As the United States government took actions to engage in surveillance of activist groups, the discourse surrounding this action straddled both sides of the national security/civil liberties dichotomy. Some officials, such as Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (quoted above), made the argument that such government activities are necessary to protect the safety and security of the American public. On the other hand, civil rights advocates such as Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s Executive Director, questioned whether activist group surveillance wasn’t motivated by political rather than security concerns. As discussed earlier, this national security/civil liberties debate was played out for public consumption through the mass media. Audience members seeking to understand the debate over government surveillance activities had to make judgments about what was happening on the basis of information reported in the media. This led us to ask questions about how the audience would make sense of this controversy in response to the news stories that they encounter.

In this chapter, we examine how different frames used to construct such new stories affect audience understanding and cognitions. As we noted in Chapter 1, frames are likely to affect people differently according to the predispositions that they bring to the processing of news stories. As such, this chapter examines the interplay of news frames and political predispositions on audience reactions to news stories. For this analysis, we used data from the Activist Study in which research participants read news stories about the surveillance of political advocacy groups under the USA PATRIOT Act.