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9. POLITICAL COMMUNICATION EFFECTS 225

media effects. Iyengar based his experimental studies of framing on dif-
ferences between episodic and thematic coverage. Episodic coverage,
characterizing much of day-to-day journalism, grows out of standard
news events and news values.
Bennett (2001) also examined episodic news routines and suggested
several common flaws in news: Personalization is the focus on individuals
and incorrectly seeing large social issues in terms of individual actors.
Fragmentation is the presentation of information in ahistorical capsule
summaries, disconnected from each other. Dramatization is using news
values rather than importance as selection criteria, suggesting that many
important but undramatic issues do not make the news unless they reach
crisis proportions. Finally, normalization is the overlaying of problems
with solutions emanating from the political system, thus reinforcing exist-
ing power structures.
Although the literature on the content of political communication con-
tinues to grow, there is much more work that needs to be done to connect
content characteristics to effects consequences. For example, researchers
might attempt to systematically investigate how the content characteris-
tics identified by Bennett (2001), as described previously, might translate
into specific audience effects. Perhaps the areas where the content-effects
linkage has received the most recent attention are the assessments of
priming and framing effects (Iyengar, 1991; McLeod & Detenber, 1999;
Pan & Kosicki, 1997; Reese et al., 2001), both of which are described in the
following section.

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION EFFECTS

Political communication effects research has continued to develop in
ways that reflect (a) the increased complexity of effects models, (b) aug-
mented conceptions of media messages, and (c) expanded emphasis on
diverse types of effects. Cognitive aspects of political psychology con-
tinue to expand their influence in the field, providing new concepts and
relationships for future study (Lodge & McGraw, 1995).
Complex models have been developed that go beyond the predisposi-
tional demographic forces in the Columbia model and the influences of
partisanship in the Michigan model. These complicated models reflect the
realities of voters using informational shortcuts and uncertainties of cog-
nitive judgmental processes (Herstein, 1985; Lau & Erber, 1985). Although
the early cognitive models did not explicitly include media variables, they
did assume that the media are major sources of information for judgments
included in the models. Recent work has tended to stress complex infor-
mation environments (Rahn, 1995), motivated political reasoning and