Fraters Libertas

The Clinton Years for Dummies

The Fall 2002 edition of Public Opinion Quarterly included an article called News Framing and Cueing of Issue Regimes: Explaining Clinton’s Public Approval in Spite of Scandal. It’s a fascinating study which showed through rigorous ideomatic modeling that sustained support among the US public for Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, quote "can be explained as a complex counter-response to the framing of the scandal in terms of the strategic motives of conservatives elites." (See the abstract for more details. Full text article not available without a subscription.)

In laymen’s terms, their primary finding was that because the mainstream news media had a propensity for framing their reporting of the scandal in terms of ‘Republican attacks on the president,’ and the indignant liberal responses to this rather than focusing on the President’s behavior in committing adultery in the White House with a much younger subordinate, then committing a felony by perjuring himself during court proceedings, public support of the president (as measured in public opinion polls) was greatly increased.

Fascinating stuff with far reaching implications for the continuing debate about media bias. I encourage interested parties to dig out the article and read more about it. But perhaps the most useful aspect of this study was unwitting the creation of a Cliff’s Notes version of the Bill Clinton presidency.

First some background. The study’s analysis centered on the coding of news stores about Bill Clinton, appearing in 32 mainstream media sources (ranging from the USA Today, New York Times and the Washington Post to CNN, the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and NPR down to the Billings (MT) Journal and our very own Minneapolis Star Tribune), during the time period of January 1993 to February 1999.

Via the NEXIS electronic database, a random sample of stories was selected. 1,373 of them specifically related to various Clinton sex scandals. (Point of clarification, some of these articles did deal with the same scandals, meaning there weren’t 1,373 separate scandals. At least that we know of.)

From there, each article was coded as being framed as focusing on 1) Clinton’s behavior, 2) focusing on partisan conservative attacks on the President, or 3) focusing on liberal reaction to these so-called conservative attacks.

The coding of stories was accomplished using the computer-aided InfoTrend coding system. The software was programmed to identify paragraphs that contained the word “Clinton” as well as certain keywords, associated with each frame. And here’s where the breakthrough takes place for condensing the complex, exhausting, and often times explicit history of the Bill Clinton presidency.

Of course, all of us who endured through this era know the details cold and have formed immutable opinions on what the truth really is. But future generations will not have this personal memory to draw upon. And it’s likely decades from now our grandchildren will come to us and ask “what was it like when Bill Clinton was president?”

Now instead of blushing and changing the subject to more dignified topics (like the collected film works of Pauly Shore), all you need to do is break out selections from the keyword code book from this research study and you can gracefully move on with your lives:

(Clinton behavior frame) intern, cigar, cover up, Currie, perjury, Vernon Jordan

(conservative attack frame) condemn, denounce, immoral, inappropriate, remove, unfit, conservative activists, House Managers, special prosecutor

(liberal response frame) liberals accuse, unconstitutional, partisan, misuse of power, sanctimonious Republicans, coup d’etat, right wing conspiracy