Download How the Media Frames Political Issues By Scott Londonhttp://www

How the Media Frames Political Issues
By Scott Londonhttp://www.scottlondon.com/reports/frames.html
This review essay looks at how the media — particularly television news — shapes political attitudes and
behavior. It examines the difference between "episodic" and "thematic" frames, the media's role as political
"agenda-setter," the question of "establishment bias," the so-called objectivity ethic, the public's waning
confidence in the press, the political consequences of news, and a handful of other questions that all of us —
professional journalists and news consumers alike — need to think about and come to terms with in our
increasingly news-obsessed and media-saturated culture. The piece was written in January 1993.
In the ever-expanding body of media effects research, relatively little attention has been paid to how news is
framed, and still less has been written on the political consequences of media frames. A frame is the central
organizing idea for making sense of relevant events and suggesting what is at issue. News and information has
no intrinsic value unless embedded in a meaningful context which organizes and lends it coherence. News
stories can be understood as narratives, which include information and factual elements, to be sure, but also
carry an implicit message. The medium, in the case of news coverage, is the ultimate message. As James
Britton writes:
Experience is kaleidoscopic: the experience of every moment is unique and unrepeatable. Until we can group
items in it on the basis of their similarity we can set up no expectations, make no predictions: lacking these we
can make nothing of the present moment.
To identify frames, the informational content of news reports is less important than the interpretive
commentary that attends it. While this is true of journalism in general, it is especially evident in television
news which is replete with metaphors, catchphrases, and other symbolic devices that provide a shorthand way
of suggesting the underlying storyline. These devices provide the rhetorical bridge by which discrete bits of
information are given a context and relationship to one another.
Shanto Iyengar, professor of political science and communication studies at UCLA, has pioneered the research
in the framing effects of news coverage on public opinion and political choice. He explains that viewers are
"sensitive to contextual cues when they reason about national affairs. Their explanations of issues like
terrorism or poverty are critically dependent upon the particular reference points furnished in media
presentations."
The frames for a given story are seldom conscientiously chosen but represent instead the effort of the journalist
or sponsor to convey a story in a direct and meaningful way. As such, news frames are frequently drawn from,
and reflective of, shared cultural narratives and myths and resonate with the larger social themes to which
journalists tend to be acutely sensitive.
EPISODIC VS. THEMATIC FRAMING
In his book Is Anyone Responsible?, Shanto Iyengar evaluates the framing effects of television news on
political issues. Through a series of laboratory experiments (reports of which constitute the core of the book),
he finds that the framing of issues by television news shapes the way the public understands the causes of and
the solutions to central political problems.
Since electoral accountability is the foundation of representative democracy, the public must be able to
establish who is responsible for social problems, Iyengar argues. Yet the news media systematically filter the
issues and deflect blame from the establishment by framing the news as "only a passing parade of specific
events, a 'context of no context.'"
Television news is routinely reported in the form of specific events or particular cases — Iyengar calls this
"episodic" news framing — as distinct from "thematic" coverage which places political issues and events in
some general context. "Episodic framing," he says, "depicts concrete events that illustrate issues, while
thematic framing presents collective or general evidence." Iyengar found that subjects shown episodic reports
were less likely to consider society responsible for the event, and subjects shown thematic reports were less
likely to consider individuals responsible. In one of the clearest demonstrations of this phenomenon, subjects
who viewed stories about poverty that featured homeless or unemployed people (episodic framing) were much
more likely to blame poverty on individual failings, such as laziness or low education, than were those who
instead watched stories about high national rates of unemployment or poverty (thematic framing). Viewers of
the thematic frames were more likely to attribute the causes and solutions to governmental policies and other
factors beyond the victim's control.
The preponderance of episodic frames in television news coverage provides a distorted portrayal of "recurring
issues as unrelated events," according to Iyengar. This "prevents the public from cumulating the evidence
toward any logical, ultimate consequence." Moreover, the practice simplifies "complex issues to the level of
anecdotal evidence" and "encourages reasoning by resemblance — people settle upon causes and treatments
that 'fit' the observed problems."
These assertions present a veritable challenge to standard journalistic procedure. Since the early part of this
century when the ethic of objectivity began to dominate news reportage, journalists have used the individual
frame to dramatize a story. The general presumption was that personalized news stories were not only more
accessible and "newsworthy" but that this form of "muckraking" spurred governmental and social service
agencies to action by arousing public support on behalf of the disadvantaged. Yet Iyengar suggests that the
opposite is in fact the case. He adds, however, that the effects of his experiments tend to vary widely,
depending on the subject matter of the news.
SHAPING THE POLITICAL AGENDA
Shanto Iyengar looks at why we think what we do about politics in Is Anyone Responsible? But the theories
and premises of his research are derived in large part from his 1987 book News That Matters (co-authored with
Donald Kinder). In the book, he examines how we think about politics, suggesting that television determines
what we believe to be important issues largely by paying attention to some problems and ignoring or paying
minimal attention to others. "Our evidence implies an American public with a limited memory for last month's
news and a recurrent vulnerability to today's," Iyengar and Kinder write. "When television news focuses on a
problem, the public's priorities are altered, and altered again as television news moves on to something new."
The idea of the media as agenda-setter was hardly new. In the late 1960s, Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald
L. Shaw began studying the agenda-setting capacity of the news media in American presidential elections.
They were especially interested in the question of information transmission — what people actually learn from
news stories, rather than attitudinal changes, the subject of earlier research. Their research precipitated a
stream of empirical studies that underscored the media's critical role as vehicles of political information.
In their 1977 book, The Emergence of American Political Issues, McCombs and Shaw argued that the most
important effect of the mass media was "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us." The news
media "may not be successful in telling us what to think," the authors declared, "but they are stunningly
successful in telling us what to think about."
McCombs and Shaw also note that the media's tendency to structure voters' perceptions of political reality in
effect constitutes a bias: "to a considerable degree the art of politics in a democracy is the art of determining
which issue dimensions are of major interest to the public or can be made salient in order to win public
support."
The presidential observer Theodore White arrived at the same conclusion in his landmark book, The Making of
a President: "The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion;
and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think
about — an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins."
THE PRO-ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA
Iyengar's contention that the media, through episodic news framing, deflect accountability from elected
officials, and that their coverage in fact propagates the status quo is widely substantiated by other scholars.
In an insightful piece in the May/June 1991 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, James Boylan reflects
on "voter alienation and the challenge it poses to the press." He writes that "information, the raw material of
news, usually turns out to be the peculiar property of those in power and their attendant experts and publicists."
The conclusion he draws from this is that "political reporting, like other reporting, is defined largely by its
sources."
President Johnson once quipped that "Reporters are puppets. They simply respond to the pull of the most
powerful strings." The point echoes Walter Lippmann's classic analysis of the press, Public Opinion, in which
he raised difficult questions about adequacy and the purity of media information. If the information we are
getting is tainted, he asked, are we capable of performing our duty as democratic citizens?
The press ... is too frail to carry the whole burden of popular sovereignty, to supply spontaneously the truth
which democrats hoped was inborn. And when we expect it to supply such a body of truth we employ a
misleading standard of judgment. We misunderstand the limited nature of news.
In their oft-quoted book Media Power Politcs (1981), David Paletz and Robert Entman argue that "by granting
elites substantial control over the content, emphases, and flow of public opinion, media practices diminish the
public's power." What this means, they concluded, was that "the mass media are often the unwitting
handmaidens of the powerful."
This same conclusion is drawn by New York University's Robert Karl Manoff in the March/April 1987 issue
ofCenter Magazine. He maintains that one of the major problems of today's journalism is that the press is
allied with the state. "The press," he writes, "is actually a handmaiden of power and American politics." It
reports governmental conflict only when conflict exists within the state itself. Journalists and officials share a
"managerial ethos" in which both agree that national security, for instance, is best handled without the public's
knowledge.
Arthur J. Heise, associate professor at Florida International University in Miami, sees the role of the media as a
"public management function," one he sees as essential to a healthy democracy. The erosion of public
confidence in government can be at least partially attributed to the media's failure "in its role as a free and
independent press . . . to live up to its constitutional responsibilities. Many in the news media could agree, at
least in large measure, that they are not covering the affairs of the state as fully, as penetratingly and as
aggressively as they might."
The problem may have less to do with the type or the quantity of coverage than with the fact that most of the
time most of the media rely on information not ferreted out by investigative reporters but provided by
government. This reliance on officially-provided information is such that journalists as prominent as Tom
Wicker of the New York Times have described it as the "biggest weakness" of the American press"
In a provocative article titled "All the Congressmen's Men," the late Walter Karp, author of Liberty Under
Siege: American Politics, 1976-1988, observed that "the press does not act, it is acted upon.... So passive is the
press that even seemingly bold 'adversarial' stories often have the sanction of the highest officials." He quotes
from a wealth of sources and presents ample evidence suggesting that the vaunted power of the press is no
more than a "shabby fiction," and the political powers have in effect subjugated and distorted the media. "Our
public realm lies steeped in twilight," he charges, "and we call that twilight news."
Karp, Heise, and Iyengar and Kinder all cite a landmark study conducted by media critic Leon V. Sigal who
analyzed nearly 3,000 news stories that appeared in New York Times and Washington Post between 1949 and
1969. He found that nearly four out of five of the stories involved official sources.
The significance of media sources becomes immediately apparent in the context of media framing. As Iyengar
writes in the September 1987 issue of American Political Science Review, "the invoking of different reference
points triggers completely different strategies of choice or judgment."
Choices between risky prospects can be profoundly altered merely by altering the description of the
alternatives. Framing the prospects in terms of possible losses, for example, induces risk-seeking behavior
while describing the identical prospects in terms of potential gains makes people risk averse.
OBJECTIVITY
Objectivity has been the ruling principle in American journalism for the better part of the 20th century. The
ethic emerged as a reaction to the sensationalism that pervaded the news industry a century ago. The
objectivity standard called for more discipline on the part of reporters and editors because it required that each
item be attributed to some authority or credible source. Objectivity increased the quantity of literal facts in the
news, and it did much to strengthen the growing sense of discipline and ethics in journalism. (The ethic of
objectivity is not to be mistaken for the "fairness" doctrine, however, which demands the presentation of
opposing and/or balanced viewpoints.)
Yet a growing number of pieces have been written in recent years suggesting that the ideal of objectivity has,
in the words of Ben Bagdikian, "exacted a high cost from journalism and from public policy." Social historian
Michael Schudson points out that objectivity became a standard in journalism "precisely when the
impossibility of overcoming subjectivity in presenting the news was widely accepted and ... precisely because
subjectivity had come to be regarded as inevitable."
In a persuasive 1984 essay in The Quill, Theodore Glasser, professor of journalism at the University of
Minnesota, made the point that "objectivity precludes responsibility."
First ... objectivity in journalism is biased in favor of the status quo; it is inherently conservative to the extent
that it encourages reporters to rely on what sociologist Alvin Gouldner so appropriately describes as the
"managers of the status quo" — the prominent and the elite. Second, objective reporting is biased against
independent thinking; it emasculates the intellect by treating it as a disinterested spectator. Finally, objective
reporting is biased against the very idea of responsibility; the day's news is viewed as something journalists are
compelled to report, not something they are responsible for creating. . . . What objectivity has brought about, in
short, is a disregard for the consequences of newsmaking.
THE MEDIA AND CIVIC LITERACY
The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University recently published
a report titled "Restoring the Bond: Connecting Campaign Coverage to Voters." One of the lessons learned
from the 1988 presidential campaign, the report finds, is that journalists have contributed to the alienation and
anger among voters. "If a single overriding theme emerges from this work, it is a concern that campaigns have
become distant from the concerns of voters, that a 'disconnect' has developed between the electorate and their
prospective leaders — and that journalism, rather than bridging the gap, has helped create and sustain it."
The Center's report also criticized the prevailing "insider" approach to campaign coverage; the media's focus
on political strategy and advertising over substance; and the tendency for the production demands of television
to determine the way candidates and issues are presented and discussed during presidential campaigns. "In
practice," the report concludes, "this means that the public is losing its grip on the democratic process."
According to the arguments set forth by Shanto Iyengar, the breakdown of public confidence in media
reportage is a result of the way campaigns are framed. "Nowhere is the debilitating influence of episodic
framing on political accountability more apparent than in presidential election campaigns . . . [which]
guarantee that coverage of the issues and the candidates' policy proposals will receive minimal attention."
There has been an effort, at least on the part of some journalists, to be more issue-specific during the 1992
campaigns, as witnessed by a wealth of articles and debates about how to improve public discourse. Everette
Dennis, executive director of the Gannet Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, suggests in his
book Reshaping the Media that reporting standards are moving toward more analysis and thematic coverage:
There is more context today as we see coverage of national trends. We are also witnessing better efforts to
connect fragments of news into patterns of continuity. This is the opposite of what Lord Tennyson described
when he warned about "fragments of singular instance." Public affairs reporting in newspapers and in
broadcasting is more conscious of time and of protracted governmental decisions. It now traces the long
evolutionary flow in the decisions of government that do not often lend themselves to immediacy and the
quick news fix, but need continuity and follow-up.
POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE NEWS MEDIA
Ultimately, however, there has been very little written about the political consequences of media reporting.
The failure to see journalism as a democratic means rather than an end unto itself is perhaps symptomatic of
the gulf between the press and the public. Surveying the available research on the political effects of mass
media, Paul Burstein at the University of Washington points out that politics is only important insofar as
"political actions have important consequences. Sociologists must know this, at some level, but when studying
politics they assidiously avoid focusing on consequences."
Politics is routinely taken to mean campaigns, elections, and the affairs of big government. Exceedingly few
sources refer to the media's role in facilitating public politics. If democracy requires more of us than the act of
casting a vote, the media scarcely reflect that notion. As Christopher Lasch puts it:
What democracy requires is public debate, not information. . . . Unless information is generated by sustained
public debate, most of it will be irrelevant at best, misleading and manipulative at worst. . . . Much of the press,
in its eagerness to inform the public, has become a conduit for the equivalent of junk mail.
But critics of this claim, such as Paul Light, associate dean of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the
University of Minnesota, maintain, that it is up to the citizens to determine the agenda.
The problem, of course, is on the consumer side of the ledger. Having more analysis, and the financial
protection that might go with it, is hardly useful if voters choose to watch Geraldo, Oprah, Maury, Phil and
Sally instead. . . . Much as we focus on the supply side of the equation, the problem with American politics
appears to reside on the demand side, whether voters either want the information we elites value or not.
Even when the media does offer substance and analysis, it may still not offer citizens a basis for choice or
action. Acting together requires dialogue,and that is something the news media rarely if ever provide or
engender. As passive recipients of information, we are simply an audience to what Bill Moyers has called the
"monologue of televisual images." In Images of Education, media critic George Kaplan sums up the problem:
Many of today's serious documentaries are thoughtful presentations that leave us informed and healthily
curious. They refute the stereotyped contention that television has helped make us a less reflective people with
shorter attention spans. As a general proposition, though, they do not impose moral and intellectual choices on
us. They usually leave us unmoved and unchallenged.
In sum, journalists may take us seriously as news consumers but generally ignore our wider role as citizens. As
a rule, they do not encourage communication, strengthen the public dialogue, or facilitate the formulation of
common decisions. In fact, they may do just the opposite by routinely framing news in objective and episodic
formats. And "even when the function of journalism is considered to be education," in James Boylan's words,
"the public's role is still likely to be conceived as passive."
Questions
1. What is the main point of the essay? Do you agree with the author? Why or why not?
2. In the section “Episodic vs Thematic Framing” the author uses the phrase “context of no
context”. What does he mean by this and how does it apply to television news coverage?
3. How does mass media shape our political agenda?
4. Re-read the section “The Pro-Establishment Media” and reflect on how this section is consistent
or inconsistent with the documentary “Outfoxed” that we watched in class.
5. What is meant by civil literacy?
6. How can media remain objective when covering politics? Is it possible? Should we even strive
for this or should we accept and embrace the media’s subjectivity?