Framing Theory

Framing theory deals with the structures and organization of a communication text and how they may affect the definition and understanding of issues and our social world. Framing is a process that selects and emphasizes certain aspects and perspectives of reality when presenting them in a communication text and organizes how the audience perceives, remembers, and judges them. Structure in a communication text can have humor be the organizing principle surrounding it, as often occurs in infotainment communication (or programs intended for both entertainment and information). But humor as frames need not be restricted to the increasingly popular infotainment segment and is used in other communication segments to achieve specific effects. This entry provides a definition of framing theory and explains where frames reside and how they work, specifically relating framing to humor and the intersection of entertainment and information.

Framing has been called a fractured paradigm and several scholars have attempted to provide a definition for it and craft appropriate methods for its analysis. As a communication theory that embraces both quantitative and qualitative methods that can be understood to reside in messages or in audience's mind, framing is an emerging area of media effects [Page 249]research, one that can have multiple applications. Framing, as a communication theory, relates to and complements several other theories of media effects, but perhaps more closely to agenda setting, priming, and persuasion. Framing is a flexible theory that has provided much insight in communication research, but this characteristic has also resulted in lack of unity as a research domain. A champion of the theory's potential fluidity, Stephen Reese (2003), has defined frames as “organizing principles” that are both “socially shared” and stable over time, that structure symbolically the social world. Reese emphasizes how framing acts to structure the text or information. Thus, humor as a frame would provide a way to understand an issue within the humor perspective with varying degrees of success.

Framing can thus occur in several locations, as framing theorist Robert Entman has indicated in 1993. Frames can occur within the communicator, in how an individual who is presenting the communication organizes the issue to be presented, and in what this individual selects to emphasize and deem-phasize. Frames can occur within the text itself, be it visually, orally, or in writing. This is where most framing studies are able to measure the frames. Frames also can occur in the audience, the receiver of communication, in how that individual is drawn to interpret an issue. Frames can have, thus, individual and societal implications. Societal implications are drawn when frames occur within social groups.

A frame can be identified and measured through framing devices. These devices are textual and visual elements or how the selection and emphasis of issues are represented. That can be seen in the source selection, specific terms chosen to portray information, keywords, stereotyped images, and quotes that are organized to give meaning to the communication. With inclusion and exclusion, placing certain information in a more prominent location or emphasizing it in other ways, communicators can frame an issue. A communication structured and organized with humor as its frame would thus include certain information that would emphasize humor, using language devices that would allow for such frame, while omitting other information. Studies have indeed found that messages in news, and especially in television, often emphasize emotional themes.

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