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This paper considers the extent to which leading news organizations use independent documentation to build interpretations of events that challenge official framing. The data presented in this study show that despite available evidence and sources to support a counterframing of the Abu Ghraib prison story in terms of a policy of torture, the leading national news organizations did not produce a frame that strongly challenged the Bush administration’s claim that Abu Ghraib was an isolated case of appalling abuse perpetrated by low‐level soldiers. The press struggled briefly, and in limited fashion with the question of whether events at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere reflected an administration policy of torture, but “abuse” was by far the predominant news frame. The case of Abu Ghraib offers a critical test of agreement and differences among theories of event‐driven news, cascading activation, and indexing. Although all the 3 models were implicated in this case, the data, drawn from a content analysis of the Washington Post, CBS Evening News, and a sample of national newspapers, fit most closely with the predictions of the indexing model.

Two theoretical paradigms have traditionally guided understandings of the news. The liberal-pluralist paradigm posits the mass media as a vital conduit of accountability and bottomup change, whereas the criticalparadigm views the news as a crucial site and mechanism of ideological domination. This analysis furthers an evolving ecological approach, which bridges the two dominant paradigms, contending that the same market imperatives and journalistic routines which so often produce news that reinforces the status quo can at times produce news which challenges it. Analysis of news about the environment and waste recycling from 198C-1990 reveals a dramatic shi) in coverage patterns following the ill-fated voyage of the Mobro, the garbage barge that sailed the high seas for three months in an unsuccessful search for a port that would accept its cargo. The barge became what we call a news icon: an image that lived on beyond its originating event by being introduced into a variety of subsequent news contexts. The icon provided an occasion for both journalists and their sources to refigure cultural scripts about garbage and recycling. I n this process news routines and source communication strategies interacted to produce news as cultural forum, creating opportunities for cultural transformation.Recent moves in media scholarship have attempted to broaden the models upon which we base our understanding of the government-press-public connection. Traditionally we have had two principal models. The liberal-pluralist model sees the news media as the essential connecting point between government and people, the institutional conduit through which the people realize

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