The degree to which people seek and retain information about politics is a key variable for understanding why people think, feel, and act as they do politically. But measuring information acquisition has proven to be fraught with challenges. As a consequence, in recent years political scientists have shifted their measurement strategies to focus on information retention, most commonly in the form of factual knowledge questions.

This paper revisits the original psychological literature on priming in order to assess new possibilities for research on priming effects stimulated by news discourse. We detail some important theoretical limitations of existing priming research; propose a method for studying the dynamics of priming effects in real‐world, complex information environments; and illustrate the usefulness of this approach with a case study of opinion change during the 1990–91 Persian Gulf Crisis.

The literature on media independence shows that the public statements of government officials can simultaneously stimulate news coverage and regulate the discursive parameters of that coverage. This study investigates two sources of uncertainty in that literature which have limited the ability of researchers to draw firm conclusions about the nature of media independence: how critical the news actually is, and how journalists put the indexing norm into practice.

Four televised debates in the 1960 presidential campaign pitting Democratic challenger John F. Kennedy against Republican vice-president Richard M. Nixon are widely considered a landmark in the history of American political campaigning. Although candidates vying for a party’s nomination had debated occasionally in the years following World War II, the 1960 debates marked the first time in American history that major-party candidates for president had debated against each other during a general election campaign.

Pool journalism is a term describing several types of arrangements used by government officials to provide for broad media coverage of events that, for various reasons, can only be covered by a limited number of journalists. Pool arrangements are most commonly used when the number of journalists interested in covering an event is greater than the space available for accommodating them, as sometimes happens in coverage of the presidency.

This issue of Political Communication is dedicated to David Swanson, who died unexpectedly on November 1. It is fitting that we remember him with an issue devoted to research on the media and international affairs. The subject was of great interest to David, and he published it in the journal during his editorship.

Many scholars rely upon the Vanderbilt Television News Index and Abstracts to represent the topics covered by network broadcast news. Earlier research has shown that the Abstracts do not adequately capture the evaluative tone of news, but the degree of topical correspondence between the abstracts and the full transcripts of newscasts has never been formally tested.