Framing the health care reform campaign of 1993-1994: News frame, interpretation, and public opinion change

This dissertation investigates the nature of public opinion change in relation to the way in which the public interprets news coverage of a political issue. The primary questions are how news frames influence the way people interpret news coverage of a complex social issue and whether different interpretations of news coverage affect their opinions. To address these questions, a framing model of public opinion change is proposed. The central propositions of the framing model assert that (1) a campaign context provides the public with conditions under which campaign messages can be interpreted; (2) news stories are typically organized or \u27framed\u27 in a way that emphasizes a particular story line as more relevant than others; (3) the individual takes up the interpretive cues from news frames to contextualize their overall interpretation of a public issue; and (4) interpretation constrains the way political considerations are brought up to evaluate the issue in a way that selects relevant considerations, emphasizes particular semantic associations among the considerations and constructs a coherent representation of a situation. The framing model was evaluated in three related studies within the context of the 1994 health care reform debate. Study 1 revealed that, at the aggregate level, news frames influenced public opinion independent of the evaluative implications of news stories. Study 2 tested a two-sided information flow model of public opinion change: the individual\u27s attitude toward the Clinton plan was associated with the extent to which he or she received and accepted the dominant media messages, the anti-Clinton plan messages. Study 3 demonstrated that individual interpretations of the health care reform debate accounted for public opinion change over and above the baseline model tested in Study 2. Taken together, the findings suggest that as news frames provide the public with a relevant interpretation of a political issue, the public uses concepts associated with its overall interpretation of the issue to construct attitudinal responses. Public opinion change thus is considered an outcome of complex interplay among media frames, the public\u27s active engagement in interpretation of media messages, and the effects of interpretation on attitudes