What Gets Covered? How Media Coverage of Elite Debate Drives the Rally-'Round-the-Flag Phenomenon, 1979-1998

In seeking to explain the causes of the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon, some scholars have cited a surge of patriotism when the president focuses the nation's attention beyond the water's edge. Others have attributed the effect to an absence of elite criticism, or of media coverage of critical views, in the initial stages of foreign crises, when the Administration is the media’s primary source of information. Still others have found evidence that the magnitude of rallies depends upon the extent of bipartisan support for a president's foreign policy. With several notable exceptions (esp. Brody 1991), most of these arguments are based on an assumption that elite debate, or the lack thereof, is mirrored in media coverage. And even those studies that have explicitly tested this assumption have done so with respect to only a small number of cases. As a consequence, the most broadly accepted explanations for the rally phenomenon – an absence of initial elite criticism reflected in uncritical media coverage – remains largely untested. This study corrects that deficiency. We undertake a comprehensive examination of television coverage of all major U.S. uses of military force from 1980 to 1998. Specifically, we content analyze all congressional evaluations of the president and the executive branch of government that appeared in ABC’s World News Tonight within a 60-day time period centered on the start date of each use of force. We use this data to test a series of hypotheses concerning the nature and significance of the rally phenomenon. We find, contrary to the arguments of Brody (1991) and others, that elites show little inclination to suspend partisan attacks on the president during crisis periods. Indeed, we find an overwhelming prevalence of critical comments by Members of Congress before and in the immediate aftermath of rally events. Although presidents are not particularly successful at changing the tenor of elite debate when they employ military force, they are somewhat more successful at changing its subject. Indeed, consistent with the diversionary war hypothesis, we find that elite commentary immediately following the initiation of rally events turns disproportionately toward foreign policy. We conclude, in part, that the existence or absence of rallies is unlikely to be attributable to variations in the tenor of elite debate as presented in the mass media, and that politics was no more likely to stop at the water’s edge in the final decade of the Cold War than in the post-Cold War era.