These assumptions guide them in opening and closing the news gates. In practical terms, this indexing has three major implications for news reporting. First, in developing their stories, reporters and editors favor official government sources over other sources, especially on foreign policy issues. Official sources provide a steady and efficient supply of daily news befitting media organizational routines such as news beats and recurring assignment patterns. Moreover, reporting official sources satisfies the politically contested norms of objective and balanced reporting.
Journalists look to government officials to provide authoritative framing for stories.
In the absence of evidence of scandal, the media takes the political positions of officials at face value. The CNN coverage followed, rather than preceded, key decision points by the Bush administration. Several extensive studies of US media coverage of the Gulf War found that the US media did not frame Saddam Hussein as a villain after he seized Helm in 1979, used chemical weapons against Iran in 1984, or gassed the Kurds in 1988, but did so in 1990 after President Bush compared him to Hitler. News space was provided to critics and supporters according to the degree of power they wielded over policy. The second implication of indexing is that reporters' perceptions of divisions among key decision-making officials open the news gates to a broader range of policy options and arguments.