The above quotations share a common concern that the war on terrorism has exacerbated perceptions that people of Arab descent constitute a threat to public safety. Moreover, such threat perceptions have provided an impetus to generate public support for the policies of the USA PATRIOT Act that in turn has threatened the civil liberties of Muslims and Arab-Americans. For most citizens, the mass media provide the primary source of information upon which to base judgments about potential threats. As such, the nature of news coverage and its effects become important concerns for researchers seeking to understand the dynamics of political judgments.

In the discussion of our integrated Message Framing Model (Figure 1.2) in Chapter 1, we noted that news frames and cues have much in common in that they both describe ways in which journalists give meaning to text. They differ in terms of the unit of text to which they are applied. Both frames (i.e., organizing devices used by journalists to structure press accounts) and cues (i.e., the labels used to characterize issues, groups, and figures in the news) have received considerable attention from mass communication researchers interested in understanding how subtle changes in news reports influence audience understanding (Shah et al., 2002).