. Elvis Costello, quoted in Timothy White, "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock," Musician, October 1983, 52.
73. President George Bush, cited in Richard W. Stevenson, "Bush Says U.S. Needs Patience On Iraq War; Admits Errors," New York Times, 15 December 2005. Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll #2004-07, 29 January-1 February 2004 (Washington, DC: The Gallup Organization).
74. See Figure 7 for war support trends.
75. Those familiar with the sociology of knowledge literature will recognize a connection between my argument and the social construction of knowledge school. I do not adopt, nor does my argument require, an assumption that facts are unknowable or infinitely malleable. My argument should be seen as a soft social construction argument that the meaning of facts emerges from intersubjective debate, influenced by social structures and culture. The classic introduction to social construction of knowledge is Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).
76. Another excellent resource is Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
77. For a review of the debate during the first Reagan administration, see, for example, Barry R. Posen and Stephen Van Evera, "Defense Policy and the Reagan Administration: Departure from Containment," International Security 8, no. 1 (Summer 1983): 3-45.
78. Excellent discussions of these competing notions of national security include Barry R. Posen and Andrew L. Ross, "Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy," International Security 21, no. 3 (Winter 1996-97): 5-53;
79. Wittkopf, Faces of Internationalism;
80. Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
81. Condoleezza Rice, "Transformational Diplomacy" (lecture given at Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Washington, DC, 18 January 2006).
82. Huntington, Who We Are, xvi.
83. Alan Wolfe, Νative Son,Foreign Affairs (May/June 2004). The heated exchange of follow-up letters between Huntington and Wolfe further illustrates that the clash of values, rather than facts, took center stage even as the two argued over historical facts.
84. See Samuel Huntington and Alan Wolfe, "Creedal Passions," Foreign Affairs (September/October 2004).
85. Rev. Edward Lopez, cited in John Sullivan, "Who Are We?" The American Conservative, 19 July 2004, http://www.amconmag.com/ 2004_07_19/cover.html.
86. Anton Chaitkin, "What Do You Mean, We?" Executive Intelligence Review, 21 May 2004.
87. Robert Entman, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.
88. Robert Entman, "Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm," Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 52.
89. Riker is often credited with giving framing a jump start within political science, offering it as a bridge between rational choice and other methodological approaches. See William H. Riker, "Political Theory and the Art of Heresthetics," in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. A. Finifter (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1983).
90. See also Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action.
91. For a specific reference to foreign policy, see Entman, Projections of Power;
92. Kaufmann, Modern Hatreds.
93. Herbert Gans, Deciding What's News (New York: Vintage Press, 1980)
94. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: The Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980);
95. Daniel C. Hallin, We Keep America On Top: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
96. Stephen D. Reese, Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., and August E. Grant, Framing and Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001).
97. For perspectives on international and conflict news framing since 9/11, see Pippa Norris, Montague Kern, and Marion Just, eds., Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government, and the Public (New York: Routledge, 2003).
98. It is easier to recognize these social processes as they apply to others: Witness the international conversation taking place concerning the role of madrassas (religious schools) in inculcating students with a radical Islamic worldview. See, for example, Robert Looney, "Pakistan's educational system: The challenge of the Madrassas," The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies 28, no. 3 (Fall 2003).
99. A recent essay asserts, "...framing has become the dominant paradigm for understanding public opinion formation."
100. See Paul M. Sniderman and Sean M. Theriault, "The Structure of Political Argument and the Logic of Issue Framing," in Studies in Public Opinion, ed. Willem E. Saris and Paul M. Sniderman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
101. See also Richard Lau and Mark Schlesinger, "Policy Frames i, Metaphorical Reasoning, and Support for Public Policies," Political Psychology 26, no. 1 (2005);
102. James N. Druckman, "Political Preference Formation: Competition, Deliberation, and the (Ir)relevance of Framing Effects," American Political Science Review 98, no. 4 (November 2004): 671-86;
103. Dietrich Scheufele, "Framing as a Theory of Media Effects," Journal of Communication (1999).
104. The above works build on the foundation laid by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in their following: "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice," Science 211, no. 4481 (1981): 453-58;
105. "Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions," Journal of Business 59, no. 4, part 2;
106. The Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory (October 1986): S251-78.
107. Application of these concepts to the study of society, however, owes a deep debt to another pioneering work: Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Goffman introduces the notion of framing into sociological analysis; it is the launch pad for a great deal of work on framing in both sociology and political science.
108. A thorough test of news media impact requires a great deal of time-consuming content analysis that was beyond the scope of the current project.
109. Vincent Price and John Zaller, "Who Gets the News? Alternative Measures of News Reception and Their Implications for Research," Public Opinion Quarterly 57, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 133-64. Price and Zaller found that simple measures of prior political knowledge predicted news reception better than any of the other previously used, more common measures such as education, self-reported news consumption, and interpersonal communication.
110. The polls used include the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations Worldviews 1998, 2002 and Global Views 2004. The 2004 knowledge scale was created with questions 1035 and 1037. Thanks to the large survey samples (N = 1195 in 2004, for example), there are enough people in each cell (such as in the "liberal and most aware" group) to be confident in the statistical significance of the findings. All cells analyzed in the paper contain at least seventy-five people.
111. I have excluded moderates from the figures and from my discussion here because they fall in all cases, as expected, between liberals and conservatives and thus add little to the theorizing process. Moderates do, of course, play an important role in the creation and maintenance of majority support.
112. This argument has been made since 1920. Walter Lippmann argued that "those citizens] who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information." Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 54-55.
113. George Edwards makes this point in his excellent work, On Deaf Ears (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Price and Zaller also make this point in "Who Gets the News."
114. My debt to Zaller's work is especially heavy at this point. See Zaller, Nature and Origins. George Edwards makes a similar argument looking at presidential efforts to "go public" more generally. Edwards argues that presidents are not nearly as successful, as has often been presumed, at winning public support for their policy proposals. Instead, Edwards finds that presidents tend to do well at mobilizing their own supporters but poorly at winning the support of other partisans. S
115. ee Edwards, On Deaf Ears.
116. This partisan divide holds for the general public as well. A majority of the general public identified one additional threat as critical (AIDS, Ebola, and other viruses), and majorities of liberals and conservatives also agreed that chemical and biological weapons were a critical threat. However, there were still no instances of a critical threat with a threat perception gap less than ten percentage points.
117. Various psychological explanations have been offered as to why the public would be more afraid of the world in the wake of 9/11. Interestingly, most of these suggest even if not explicitly that threat inflation should be easier for elites after 9/11. Poll data suggest, however, that this effect, if real, did not last long, at least among independents and liberals. On the psychological impact of 9/11, see, for example, Shana Kushner, "Threat, Media, and Foreign Policy Opinion (paper presented at the 2004 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, 2004).
118. See also Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, Charles Taber, Gallya Lehav, "Threat, Anxiety, and Support of Antiterrorism Policies," American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (July 2005).
119. Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation." Kaufmann borrows the central argument of the hegemonic theory of the news media advanced by Noam Chomsky and others. In this view, the press rely heavily on elites to define and interpret news and do little to challenge the status quo.
120. John Mueller makes the same argument about rising support for Desert Storm in 1991. Not until President George H.W. Bush sent 500,000 troops to the Persian Gulf did he begin to see significant support for his policy build See John E. Mueller, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
121. Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll #2003-12, question 18, 7 February 2003 (Washington, DC: The Gallup Organization).
122. Jason Barabas, "Certitude: Uncertain Knowledge and Message Clarity in Mediated Deliberation" (paper presented at the American Political Science Association Conference for International Communication and Conflict, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 2005).
123. Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA)/Knowledge Networks Poll, "Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War," (College Park: PIPA, University of Maryland, 2 October 2003). It should be noted that PIPA itself did not support this conclusion from its data. 64 Barabas, "Certitude," 15.
124. These same frames may also have led people to make different choices with respect to news sources. However, threat framing theory also suggests that the likely impact of Fox News watching for conservatives would flow not from its factual accuracy but instead from its more general reinforcement of the conservative worldview and priming of conservative values.
125. By January 2004, 42 percent of Republicans were still certain Iraq had been trying to develop WMD while just 17 percent of Democrats were certain. Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll, #2004-07. It is worth pointing out here that frames make learning facts difficult and that contrary to marketplace of ideas theory, false facts are far stickier than typically allowed even if a marketplace is healthy in all respects. On the other hand, I believe this also shows that in a complex world full of uncertainty, people usually use their values and frames as heuristics to make decisions about issues with which they have no firsthand experience. The author admits to having doubts himself as to which response he would give if asked the question: "Do you think Iraq was trying to develop WMD?"
126. Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll #2004-07.
127. On Bush's rhetorical strategy, see, for example, Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kusher, "Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11-Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration's Rhetoric," Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 3 (September 2005). See also John Western, Selling Intervention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2005).
128. Though the purpose of the paper is not to identify the precise reasons for polarization over Iraq, I believe we are getting closer to the real explanation when we look at the partisan division over the morality of the war. By May 2004, just 23 percent of Democrats believed the war had been morally justified, compared to 83 percent of Republicans. See the Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll #2004-18, 21-23 May 2004 (Washington, DC: The Gallup Organization).
129. Zaller provides similar models of differential opinion change in response to competing messages of varying intensity. See Zaller, Nature and Origins, chap. 7.
130. See, for example, Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, American Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (New York: Wiley, 2005).
131. John Stuart Mill himself makes a strong case for tolerance concerning the manner in which people make arguments. Writing about objectionable debate tactics he argues, "The gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion. But all this, even to the most aggravated degree, is so continually done in perfect good faith, by persons who are not considered, and in many other respects may not deserve to be considered, ignorant or incompetent, that it is rarely possible on adequate grounds conscientiously to stamp the misrepresentation as morally culpable...." Gray and Smith, John Stuart Mill On Liberty, 70.
132. Robert Entman makes a similar argument in Projections of Power, chap. 2
133. The vivid coverage of the disastrous raid in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 is often cited as an example of this dynamic. See Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of the News Media, Foreign Policy and Intervention (New York: Routledge, 2002);
134. Steven Livingston. and W. Lance Bennett, "Gatekeeping, Indexing, and Live-Event News: Is Technology Altering the Construction of News?" Political Communication 20, no. 4 (October 2003).
135. Matthew A. Baum and Samuel Kernell, "Has Cable Ended the Golden Age of Presidential Television?" American Political Science Review 93, no. 1 (March 1999).
136. A handful of works making arguments along these lines includes John E. Mueller, "Devils and Ducttape";
137. Samuel F. Wells, Jr., "Sounding the Tocsin: NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat," International Security 4 no. 2 (Autumn 1979): 116-58;
138. James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990);
139. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).
140. See, for example, J. Michael Sproule, Democracy and Propaganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
141. On the power of the American cultural bias (in this case relating to racism) on public opinion and elite framing efforts in World War II, see James Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1987).
142. Richard Clarke's story of trying to raise the alarm about Al Qaeda before 9/11 stands as a stark proof of the potential for threat deflation. See Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004).
143. James Madison, "Federalist, no. 10," 22 November 1787, in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Pocket 2004).