Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 2, Summer 2005, pp.

324–336

BOOK REVIEWS

Robert M. Entman. Projections of Power: Framing News, Public

Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2003. 240 pp. $40.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).

WILLIAM A. GAMSON
Boston College

Projections of Power is a book about who wins framing contests and why.
Entman offers us a model that “highlights what the hegemony model neglects:
that the collapse of the Cold War consensus has meant [that] differences
among elites are no longer the exception but the rule. Patriotic deference to
the president does not come automatically or last indefinitely, and hegemonic
control is a tenuous feature of some but not all foreign policy news” (p. 5).
Entman calls his model of the process “cascading network activation.”
Picture a waterfall with the water bouncing down a series of ledges, which
produce some splash-back to the level above. The cascade begins with the
administration, bounces down to other elites who may pass it along or splash
it among themselves in varying degrees, depending on a number of variables.
Then, the somewhat altered water gets bounced down to the media, who,
again, pass it on pretty much as received or splash it around, turning the water
into news frames for the public. The public, in this model, is pretty much the
“perceived” public as reflected in voting behavior, polls, and other measures
of aggregated individual behavior. Splash-back here comes in the perception
that a particular frame does not play well in Peoria.
A lot of the interest, of course, is on what the amount of splash-back
depends. Entman takes us through a number of foreign policy examples
(Grenada, Panama, Bosnia, Libya, among several others), almost all of them
before the Iraq war and 9/11. He argues that even though the events of 9/11
and the terrorist threat presumably produced the need for symbolic reassurance
provided by the president, the media have not fallen into line in the way they
have in the past. “The media’s failure to provide unalloyed support for the
leader in this time suggests something new” (p. 5). The central purpose of the
book, Entman suggests, is to understand the nature and extent of this “less
dependably deferential role for media.”
One of the things that the splash-back in Entman’s argument depends on is
the degree of ambiguity of events. “Ambiguous events present more opportu-
nities for players outside the administration, including the media themselves,

© Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research 2005.
Public Opinion Quarterly 325

to affect framing” (p. 50). Ambiguity, in this discussion, appears as an

unproblematic characteristic of events rather than a social construction.
Consider the murky incident in August 1964 involving U.S. naval warships
in the Gulf of Tonkin. One of the destroyers involved, the Maddox, reported
the incident to headquarters: “Freak weather effects and overeager sonarmen
may have accounted for many reports. No actual visible sightings by Maddox.
Suggest complete evaluation before any further action.” On a scale of intrinsic
ambiguity, this has to be a 10. Yet it cascaded down with little or no splash-
back at the time. The New York Times ran a front-page story under the head-
line, “Red PT Boats Fire at U.S. Destroyer on Vietnam Duty.” Ambiguity here
came after the fact as the anti–Vietnam War movement challenged the official
frame of the war as Aggression from the North.
The role of social movements and of citizens as collective actors in framing
contests largely disappears in Entman’s model. Indeed, the only time move-
ment groups make an appearance is in a chapter on “Representing the Public’s
Opinions in Foreign Policy,” that is, as indicators of perceived public opinion
by elites. The nuclear freeze movement failed, Entman suggests, because
“unfavorable media framing of the movement discouraged involvement by
those ordinary citizens who supported the remedy but remained outside the
group’s activities. . . . By disdaining the movement and denigrating the pub-
lic’s qualifications to even press its views on government, media frames
discouraged citizens from granting higher priority to their own pro-freeze
sentiments” (pp. 139, 157).
I looked in vain for references to Meyer’s (1990) and Solo’s (1988) rich and
textured discussions of the impact of the nuclear freeze movement on American
politics. In these accounts the nuclear freeze movement was very far from
marginalized in the media, attracted substantial elite support, and produced
significant responses by President Ronald Reagan’s administration. It is hard
to believe that Reagan would have announced, in January 1984, his intention
to resume arms control negotiations with a Soviet Union that only two years
earlier he had characterized as an “evil empire.” A strong case can be made
for the success of the nuclear freeze movement in reframing the discourse on
nuclear weapons, using an often sympathetic and helpful mass media to help
the process along.
When I look at the major re-framings that have taken place in the past
50 years—on race and gender issues, on Vietnam, on the environment, for
example—it strikes me that an inverted cascade model works better than the
one Entman offers. Challengers to official frames mobilize and take collective
action, and this activates media frames and political elites, who eventually
stimulate some response from the administration—if not the exact response
desired by the challengers.
Would that Entman was correct in his assessment of the post-9/11 media as
“less dependably deferential” to the administration in its foreign policy
pursuits. It is hard to be persuaded of this when the New York Times has taken
326 Book Reviews

the unusual step of apologizing for its failure to examine more critically the
George W. Bush administration’s claims on the nature of the threat from Iraq
in the months preceding the U.S.-led invasion. The media has reported on the
lack of evidence for specific meetings or other communication between the
Saddam regime and al Qaeda. But if Saddam and al Qaeda are simply two
faces of the same many-headed monster—terrorism—this lack of specific
meetings is nit-picking that misses the nature of the evil forces we are
confronting.
The success of the Bush administration in using 9/11 to justify the Iraq war
and to manage the media with considerable skill in the process seems to
undercut Entman’s claim that something new is afoot. In the inverted cascade
model, the reframing will occur only when the nascent antiwar movement
takes off, activating new media frames and emboldening additional political
elites to join the cause. Eventually, it will cascade down to the administration
itself, as former supporters defect and create some distance for themselves
from official policy. A model that ignores the role of collective action by chal-
lengers in undercutting official frames will offer very limited help in under-
standing successful reframing efforts.

References
Meyer, David S. 1990. A Winter of Discontent. New York: Praeger.
Solo, Pam. 1988. From Protest to Policy. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
doi:10.1093/poq/nfi017

Robert M. Groves, Floyd J. Fowler, Mick P. Couper,

James M. Lepkowski, Eleanor Singer, and Roger Tourangeau.
Survey Methodology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley–Interscience. 2004. 448 pp. $49.95
(paper).

PAUL BEATTY
National Center for Health Statistics

Traditionally, newcomers to survey research have had two potential written

introductions to the field. The first are guidebooks that provide instruction and
examples of “how to do a survey.” These are generally user-friendly, but not
rooted within a theoretical framework. As a result, neophytes may successfully
emulate the examples but run into trouble when making decisions beyond the
scope of the books—and are likely to be ill equipped for methodological
innovation. The second are more cutting-edge scholarly books and journal articles
that address specific topics in greater detail (e.g., nonresponse, measurement
error, or questionnaire design). These overcome the theoretical weaknesses of