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Critics often complain that network television election coverage is too short, too superficial, and too focused on "horse race" and strategy. As a result, television news viewers are believed to have an inadequate basis for making intelligent democratic electoral choices. Short, fast-moving, episodic stories and dramatic images convey news frames that fail to inform and empower citizens wishing to make the sort of thoughtful, issue-based choices valued by democratic theorists. Many of these critics laud Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) coverage for its greater story length, use of knowledgeable experts, focus on substantive issues, and lack of dramatic imagery. However, our research shows that despite many differences in the structure of PBS stories, its election news frames are surprisingly similar to those of the oft-criticized commercial networks. Our analysis of ten story frames appearing in PBS and ABC evening news coverage of the 1996 presidential election reveals that public and commercial stories were dominated by horse-race and strategy frames to the exclusion of frames that focus on the prospective and retrospective consequences of candidates' actions and proposals. Our analysis shows that PBS coverage is more comparable to network news coverage than is widely believed, and we suggest that, like network television, PBS frames election news in terms that are disempowering to democratic processes.

Argues that both public and commercial news stories frame election campaign news in terms of a strategic battle rather than focusing on issues, ideology, or candidate records; based on an analysis of Public Broadcasting Service and ABC coverage of the 1996 presidential election; US.

Agenda building is the process through which demands of various groups in a population are translated into issues which vie for the attention of decision makers (formal agenda) and/or the public (public agenda). This paper presents three models for the comparative study of agenda building. The outside initiative model describes groups with minimal prior access to decision makers, who must consequently first expand their issues to a public agenda before they can hope to reach the formal agenda. The mobilization model accounts for issues which are placed on the formal agenda by political leaders, who subsequently attempt to expand these issues to the public agenda to obtain the support required for implementation. The inside access model refers to leaders, or to those having close contact with these leaders, who seek to place issues on the formal agenda directly, and for whom expansion to the public agenda is both unnecessary and undesirable.Propositions are stated about intergroup variation in patterns of agenda building within societies; about variations in success rates for different strategies and probabilities of occurrence for the three models in different types of societies; and about characteristics of the agenda-building process which hold in all three models and in any social setting.