Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey on "Chicken or Egg? The Reciprocal Influence of Press and Politics" by Jan Kleinnijenhuis, Wouter van Atteveldt, and Antske Fokkens: The paper begins with an excellent question as to direction of influence (media influencing Congress or Congress following the lead of the media) and then employs a multi-method approach (keyword search, VAR, granger causality) to lend insight into this question. The paper is admirable in its relative simplicity—i.e., intuitively straightforward tools are combined in a novel way. It is also ambitious, to say the least. That said, the underlying weakness of the paper is the lack of attention given to the political dynamics at play, the most important of which was (a) the US mid-term elections in 2010, which expedited passage of Dodd-Frank by Democratic leadership, in anticipation of Republican gains in Congress, and (b) a general election in Britain in 2010 (which skewed media coverage away from solution aspects of the crisis, pending anticipated financial reforms by the Conservatives (or Conservative-led coalition). Factoring in the UK election in May 2010, the new Government had only entered office just a couple of months before the US passed the Dodd-Frank legislation. Financial reform legislation in the UK thus came later (and at a more leisurely pace than in the US)—i.e., in the Financial Services Act of 2012 and the Banking Reform Act of 2013. Hence, any conclusions about causality of influence with respect to the timeline from “problem” to “cause” to “consequence” and finally to “solution” must be sensitive to the underlying electoral cycle(s) driving the reform package(s). To be fair to the authors, they acknowledge in their discussion section that the political dimension is missing, and recognize that more work is needed on this front. So, presumably the paper could be revised to take into account the underlying political/electoral context (including, also, the role of the presidential administration in exerting influence on both Congress and the media). Once this is done, the basic methodology is very attractive in many ways. First, I like the categorization of topics into problems, causes, consequences and solutions. This is an attractive and sensible framework by which to organize the topics (though I’m still not clear about where “blaming” fits into this scheme—as an evaluative dimension, but how is this separated from “causes”?). Second, mapping the direction of causality (as in Figure 2) is tremendously fascinating. This should be considered just the tip of the iceberg, as so much more could be done to flesh out the implications of this study. In short, this paper could almost be said to raise more questions than it answers—but these are important questions, and the paper has made a first attempt to provide new insights into the relationship between media and politicians, in times of crisis.