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In this 1992 book John Zaller develops a comprehensive theory to explain how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences. Using numerous specific examples, Zaller applies this theory to the dynamics of public opinion on a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign policy, trust in government, racial equality, and presidential approval, as well as voting behaviour in U.S. House, Senate, and presidential elections. The thoery is constructed from four basic premises. The first is that individuals differ substantially in their attention to politics and therefore in their exposure to elite sources of political information. The second is that people react critically to political communication only to the extent that they are knowledgeable about political affairs. The third is that people rarely have fixed attitudes on specific issues; rather, they construct 'preference statements' on the fly as they confront each issue raised. The fourth is that, in constructing these statements, people make the greatest use of ideas that are, for various reasons, the most immediately salient to them. Zaller emphasizes the role of political elites in establishing the terms of political discourse in the mass media and the powerful effect of this framing of issues on the dynamics of mass opinion on any given issue over time.

This article develops a model of the relationship between candidates, journalists, and citizens in the game of media politics. For politicians, the goal is to gain public support by using reporters to get their story out, while, for reporters, the goal is to do stories that increase market share while emphasizing the independent and significant voice of journalists. These goals conflict with one another, leading the two groups into a turf war for control of political communication. The article proposes the rule of product substitution to explain how this struggle plays out in the context of presidential election campaigns. The rule asserts that reporters react to candidates' attempts at news management by creating alternative forms of news—most of it negative—that they can market to the public in place of candidate-supplied information, thereby vindicating journalistic voice. The article shows that, consistent with this rule, candidates who try to control their media images through aggressive news management suffer more frequent press criticism, even after controlling for the media negativity that may initially cause aggressive news management.