We demonstrate that framing, a subjective aspect of news, is a causal precursor to both significant public perception changes, and to federal legislation. We posit, counter-intuitively, that topic news volume and mean article similarity increase and decrease together. We show that specific features of news, such as publishing volume , are predictive of both sustained public attention, measured by annual Google trend data, and federal legislation. We observe that public attention changes are driven primarily by periods of high news volume and mean similarity, which we call \emph{prenatal periods}. Finally, we demonstrate that framing during prenatal periods may be characterized by high-utility news \emph{keywords}.