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DEMONSTRATING THE CNN EFFECT
the Gulf crisis, this study reveals that television news did not merely
shadow the debate occurring among U.S. officials. Journalists fre-
quently presented competing perspectives and were often the instiga-
tors rather than merely gatekeepers of critical viewpoints. These
findings suggest that the press was much more independent in report-
ing the Persian Gulf crisis than scholars of political communication
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usually presume it to be.
Furthermore, the indexing hypothesis does not necessarily
contradict the claims of the CNN effect model outlined in this chapter,
because the same studies that have supported indexing have failed to
disprove its antithesis—that government elites develop their positions
based on the media. The inability to conclude decisively who leads
whom opens up a third plausible explanation: that both journalists
and elites in a given society take similar positions because they come
from the same culture and are inclined toward similar culturally
conditioned responses. This is an explanation that Zaller and Chiu
cannot rule out based on an extensive study of 42 foreign policy crises
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between 1945 and 1999.
Commenting on the work of Lance
Bennett, Zaller and Chiu conclude, “The empirical results are equally
consistent with the thesis of press dependence on Congress, with a
thesis of congressional dependence on the press, and with a thesis that
some ‘third factor’ causes both press slant and congressional opinion,
thereby inducing a spurious correlation between them.” 102 Reference to
a “third factor” leads to one of the key assumptions of this book—that
media and political elites are both ultimately bound by their political
culture. Some advocates of indexing seem to have perhaps inadver-
tently already assumed this in their research. In his assessment of the
1991 Gulf War, for example, Mermin, looking at the antiwar move-
ment, observes that “one does not expect mass demonstrations
against American foreign policy to have much influence on elite
commentators, unless there is evidence of a general deterioration in
public support.” 103 Separately, research on British media coverage of
the 2003 Iraq War also demonstrates indexing based on perceived
public opinion rather than on elite opinion, providing additional
evidence of deeper influences at work. 104
While the indexing hypothesis effectively demonstrates a link
between media criticism and elite dissensus under some research
designs, it does not address the more important question of why elite
political dissent emerges in the first place. As such, the indexing
hypothesis is largely instrumentalist in nature. The CNN effect model
presented earlier argues that dissent from (or challenge to) official