Studies of the organizational and behavioral characteristics of the American news media, as well as studies of media effects, often presume a basic institutional unity among news organizations. These studies typically analyze a small set of prestige media, and then make or infer conclusions with respect to the non-prestige media or the news media in general. The intention here is to verify empirically the extent to which the non-prestige ”outer ring” media in fact take cues from the prestige ”inner ring” news organizations. Using content analyses of forty-one daily newspapers from the 1992 presidential election campaign, we find that the outer ring newspapers sometimes replicate the issue agenda of the inner ring newspapers, but that they exercise significant discretion with respect to the favorability of their coverage of the presidential candidates and specific issues.
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