NELSON, Thomas E.  <br/><br/>
Media framing of a civil liberties conflict and its effect on tolerance 

 - New York, NY :  Cambridge University Press,  September 1997 
<br/><br/> About 50 million Americans watch the CBS, NBC, or ABC network news on an average evening, and an even greater share of the public watches at least a portion of their favorite local news broadcast (Ansolabehere, Behr, and Iyengar 1993). Among those citizens who rely on only one news outlet, television is preferred over newspapers and other sources by wide margins (Ansolabehere, Behr, and Iyengar 1993), and television news also enjoys the most trust of any news source at the national and local level (Kaniss 1991). An institution with such broad reach and appeal would seem to carry great potential power to shape the political views and outlooks of ordinary citizens, yet media scholars have differed sharply about the effect of the news in general and of television news in particular, often dismissing media impact as "minimal" at best (McGuire 1985, Patterson and McClure 1976). While numerous individual and institutional reasons could account for weak media effects (Ansolabehere, Behr, and Iyengar 1993; Beck, Dalton, and Huckfeldt 1995), some failures to find media effects can be blamed on weak research designs or measurement error (Bartels 1993, Graber 1993). Further advancement of the conceptual and analytical tools needed to describe and measure the often subtle effects of the news is required.