The Construction of Frames in News Journalism, Slides of Media Management

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THE CONSTRUCTION OF

FRAMES IN NEWS

JOURNALISM

Framing theory

• Framing theory - or theories about framing - today represent one of the most common research approaches in the field of communication and media studies.
• The origins of the frame metaphor lie in other fields like cognitive psychology, anthropology (Bateson) and sociology (Goffman).
• A frame specifies the relationship between a number of connected elements in a text, helping us to define or interpret what is going on, making sense out of events

Media frames (Todd Gitlin, 1980)

• “What makes the world beyond direct experience look natural is a media frame”.
• “Frames are principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens and what matters”
• “Thus for organizational reasons alone, frames are unavoidable, and journalism is organized to regulate their production”

Gaye Tuchman: News as frame

• News is a window of the world. Through its frame,

American learn of themselves and others, of their

institutions, leaders, and life styles, and those of

other nations and their peoples…

• …The view through a window depends upon

whether the window is large or small, has many

panes or few, whether the glass is opaque or

clear, whether the window faces a street or a

backyard. (Making News, 1980)

How frames work

• “The frame suggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue” (Gamson & Modigliani 1989, in Vreese: 27)
• Frames are ..interpretative packages that give meaning to an issue (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989: 3)
• Framing involves implicit information between the lines, the frame provides a context for the interpretation of a news message

Journalistic tools in framing the news

• Choosing the news angle
• Selecting the sources (and avoiding others)
• Formulating the headline, the lead of a news

story and selecting the visual image

• Culture bound narratives: formulating a new

episode in a longer and well known story.

Frames are part of a culture..

• “Frames are part of a culture and are institutionalized in various ways” (Goffman 1981, p 63).
• Van Gorps (2007) six premises:
  1. There exist a cultural stock of frames, alternatives are available (like in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the folk tale)
  2. The text and the frame is not identical; the readers connect framing devices in a news story with familiar cultural phenomena
  3. The use of frames seem normal, natural and the social construction are often invisible. Frames as a power mechanism.
  4. Frames are part of the culture, more stable than personal schemata
  5. A frame changes gradually or little over time
  6. Frames are negotiated and part of a social interaction

Frames are not the same as topics

• Topic : Asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants
• Alternative frames (van Gorp 2007):
• Misgovernment frame
• Intruder/strangers frame
• Our hospitality frame
• The innocent victim frame
• The donor/support frame
• The “not in my backyard” frame

Bali, Moscow Theatre, Mombasa

hotel: The same Story?

Framing early student protest against the

war against Vietnam (1965)

• Todd Gitlin: The whole world is watching (1980): analyzing the earliest framing devices in main stream media outlets.
• “15000 White House pickets denounce Vietnam War”

Framing the WTO

• “A few Starbucks windows smashed by a hundred ‘anarchists’ where all the shallower news reports needed to see to decide “what’s the story”, even if tens or hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were marching by playfully, in peace” (Todd Gitlin about Seattle 1999)

Contrasting guilt and innocence

• Robert Entman (in Projections of Power, 2004), comparing the media coverage of a Soviet Air Force Fighter who shot down Korean Air Flight 007 (1983, killing 269 people) and the coverage of a US Navy Ship (Vincennes) who in 1988 shot down an Iranian Air Flight 655 (killing 290).
• The media framing varied dramatically. Soviet covered with “the murder frame”, US by the “technical glitch frame”. Contrasting magnitude, causes and the use of humanizing or neutral terms (quantitatively)

New Example: Ferguson

The police violence frame:

• Emphasizes the centrality of Michael Brown’s murder as the key issue and focal point
• Emphasizes the impunity of the Ferguson Police Department
• Puts this specific incident in a larger context of police repression in Ferguson
• Puts this specific incident in a larger context of both police violence and police militarization on a national scale