Frame Analysis

Key Terms

According to Stephen Reese, a frame is a socially shared organizing principle that works symbolically to shape democratic discourse and influence public opinion by creating and promoting particular vocabularies. Frames appear most vividly in media coverage. Consider the journalistic choices that precede a news story about a crime in your neighborhood, an Occupy Wall Street protest in [Page 584]New York, or a terrorist attack in the Middle East. Newspaper readers or television viewers will want to know what happened, why, and what should be done about it. News directors, producers, and journalists will want to answer those questions in a way that resonates with the cognitive schema already in place in the minds of their audience. The frame is the socially shared organizing principle that informs how media coverage can fulfill the audience’s need to make sense of these news events in a way that aligns with their existing orientations.

Frames serve an important heuristic function. According to Robert Entman, frames allow for mental shortcuts. This shortcut function can be compared with how you might remember a new phone number: your brain may have trouble recalling all 10 digits of a phone number on command. It has a much easier time recalling two sets of three digits and one set of four (555-364-1037). Frames work similarly. By turning fragmented symbolic resources into coherent organizing schema, frames can transform complex political, social, cultural, and economic issues into manageable, chunk-able thought structures.

Scholars from several disciplines, including journalism, political science, and communication and rhetorical studies, have used framing to analyze the rhetorical and ideological potency of our sense-making processes. Here is where frame analysis departs from the phone number comparison. Unlike a phone number, frames do not merely produce a neutral account of the world. There is no objective truth that a frame can illuminate. Explaining why a crime occurred, a protest rally was held, or an act of violence was committed may appear natural and common sense in the media coverage, but it never is. Frames are always imposing a specific logic on an audience and foreclosing alternative perspectives in subtle and taken-for-granted ways. Frame analysis attracts the attention of scholars interested in power because frames define the terms of debate in strategic ways. Frames shape public opinion through the persuasive use of symbols, and in many cases, end up influencing legislative and public policy decisions.

The process of framing described here can sometimes seem like part of a cynical plot employed by elites, politicians, and media power brokers crowded into smoke-filled rooms deciding how to best manipulate news coverage in a way that conforms to their selfish interests. Fortunately, that top-down description of framing is deeply misguided. Framing is not brainwashing. Frames are not targeted at a referential, static, and passive audience. The power of a frame is not derived from its capacity to completely shape discourse and opinion. Frames do not work on audiences, they work with audiences. Frames encourage a particular interpretive lens, but because frames are contingent and dynamic, they must derive their appeal from existing cultural narratives, symbolic traditions, and social orientations. The contingent and dynamic nature of framing opens up fresh and exciting lines of inquiry for the communication researcher.

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