Stephen D. Reese, University of Texas - Austin

At this year’s ICA convention in Washington, D.C., one division panel took up the topic of framing, a term seen frequently in research paper titles at these meetings. I’ve had considerable interest in this area of research, and along with several co-authors have grappled with it in a recent volume from Framing Public Life: Perspectives on the Media and Our Understanding of the Social World (edited by S. Reese, O. Gandy, and A. Grant; Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001). The panel was an opportunity to air these issues. We had some success considering frames as organizing principles that work to meaningfully structure social (especially political) life, and discussing the research questions springing from that definition. 

I don’t have undue hope that somehow this paradigm will provide a unitary way to organize the many types of research that characterize the division. But framing does have potential as a cross-over concept, meaningful to scholars, the public, and professional practitioners as well. It also cuts across other binary oppositions, such as qualitative/quantitative, visual/verbal, sociological/psychological, and critical/behavioral. Framing also enjoys much cross-national appeal, beyond the United States, generating interest in Israel, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Canada, and Korea, to name just a few that I am immediately familiar with.

But within our own panel, there was considerable difference in how to most fruitfully pursue the idea. In my own case, I have focused on how to analytically tie frames to interests, in a quasi-ideological fashion, taking the idea of framing effects largely for granted. Jim Hertog has emphasized the cultural nature of frames, requiring that they have specific content (War on Drugs), compared to the more tactical way of regarding frames (e.g., episodic vs. thematic). He considers how best to read out those frames from media accounts, while working closely with other cultural sources to check their validity and reliability. 

Zhongdang Pan and Jerry Kosicki have emphasized the public deliberation aspects of framing, arguing that the venues for public political discourse have greatly increased, making our understanding of the framing process that much more important. They advocate using a case study approach (as they did with the health care debate) to consider the sociological web of subsidies that undergird the framing process, which must be regarded as an inevitable part of public deliberation-not just the occasional and suspect “spin.” Mark Miller derives frames inductively from media texts, identifying vocabularies associated the frames utilized by specific interest groups. This approach allows quantitative analysis of vast amounts of text, but requires the assumption that the frame is lodged in the manifest text at word level.

The flexibility of the framing concept may account in part for its popularity, allowing scholars to project onto it a variety of questions, not adequately addressed by other perspectives. But this flexibility also makes it more difficult to teach as a “method,” with agreed upon measurement procedures. The agenda-setting paradigm, for example, has enjoyed great success in many countries, as a set of concepts and techniques that permit ready adoption in other settings. I suspect the framing approach will need much more local adaptation and familiarity, especially if one is using the cultural approach advocated by Hertog, and others such as William Gamson.

Nevertheless, framing does seem to get us past certain traditional impasses. As I have written in the coming volume, it’s not enough to say either that knowledge is in the service of power or that knowledge emerges naturally through the pluralistic interplay of forces. Framing suggests that we specifically study how our social understanding is structured and how these understandings are tied to interests. Thus, to study framing means we must address normative issues.

Although social science research has not emphasized explicit value judgments in analysis of press coverage, framing can’t help but suggest them. How well did the press frame do justice to the issue? Why were journalists so willing to adopt the frame of a special interest group, when another would have been closer to the truth? 

This advances our understanding of press performance, which as a director of a school of journalism I regard as the central concern of our scholarly project. These are questions that academic analysts can easily share with media professionals. In his review of press coverage of China, for example, journalist James Mann considers the frame concept: “the single story, image, or concept” that governs the reporting in the media, affects editors mindsets, and sets the context against which journalists contend. Specifically, he warns against reducing China to a one dimensional, and distorting, frame. Editor Frank Denton cited framing research he found useful in understanding how journalists and readers approach stories from different perspectives. Jay Rosen has used the framing concept in his discussion of public journalism, providing a useful way for journalists to consider the many alternative ways they can approach the same general story.

The growing and powerful media watchdog industry, especially well-funded on the Right, has been doing this kind of framing research for years without exactly calling it that (e.g., Accuracy in Media, Media Research Institute, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting). And critical analyses have been emerging recently of the important framing role played by the public relations industry. Even if academic media researchers do not share the political spin of such groups, it is important that they be aware of the concerns that animate them — that the media are powerful, economic concerns, often distant from the audiences they serve, producing news as a commodity, generating frames that may distort as much as they illuminate our social world. The framing model comes closer than many research areas in our field to posing important, intelligible questions of common concern to scholars, press watchdogs, and ultimately the public as well.

Stephen D. Reese is director of the School of Journalism, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712 (512) 471-1845 Fax 512.471.7979.