Cascading Activation: Contesting the White House's Frame After 9/11

President Bush's initial frame for the attacks of September 11, 2001, overwhelmingly dominated the news.Using that frame as a springboard, this article advances a coherent conception of framing within a new model of the relationship between government and the media in U.S. foreign policy making.The cascading activation model supplements research using the hegemony or indexing approaches.The model explains how interpretive frames activate and spread from the top level of a stratified system (the White House) to the network of nonadministration elites, and on to news organizations, their texts, and the public-and how interpretations feed back from lower to higher levels.To illustrate the model's potential, the…