Nhung Nguyen

Key scholars

• Erving Goffman

• Fairhurst

• Sarr

• Scheufele

Seminal reading(s)

• Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York, NY et al.: Harper & Row
• Fairhurst, G. & Sarr, R. 1996. The art of Framing. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Scheufele, Dietram A. 1999. “Framing as a Theory of Media Effects.” Journal of Communication 49 (4): 103-22.
• Chong, D., & Druckman, J. (2007b). Framing theory.Annual Review of Political Science,10,103 – 126.

Key concepts

• Attitudes
• Competing Frames – two ideas compete against one another
• Reframing – traditional issues are transformed into new issues
• Moderators
• Values
• Applicability
• Metaphor: To frame a conceptual idea through comparison to something else.
• Stories (myths, legends): To frame a topic via narrative in a vivid and memorable way.
• Tradition (rituals, ceremonies): Cultural mores that imbue significance in the mundane, closely tied to artifacts.
• Slogan, jargon, catchphrase: To frame an object with a catchy phrase to make it more memorable and relatable.
• Artifact: Objects with intrinsic symbolic value – a visual/cultural phenomenon that holds more meaning than the object itself.
• Contrast: To describe an object in terms of what it is not.
• Spin: to present a concept in such a way as to convey a value judgement (positive or negative) that might not be immediately apparent; to create an inherent bias by definition.

Main premises

• The theory is used to look at how people view the media from a political standpoint and how they make decisions. 

• An issue can be viewed from a variety of perspectives and constructed having implications for multiple values or considerations.  It is a process people go through to develop an idea about an issue or reorient their thinking about an issue.  A person’s “frame of thought” is a set of dimensions that affect their evaluation of an idea.  Framing in the media takes everyday events and provides meaning to them to them and promotes particular definitions and interpretation.  This is particularly common in politics.  Recent agendas that have been framed include the “Cold War,” “War on Terror,” “Affirmative Action,” and “Pro Life” vs “Pro Choice”

• Steps to framing:

1. Issue is identified
2. Researchers isolate a specific attitude, different frames may underlie different attitudes
3. Set of Frames are identified and coded
4. Select sources for content analysis, such as, media outlets or advocacy groups.

For framing to occur it needs to be stored in memory and available for retrieval and use.  This increases through regular and recent exposure.  This can also be increased based on motivation and knowledge about a subject.

Competing Frames is when people are exposed to more than one frame of an issue or problem.

• When people receive different views on an issue they tend to choose the one that is consistent with their values.
• When an issue is new both sides might compete and contend that their values are consistent with those they are targeting.

Frames are built around a particular value and they may not work for every issue.

They can be constructed both positively and negatively. 

They can manipulate or deceive and people often agree on a frame based on common beliefs.

Frame building:

• First, in terms of practices of news production, there are at least 05 aspects of news work that may influence how journalists frame a certain issue: (1) arger societal norms and values, (2) organizational pressures and constraints, (3) external pressures from  groups and other policy makers, (4) professional routines, and (5) ideological or political orientations of journalists.

• The second potential influence on frame building comes from elites, including interest groups, government bureaucracies, and other political or corporate actors. Empirical studies show that these influences of elites seem to be strongest for issues in which journalists and various players in the policy arena can find shared narratives.

• Finally, cultural contexts of a society are also able to establish frames.

Frame setting:

• When people are exposed to a novel news frame, they will accept the constructs made applicable to an issue, but they are significantly more likely to do so when they have existing schema for those constructs. This is called the applicability effect. That is, when new frames invite people to apply their existing schema to an issue, the implication of that application depends, in part, on what is in that schema. Therefore, generally, the more the audiences know about issues, the more effective are frames.

• There are a number of levels and types of framing effects that have been examined, scholars have focused on attitudinal and behavioral changes, the degrees of perceived importance of the issue, voting decisions, and opinion formations. Others are interested in psychological processes other than applicability.

Second-level agenda-setting vs. framing

• The agenda setting theory and the second level of agenda setting, framing, are both relevant and similar in demonstrating how society is influenced by media, but they describe a different process of influence. One tells us what information to process and the other tells us how to process that information.

• Framing theory, an extension of agenda setting, describes how the “stance” an article of media may take can affect the perception of the viewer. It is said that there are two main attributes of the second-level of agenda setting. Those include substantive and affective. The substantive factor has to do mainly with things such as personality and ideology. The affective factor is focused on the positive, negative, and neutral side of things.

• McCombs et al. (1997) demonstrated that agenda-setting research at the second level deals with the influence of ‘attribute’ salience, whereas the first level agenda-setting illustrates the influence of ‘issue’ salience.
• Balmas and Sheafer (2010) argued that the focus at the first level agenda-setting which emphasizes the media’s role in telling us “what to think about” is shifted to the media’s function of telling us “how to think about” at the second level agenda-setting.
• The second level of agenda-setting considers how the agenda of attributes affects public opinion (McCombs & Evatt, 1995).
• Furthermore, Ghanem(1997)demonstrated that the certain attributes agendas in the news with low psychological distance, drove compelling arguments for the salience of public agenda. The second-level agenda-setting differs from traditional agenda-setting in that it focuses on attribute salience, and the public’s attribute agenda is regarded as one of the important variables.

Similarities agenda setting and framing

• Both are more concerned with how issues or other objects are depicted in the media than with which issues or objects are more or less prominently reported.
• Both focus on most salient or prominent aspects of themes or descriptions of the objects of interest.
• Both are concerned with ways of thinking rather than objects of thinking

Differences “agenda setting” and “framing”

• Framing does seem to include a broader range of cognitive processes – moral evaluations, causal reasoning, appeals to principle, and recommendations for treatment of problems – than does second-level agenda-setting (the salience of attributes of an object).

• Scheufele and Tewksbury argue that “framing differs significantly from these accessibility-based models [i.e., agenda setting and priming]. It is based on the assumption that how an issue is characterized in news reports can have an influence on how it is understood by audiences;”[45] the difference between whether we think about an issue and how we think about it.

Framing and agenda setting differ in their functions in the process of news production, information processing and media effects.

• News production: Although “both frame building and agenda building refer to macroscopic mechanisms that deal with message construction rather than media effects”, frame building is more concerned with the news production process than agenda building. In other words, “how forces and groups in society try to shape public discourse about an issue by establishing predominant labels is of far greater interest from a framing perspective than from a traditional agenda-setting one.”

• News processing: For framing and agenda-setting, different conditions seem to be needed in processing messages to produce respective effects. Framing effect is more concerned with audience attention to news messages, while agenda setting is more concerned with repeated exposure to messages.

• Locus of effect: Agenda-setting effects are determined by the ease with which people can retrieve from their memory issues recently covered by mass media, while framing is the extent to which media messages fit ideas or knowledge people have in their knowledge store.

Common methods

• Survey
• Experiment
• Self-report
• Machine learning
• In-depth interviews

Limitations

• There are no explanations for why certain frames cancel one another out and reinforce existing values when it comes to competing frames.
• There is little understanding, other than values, as to why frames will push people in conflicting directions.
• How they emerge is something that is still not well understood by researchers.
• It is difficult to measure the amount of time a person is exposed to a story to see if that has an impact on the theory.
• There is not much understanding as to whether exposure to several other alternatives of an idea will make someone less vulnerable to biased communication.
• They still do not understand all of the factors that make a frame strong, but they often seem to emerge from public discussion as the best rationale. There is also a lack of understanding as to how they affect and are accepted by the audience.  This theory seems cognitive in nature.