Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm
Summary (2 min read)
Of Frames and Framing
- To frame is to select some aspects of aperceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote aparticularproblem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.
- A single sentence may perform more than one of these four framing functions, although many sentences in a text may perform none of them.
- The cold war example also suggests that frames have at least four locations in the communication process: the communicator, the text, the receiver, and the culture.
- The culture is the stock of commonly invoked frames; in fact, culture might be defined as the empirically demonstrable set of common frames exhibited in the discourse and thinking of most people in a social grouping.
How Frames Work
- Frames highlight some bits of information about an item that is the subject of a communication, thereby elevating them in salience.
- An increase in salience enhances the probability that receivers will perceive the information, discern meaning and thus process it, and store it in meniory (see Fiske & Taylor, 1991) .
- Kahneman and Tversky (1984) offer perhaps the most widely cited recent example o f the power of framing and the way it operates by selecting and highlighting some features of reality while omitting others.
- If Program D is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die" (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984, p. 343).
- Often a potential counterframing of the subject is mostly or wholly absent from a text, although, to use this instance, an audience member with a strong civil liberties philosophy might reject mandatory testing even if the poll framed AIDS strictly in public health terms.
Frames in Political News
- This portrait of framing has important implications for political communication.
- Frames call attention to some aspects of reality while obscuring other elements, which might lead audiences to have different reactions.
- Many news texts exhibit homogeneous framing at one level of analysis, yet competing frames at another.
- The news frame included only two remedies, war now or sanctions now with war later, while problem definitions, causal analyses, and moral evaluations were homogeneous.
- Unpublicized, the views could gain few adherents and generate little perceived or actual effect on public opinion, which meant elites felt no pressure to expand the frame so it included other treatments for Iraqi aggression, such as negotiation.
Benefits of a Consistent Concept of Framing
- An understanding of frames helps illuminate many empirical and normative controversies, most importantly because the concept of framing di-rects their attention to the details of just how a communicated text exerts its power.
- The example o f mass communication explored here suggests how a common understanding might help constitute framing as a research paradigm.
- Journalists may follow the rules for "objective" reporting and yet convey a dominant framing of the news text that prevents most audience members from making a balanced assessment of a situation.
- The major task of determining textual meaning should be to identify and describe frames; content analysis informed by a theory of framing would avoid treating all negative or positive terms or utterances as equally salient and influential.
- Public opinion and normative democratic theory.
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Citations
3,345 citations
Cites background from "Framing: Toward Clarification of a ..."
...Entman (1993) referred to framing as “a scattered conceptualization” (p.␣ 51), with previous studies lacking clear conceptual definitions and relying on context-specific, rather than generally applicable operationalizations....
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...The presentation of operationalizations and empirical results shows that the fractured paradigm to which Entman (1993) referred still exists....
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...Entman (1993) offered a more detailed explanation of how media provide audiences with schemas for interpreting events....
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...Pan and Kosicki (1993) and Entman (1993), for example, conceptually predicted a link between media and audience frames, but provided only exploratory analyses of media frames....
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...Individual frames are defined as “mentally stored clusters of ideas that guide individuals’ processing of information” (Entman, 1993, p. 53)....
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2,365 citations
Cites background from "Framing: Toward Clarification of a ..."
...Our field, unfortunately, has largely skipped the first step and rushed ahead to the second step, which explains much of the conceptual and terminological confusions that so many scholars have written about (e.g., Entman, 1993; Pan & Kosicki, 1993; Scheufele, 1999)....
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2,006 citations
1,322 citations
1,311 citations
Cites background from "Framing: Toward Clarification of a ..."
...Fully developed frames typically perform four functions: problem definition, causal analysis, moral judgment, and remedy promotion (Entman, 1993, 2004)....
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References
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Frequently Asked Questions (13)
Q2. How can text make bits of information more salient?
Texts can make bits of information more salient by placement o r repetition, or by associating them with culturally familiar symbols.
Q3. What is the main task of determining textual meaning?
The major task o f determining textual meaning should be to identify and describe frames; content analysis informed by a theory of framing would avoid treating all negative or positive terms or utterances as equally salient and influential.
Q4. How many people will die if Program D is adopted?
If Program D is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die” (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984, p. 343).
Q5. What is the role of the frame in a news text?
Framing in this light plays a major role in the exertion of political power, and the frame in a news text is really the imprint of power-it registers the identity of actors or interests that competed to dominate the text.
Q6. What is the role of framing in the democratic process?
In Zaller’s (1992) account, framing appears to be a central power in the democratic process, for political elites control the framing of issues.
Q7. What is the main purpose of content analysis?
Unguided by a framing paradigm, content analysis may often yield data that misrepresent the media messages that most audience members are actually picking up.
Q8. Why is it not axiomatically the democratic response?
Approving the option with 60 percent support is not axiomatically the most democratic response because of the cyclical majority problem (Riker, 19861, which makes majority rule among several complex options mathematically impossible.
Q9. What does the definition of salience mean?
Because salience is a product of the interaction of texts and receivers, the presence of frames in the text, as detected by researchers, does not guarantee their influence in audience thinking (Entman, 1989; Graber, 1988).
Q10. What did the elites feel about the frame?
the views could gain few adherents and generate little perceived or actual effect on public opinion, which meant elites felt no pressure to expand the frame so it included other treatments for Iraqi aggression, such as negotiation.
Q11. What was the effect of framing on policy?
During the pre-war debate, any critique transcending the remedies inside the frame (war soon versus more time for sanctions) breached the bounds of acceptable discourse, hence was unlikely to influence policy.
Q12. What are the benefits of a common understanding of framing?
The framing paradigm could be applied with similar benefits to the study of public opinion and voting behavior in political science; to cognitive studies in social psychology; or to class, gender, and race research in cultural studies and sociology, to name a few.
Q13. What is the important part of the debate?
Just as important, attempting to determine which of the differently framed opinions is the closest to the public’s “real” sentiments appears futile, because it would require agreement among contending elites and citizens on which frame was most accurate, fair, complete, and so forth.