Government's little helper: U.S. press coverage of foreign policy crises, 1945–1991

This article examines the implicit rules by which reporters determined the slant of news coverage of U.S. foreign policy crises from 1945 to 1991. The single most important rule was that reporters, as Lance Bennett has maintained, tended to “index” their coverage to reflect the range of views that exists within the government. A series of narrower and more situational rules also appeared to hold, such as a tendency of reporters to be more hawkish than official sources when the United States faced a communist foe and more dovish when the United States suffered a military setback.