Local Television News Coverage of President Clinton's Introduction of the Health Security Act

(Journal of the American Medical Association, 1996) examines the role of the media in legislative agenda setting by comparing how national health care reform was presented to the public by television news, how it was presented to Congress by President Clinton, and what was contained in the legislation itself. This study was noteworthy for the scope of the analysis (we coded the hundreds of television news stories for content), and for its insights into how public agendas are framed by the press. We found (as others have) that the media focused disproportionately on the politics of the reform effort. However, we also found that when television news focused on the issues, it focused disproportionately on the expected costs of reform and thus downplayed its potential benefits.

John Wilkerson, Helen Halpin Schauffler, and Lori Dorfman (UC/Berkeley)