Framing: mediaA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWand/or solution.’
Th is approach is useful in analysing the encod-
ing of messages and gauging their eff ectiveness.
It emphasizes the subjective nature of encoding
by recognizing the ‘invisible’ schemata – psycho-
logical templates – which, however hard we try
to be objective and impartial, deeply infl uence
our actions.
For successful communication, that is winning
the interest and attention of the audience, and
perhaps even going beyond that in terms of
gaining the audience’s assent or approval, there
seems to be a need for a meeting of schemata:
a common ground. Th e communicator selects,
then attempts to give salience to those parts of
the story which may fi t with the existing sche-
mata in a receiver’s belief system.
Much of what we know about the past, about
history, is itself in frames – in ancient palaces
and tombs, on triumphal arches, the walls and
ceilings of great monasteries and cathedrals.
Th ese artefacts do not necessarily tell us what
life was like in those days; rather, they tell us
what was considered salient by those with power
to make decisions. In Th e Nature and Origins
of Public Opinion (Cambridge University Press,
1992), J.R. Zaller says that framing is a central
power in the democratic process: it is political
elites who control the framing of issues. Such
framing, Zaller believes, not only influences
public opinion but also is capable of defi ning it.
At a practical level, framing is governed by
professional conventions, indeed by ritual: news-
papers are framed by deadlines and publication
times. TV news is framed with music, graphics,
headlines and news readers. Each ritual presence
reinforces and increases the salience of the frame,
its dominance over alternative frames. Th e study
of media is an example of what Entman calls
counterframing in that it attempts to call the
ritual frames into question by analysing them in
the light of possible alternative frames.
In ‘Framing European politics: a content
analysis of press and television news’, in the
Journal of Communication, Spring 2000, Holli
A. Semetko and Patti M. Valkenburg identify fi ve
key frames in which the media present the news- attribution of responsibility, confl ict, economic
consequences, human interest and morality. In
their researches, the authors found less diver-
gence between press and TV and more between
serious and sensationalist press; the fi rst oper-
ating within the attribution-of-responsibility
frame, the second in the human-interest frame.
See topic guide under media: processes &
production.
30-minute slots to be fi lled, each to conclude
with unfi nished business, preferably dramatic
and suspenseful, while not being so dramati-
cally ‘fi nal’ that the series cannot continue day
by day, week by week. Presented with such a
time-frame, soaps require many characters and
many plots. To facilitate this requirement (and
to capture and retain audience attention)
scriptwriters divide up the frame into quick-bite
scenes – framing within frames.
What happens outside the creative frame –
audience measurement, for example –infl uences
the nature of the frame and what goes on inside
it. Robert Entman in ‘Framing: toward clarifi ca-
tion of a fractured paradigm’, in the Journal of
Communication, 4 (1992), says that a crucial
task of analysis is to show ‘exactly how framing
infl uences thinking’ for ‘the concept of framing
consistently off ers a way to describe the power of
a communicating text’.
He argues, ‘Analysis of frames illuminates the
precise way in which infl uence over a human
consciousness is exerted by the transfer (or
communication) of information from one loca-
tion such as speech, utterance, news report, or
novel – to the consciousness.’ Essentially, fram-
ing constitutes selection and salience; what is
perceived to be most meaningful, the one serving
the other. Entman suggests that framing serves
four main purposes: (1) to defi ne problems; (2) to
diagnose causes; (3) to make moral judgments;
and (4) to suggest remedies.
Th ese will function varyingly according to the
text, but they operate in four locations in the
communication process: the communicator, the
text, the receiver and the culture. Communica-
tors ‘make conscious or unconscious framing
judgments in deciding what to say, guided by
frames (often called schemata) that organize
their belief systems’. Before we frame, we are in
a frame. Th e text will not only be framed by the
framer within a frame, it will also be shaped by
a number of factors – requirements concerning
format and presentation, aesthetic consider-
ations, notions of professionalism and pressures
to meet the expectations of convention.
When the text comes to be ‘read’, the frames
as presented may be at variance with the frames
that guide the receiver’s thinking. For Entman,
the culture is ‘the stock of commonly invoked
frames ... exhibited in the discourse and thinking
of most people in a social grouping’. ‘Framing
in all four locations includes similar functions:
selection and highlighting, and use of the
highlighting elements to construct an argument
about problems and their causation, evaluation