Framing the IRA: beyond agenda setting and framing towards a model accounting for audience influence

Coverage of Irish Republican Army (IRA) attacks and the Northern Irish peace process is affected by both the country a media organisation is located and their format. The coverage of the IRA in 1996 was studied in five newspapers based in Ireland, Northern Ireland, the UK and the USA to reveal similarities and differences in language use, stories reported and general emphasis. The frequency of keywords was examined to show that the location a newspaper is based in affects the stories run by the newspaper. However, the format of a newspaper affects the framing of this coverage more than the location. These results were analysed through the lens of two leading theories pertaining to media–public relations: agenda-setting theory and framing theory. While both are shown to be partially useful in explaining the results, a more holistic view that accounts for public influence on media coverage would be even more useful. As a result of this narrow focus on only one part of media–public relations, the two theories do not exhibit predictive power, and further study should be conducted to expand their scope to encompass the public’s affect on media coverage.     

Death is in the eye of the beholder: a study of casualty count framing in the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict

The 2014 Israel–Gaza war was the third of a string of conflicts to erupt between the State of Israel and Hamas in neighbouring Gaza and quickly became the deadliest for both sides. Even with the extensive media attention this crisis received, calls for more objective reporting were widespread, as locating sources that were not clearly influenced or reflective of political biases seemed near impossible. This paper seeks to explore the role “cultural proximity” plays in informing casualty count reporting in times of conflict. Qualitative content analysis is conducted on news coverage of the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict in the American daily newspaper, The New York Times, and the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, to assess whether significant differences exist in the way casualty figures are addressed across varying degrees of political and cultural involvement. This research reveals that variations in casualty count reporting do indeed exist across cultural and national contexts, and deems this subject worthy of further research.     

Framing terror: an experimental framing effects study of the perceived threat of terrorism

An exploratory framing effects experiment was conducted to test whether three controversial news portrayals (or frames) of the terrorist threat increase subjects' perceptions of the danger. A total of 176 subjects were exposed to one of eight different article treatments. The subjects reported higher levels of perceived threat when the danger was associated with ‘radical Islamic groups’ (as compared to homegrown terrorists) and ‘nuclear’ technology (as compared to conventional weapons). Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, this study also showed that the term ‘terrorism’ itself did not affect the perceived threat. These results provide support for a theory of framing that explains the precise ways in which a particular set of communicating texts (terrorism news frames) influence human consciousness. Further theoretical details, as well as the social and political implications of this study, are discussed.     

Playing to the Crowd: Agenda Control in Presidential Debates

Presidential debates allow candidates to send a message directly to voters. We use an experimental design complemented with a content analysis of all presidential debates in 1992, 2004, and 2008 to explore how candidates should and do use agenda setting, framing, and message tone to shape the agenda in debates. We find that candidates are differentially attentive to various topics, depending on the comparative advantage provided by the topic. Yet, this agenda control occurs only at the margins because topic salience in public opinion predicts candidate attention and conditions voters' receptiveness to debate rhetoric. Our findings thus suggest that topic salience constrains candidates' abilities to focus the agenda strategically.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resources: Experimental Sample and Randomization; Experimental Treatments; Experimental Results; and the Presidential Debate Rhetoric Codebook.]     

‘Legislative frame representation’: towards an empirical account of the deliberative systems approach

The systemic approach to deliberative democracy is an empirically underexplored topic. Since ‘classic’ micro indicators for deliberation are at loggerheads with the idea of distributed deliberation, appropriate assessment techniques for large-scale public deliberation are few and far between. This paper aims at exploring a novel pathway into the empirical translations of the deliberative systems approach, using discourse content and the representation of policy frames in the legislature. I argue that legislative frame representation (LFR) is a crucial indicator for the level of sub-systemic deliberative uptake and policy responsiveness. Next to the necessary theoretical and methodological work, the results of an explorative case study for the immigration discourse in the US and Canada are presented. The results indicate that there are considerable differences in the systems’ capacities to take up discourses from civil society and that LFR can be an important tool to explore deliberative systems empirically.     

Constructing Authoritative Answers to a Latent Crisis? Strategies of Puzzling,Powering and Framing in Dutch Climate Adaptation Practices Compared

While adaptation tends to be approached as an issue for policy analysis, framing and powering strongly interact with policy analysis (puzzling) and are at least as important for adequate outcomes in such an ambiguous context. The present contribution compares and analyzes two Dutch adaptation strategies in the Central Netherlands: (1) realizing a flood bypass channel near the town of Kampen and (2) exploring possibilities to raise the water level of Lake IJssel, enhancing the country’s freshwater storage capacity. The article concludes that in both trajectories there is an important role for policy analysis (puzzling) but the cases differ strongly in the way actors frame the intervention, their corresponding powering strategies and the policy outcomes.     

Media Framing on Armed Conflicts: Limits of Peace Journalism on the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

ABSTRACT

Media framing and coverage of contemporary armed conflicts largely focus on the defence of national security and war propaganda. The concept of peace journalism draws on the Galtung tradition and provides a toolkit for opposing war journalism and contributing to reconciliation. By examining the case of media framing of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, this article asks whether and why peace journalism is possible in the given political context. Our study of limited peace journalism shows that traditions of war journalism are predominant and points to limitations of liberal instruments in (semi-)authoritarian post-Soviet conflict contexts.     

‘They come here to work’: an evaluation of the economic argument in favor of immigrant rights

Advocates commonly highlight the exploitation that hard-working undocumented immigrants commonly suffer at the hands of employers, the important contribution they make to the US economy, and the fiscal folly of border militarization and enhanced immigration enforcement policies. In this paper, I unpack these economic rationales for expanding immigrant rights, and examine the nuanced ways in which advocates deploy this frame. To do so, I rely on statements issued by publicly present immigrant rights groups in six places: California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Texas, and Washington, DC. I also draw on interviews with immigrant advocates in San Jose, CA and Houston, TX, press releases from two alternative national immigrant rights organizations, and an ethnographic photo-documentation of immigrant rights mobilizations in 2012–2014. Economic rationales, I emphasize, can be found in each of these contexts, but are not mutually exclusive to other justifications, including narratives about civil, human, and family rights for immigrants. However, I argue that an economic framing of immigrant rights nonetheless runs the risk reifying work over conventional understandings of criminality, often relies on a narrow definition of economic worth, and could have negative consequences for coalition building.     

American and foreign terrorists: an analysis of divergent portrayals in US newspaper coverage

American news coverage of terrorist activity consistently portrays the attacker as abnormal, but the mechanics of this othering process are entirely dependent on the nationality of the attacker in question. Coverage of domestic terrorism stresses the attacker’s personal instability and contrasts the perpetrator with his or her victims, painting the terrorist as an anomaly in American society. Foreign attackers, with whom journalists more frequently apply the terrorist label, are othered in US news media through heavy emphasis on their association with distant groups and conflicts. To explore how framing techniques differ throughout coverage of domestic and foreign terrorists, two separate corpora of articles from popular American newspapers were systematically compiled. One corpus contained articles about American attackers, while the other contained articles about foreign terrorists. The corpora were processed using both corpus linguistics software and a comparative analysis of texts. Exploring the American media’s framing choices illuminates how popular biases and perceptions of terrorist violence came to be; framing theory asserts that communicating entities inevitably shape the story they relay, influencing the reactions of those who experience the event second-hand. Not only does news coverage use distinct framing patterns for American and foreign perpetrators, but those patterns foster a populace that conceptualises American and foreign terrorists differently.     

Framing terrorism: geography-based media coverage variations of the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid and the 2009 twin suicide car bombings in Baghdad

Written media mould how civil society perceives acts of terrorism. In employing different framing techniques, news articles develop a unique narrative that influences how readers comprehend an attack. Past studies of the relationship between the media and terrorism ignore how media portrayals of terrorist attacks vary based on the attacks’ geographic location. By comparing two similar terrorist attacks, one that occurred in the West – Madrid, Spain – and the other in the East – Baghdad, Iraq – the paper seeks to explore how media coverage of terrorist attacks that occur in different geographic locations varies. Employing news frame analysis reveals how coverage of the 11 March 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid differs from the 25 October 2009 double suicide bombings in Baghdad. Coverage of an attack on a Western nation compared to one on an Eastern nation contributes to Islamophobia and exacerbates an us–them mentality. Simply accepting information published in news articles at face value inhibits forming rational conclusions about the nature of terrorism.