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

TLDR

After 9/11, President Bush’s framing dominated the news, and scholars note that elite discord is necessary for influential frame challenges, prompting the cascading activation model to supplement hegemony and indexing research. The article proposes a new model of government–media framing in U.S. foreign policy and illustrates it by analyzing Hersh and Friedman’s attempts to shift focus from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia. The cascading activation model traces how frames move from the White House through nonadministration elites to news outlets and the public, with interpretations feeding back upward.

Abstract

President Bush's initial frame for the attacks of September 11, 2001, overwhelmingly 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 stratified 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 Friedman, who attempted to shift the focus from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia. As hegemony 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 passive receptacles for government propaganda, and the cascade model illuminates deviations from the preferred frame. As index theorists suggest, elite discord is a necessary 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.