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Article Excerpt
Abstract: The authors conduct an exhaustive analysis of broadcast news transcripts from the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks to the U.S. congressional authorization of force against Iraq. News organizations overall used framing words and phrases complementary to the Bush Administration push for war. Fox News, even more than CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNBC, and public broadcasting, emphasized pro-war framing terms. Fox News over a longer time frame also generally trailed CNN in stories covering the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, the lack of a pre-war link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, majority international public opinion about the war, and the number of American casualties.
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The bestselling book Don't Think of an Elephant!, subtitled Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, detailed some of the word choices with which the George W. Bush Administration subtly shifted public debate. Inheritance or estate taxes were called death taxes. Tax cuts were called tax relief because relief has a very strong positive connotation. However, the most notable semantic framing happened regarding the War on Iraq, more often phrased by the administration as the War on Terror. An additional technique was to frame Iraq as Saddam Hussein, and then demonize him (an admittedly easy task) in all government pronouncements. The nation-as-person metaphor fits two classic fairy tale mythologies, self defense and rescue. The hero (the U.S. and any allies) confronts a dangerous, evil and irrational villain and must defeat him, liberating his oppressed people. (1)
This research project involves using text analysis software to document the use of semantic framing by the U.S. government and how that framing may have been picked up by U.S. broadcast news organizations. The work looks at the one-month period of September 11th to October 11th, 2002, a period stretching from the first anniversary of a massive terror attack on the U.S. to the congressional vote to authorize President Bush to use force against Iraq.
Literature Review
The theoretical construct of framing has both unified and divided much recent research on political communication. In many ways it is a unifying thread, a link between methods of understanding content and techniques of measuring effects. It has been criticized for being a vague catch-all, its meaning shifting between authors and disciplines. Entman, however, nicely synthesized the approaches into this definition: "selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues, and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution." (2)
Framing, as a theoretical concept, emerged from agenda setting--the notion that media coverage does not tell the public what to think, but it does have an effect in telling them what subjects to think about. (3) Framing took agenda setting beyond audience salience and added that media coverage also indicated how that subject was to be approached by the audience, the acceptable range of terms, connections, and interpretations. Many scholars use interchangeably the terms framing and second-level agenda setting, though a dispute has emerged as to how appropriate it is to use the terms synonymously. (4)
One also can see framing as an extension of prospect theory and its assumption that subtle wording changes in any situation's description can affect how members of the audience interpret the situation. (5)
Framing also has roots in cognitive theories about how the human brain works. (6) It ties into schema theory, the idea that the synapses of our brains do not purely save and store facts. Instead, our brains link related ideas in associative patterns; ideas fitting patterns more easily find room than those with no existing "hook" to hold them.
In war and peace terms, schema may have evolved such as "needless suffering of civilians" or "noble and ultimate sacrifice for others."
Traditional communication models are largely linear, beginning with a speaker encoding a message, that message traveling through a medium to an audience, and that audience decoding, storing, and possibly reacting to the message. The short history of framing as a communication concept has followed that path backwards. It began as a means of understanding reception and storage. Later it was examination of messages for frames, and finally it became a begrudging admiration of the propagandists, politicians, and public relations practitioners who understood the process and constructed messages to maximum effect using it.
Framing can complement a political economy approach to news content. Gandy pulled together a multitude of sources to argue that most news content is the result of routine contacts with traditional sources, usually office holders and the bureaucrats beholden to them. This yields a social relationship, but it also makes sense economically for the news organization and...
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