AN ENABLING ENVIRONMENT

This study of the media's influence on the Spanish–American War revises the revisionists through quantitative research. In this, the first study to accept Caudill's challenge to reconstruct historical public opinion through agenda-setting research, we do not find the yellow press started the war—as has been previously theorized and disproved—but we do find that sensational and conservative newspapers together created an enabling environment for going to war. We hope this study puts journalists’ impact on that major historical event in better perspective and leads to more efforts to use a wide range of quantitative research tools to understand history.

[1]  Lee Wilkins.  Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time , 2005 .

[2]  Dhavan V. Shah,et al.  “To Thine Own Self Be True” , 1996, Communication Research.

[3]  F. Mott.  American journalism: a history of newspapers in the United States through 250 years 1690 to 1940 , 1943 .

[4]  K. Speckman.  Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process , 1999 .

[5]  Sidney Rosen,et al.  News Valence and Available Recipient as Determinants of News Transmission , 1972 .

[6]  W. Zimmermann.  First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power , 2002 .

[7]  P. Valkenburg,et al.  Framing European politics: a content analysis of press and television news , 2000 .

[8]  D. Shaw,et al.  Communication and democracy : exploring the intellectual frontiers in agenda-setting theory , 1997 .

[9]  Edwin Emery,et al.  The press and America: An interpretative history of the mass media , 1978 .

[10]  Robert M. Entman,et al.  Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm , 1993 .

[11]  Walter LaFeber,et al.  The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 , 1965 .

[12]  F. Mott,et al.  American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 Years, 1690-1940 , 1942 .

[13]  M. Schudson.  Toward a Troubleshooting Manual for Journalism History , 1997 .

[14]  Jean E. Dye.  Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies , 2002 .

[15]  Mark M. Welter.  The 1895-98 Cuban Crisis in Minnesota Newspapers: Testing the ‘Yellow Journalism’ Theory , 1970 .

[16]  Robert M. Entman,et al.  Coverage of international news: Contrasts in narratives of the KAL and Iran Air incidents , 1991 .

[17]  Joe Bob Hester.  Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion , 2005 .

[18]  Stephen Lacy,et al.  The Effectiveness of Random, Consecutive Day and Constructed Week Sampling in Newspaper Content Analysis , 1993 .

[19]  Bruce Miroff.  Power and the People: Executive Management of Public Opinion in Foreign Affairs, 1897-1921 by Robert C. Hilderbrand (University of North Carolina Press; 262 pp.; $19.00) , 1981 .

[20]  Stuart James,et al.  Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper , 2002 .

[21]  A. Steller.  Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time, Herbert Gans. Vintage Books, New York (1980), 393 pp., $5.95 , 1980 .

[22]  S. Iyengar.  Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues. , 1991 .

[23]  J. Rhee.  Strategy and issue frames in election campaign coverage : A social cognitive account of framing effects , 1997 .

[24]  M. Curti.  American philanthropy abroad , 1988 .

[25]  Rob Schorman.  “Remember the Maine, Boys, and the Price of This Suit” , 1998 .

[26]  Gaye Tuchman.  Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality , 1978 .

[27]  Gerald M. Kosicki,et al.  Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse , 1993 .

[28]  Lance A. Betros.  First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power , 2004 .

[29]  R. Wilson.  A Diplomatic History of the American People. , 1940, American Journal of International Law.

[30]  Lawrence N. Strout.  NRJ Books: Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies , 2003 .

[31]  George W. Auxier.  Middle Western Newspapers and the Spanish-American War, 1895–1898 , 1940 .

[32]  Walter Lafeber.  The new empire : an interpretation of American expansion, 1860-1898 , 1964 .

[33]  Frank J. Krompak.  The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media , 1988 .

[34]  M. Beasley.  News for All: America's Coming-of-Age with the Press , 1997 .