Framing American Politics. Edited by Karen Callaghan and Frauke Schnell. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 264p. $27.95.

The Mediated Presidency: Television News and Presidential Governance. By Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 236p. $60.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Researchers generally agree that media frames are an outcome of what Tim Cook (in Making Laws and Making News, 1989, 169) calls a “negotiation of newsworthiness” between elites and reporters. The idea is that each side to this exchange brings a set of resources to bear on the framing of issues and events: Elites control access to information; reporters control access to the news. Since neither can exercise complete control over the process, the participants seem destined to engage in a never-ending struggle. These two recent books buttress and refine this proposition, and also challenge it in some important respects.