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C H A P T E R 3 Elite Rhetoric, Media Coverage, and Rallying ’Round the Flag In the 1930s, Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI) was one of the most consistent and powerful foreign policy isolationists in the Senate. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor that prompted America to enter the Second World War, Vandenberg steadfastly opposed President Franklin Roosevelt ’s attempts to increase American involvement in the conflict and actively worked to constrain Roosevelt’s foreign policy through legislation, including the Neutrality Acts. In contrast Vandenberg increasingly came to advocate “bipartisanship” in the conduct of foreign policy during and after the war, by which he meant “mutual effort, under our indispensable two-Party system, to unite our official voice at the water’s edge so that America speaks with maximum authority against those who would divide and conquer us and the free world” (Vandenberg 1952). For Vandenberg, this united voice did not preclude free debate and the frank exchange of views in the derivation of the policy. Rather, he argued that, at its core, this unity “simply seeks national security ahead of partisan advantage” (Vandenberg 1952). Speaking nearly 50 years after Vandenberg , Representative Lee Hamilton (D-IN) echoed Vandenberg’s famous sentiment, arguing that “foreign policy always has more force and punch when the nation speaks with one voice. . . . A foreign policy of unity is essential if the United States is to promote its values and interests effectively and help to build a safer, freer, and more prosperous world” (Hamilton 2001). In this chapter, we examine the degree to which American politicians have in fact spoken with one voice on foreign policy issues, and whether such unity truly matters for public opinion. To do so, we analyze network news coverage of congressional evaluations of the president and his administration in periods surrounding the initiation of all major U.S. uses of military force between 1979 and 2003. We propose to demonstrate that even after accounting for a wide range of indicators of empirical reality , communication still plays a crucial, independent role in influencing public support for the president during foreign crises. We further show that, rather than simply parroting the statements of Washington elites, public opinion in these crises varies systematically with the credibility of Rallying ’Round the Flag • 47 those statements, as well as with the institutional context in which political communication takes place and the characteristics of the receivers—that is, depending on who the president is at the time of a crisis, who is speaking about it, and who is listening to their rhetoric. To accomplish these tasks, we undertake a series of statistical analyses testing nine media and opinion hypotheses derived in chapter 2, as well as several of the theoretical assumptions underlying the hypotheses. The first set of tests include three media-focused hypotheses: Oversampled Presidential Party Criticism (H1: the media will present more negative than positive evaluations of the president by his own party), Salient Crisis Novelty (H2: the amount of criticism, relative to praise, will increase during high-salience rally periods), and Divided Government Media (H7: the proportion of credible praise relative to credible criticism will be greater in divided than in unified government). In the second part of the analysis, we test six opinion-related hypotheses : Partisan Credibility (H4: evaluations of the president will have a stronger effect on members of the same party as the evaluator), Costly Credibility (H5: net of party affiliation, costly evaluations will have a stronger effect than cheap talk), Combined Credibility (H6: positive evaluations of the president by elites in the nonpresidential party [NPP] and negative evaluations by members of the president’s own party [PP] will have the strongest effects on their fellow partisans), Divided Government Opinion (H8: aggregate public opinion rallies will be more positive in divided government), and Salient Rally Praise and Criticism (H9: during rally periods with U.S. casualties, positive evaluations by members of the NPP will produce smaller effects than during other periods, positive comments by members of the PP should be similarly unpersuasive in periods with or without casualties, and negative evaluations by either party will have a bigger negative effect than during other periods). Finally, as a validity check on several of our theoretical assumptions, we surveyed national samples of citizens and professional journalists on their news preferences. Before turning to our empirical tests, however, we first describe the data set we employ as the basis for our statistical testing in this chapter, as well...

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