Framing

Media Frames

Frames at the media level act as “central organizing ideas or story lines” which give meaning and perspective to events or happenings. Embedded within news coverage, such ideas provide ways of interpreting and structuring meaning. Journalists employ frames as important translation devices that serve to make their jobs easier. In other words, frames allow reporters to reduce relatively complex issues, such as the war in Iraq or global climate change, into a format that conforms to the constraints of their medium but that also allows audiences to easily integrate the news story into their existing cognitive schema.

Media frames both shape and reflect the policy process. Rarely is a political decision reached without consideration of how it will be defined in the press. Recognizing the importance of the news media, political actors engage in the “frame-building” process, investing heavily in supplying packaged news items and story information to journalists. By framing an emerging issue early and strategically in the news, political operatives can impact the “scope of participation,” determining the policy venue where an issue is decided, by whom, and with what outcomes. Early definitional victories can have lasting and powerful feedback effects, insulating future news coverage from rival framing interpretations that might challenge the status quo.

Audience Frames

Media frames work as organizing themes or ideas because they play to individual-level interpretive schema among audiences. These schemas are tools for information processing that allow any individual—whether an average citizen, journalist, or policymaker—to categorize new information quickly and efficiently, based on how that information is defined or described by the media. Framing research has often used the metaphorical term audience frame to describe these schemas, seeing them as mental classifications for individual information processing.

Two types of frames of reference can be used to interpret and process information: global and long-term “worldviews” on the one hand and short-term issue-related frames of reference on the other hand. Erving Goffman's idea of frames of reference refers to more long-term, socialized schemas that are often shared in societies or at least within certain groups in societies. In the U.S. context, examples might include Evangelical [Page 255]Christian identity, or alternatively, secular liberal orientations. But in addition to these more long-term and socially shared schemas, there are also short-term, issue-related frames of reference that are learned from mass media and that can have a significant impact on organizing incoming information and on drawing inferences from that information. Examples might include the strongly held view that people fail in life because they are lazy, or alternatively, that unfortunate personal circumstance is not the result of individual flaws but the product of a system that stacks the deck against success for a particular group.

...