Agenda-Setting and Framing

Question 1

What is agenda-setting?

Answer 1

• Theory concerned with which issues or objects are more or less prominent in the media
• Media’s capability, through repeated news coverage, of raising the importance of an issue in the public’s mind
• a type of social learning
• People learn about the relative importance of issues in society through the amount of coverage such issues receive in the media

Question 2

How do media set agendas to the public?

Answer 2

Top networks set agenda for other news organizations as well

Question 3

What’s framing?

Answer 3

Media tell us not only what to think about but also how to think about it

• Theory concerned with how issues are depicted in the media. Examines the attributes of issues.
• Second level of agenda setting
• Issues have attributes, characteristics and properties

Question 4

What is a media frame?

Answer 4

A central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what issue is through use of selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration.

Question 5

What do frames do? Who can they be constructed by?

Answer 5

Provide a perspective to a story. They can be constructed by the media, by the individual or groups that have an interest in the way the story is told.

Question 6

The less direct experience people have with a given issue, what will they depend on more?

Answer 6

The media

Question 7

What can be considered a frame?

Answer 7

• choices about language, quotations, sources, characterization, and relevant info.
• Presence or absence of key words
• Stereotypical images
• Sentences that reinforce clusters of facts or judgements
• Elements in a story that reflect common news values

Question 8

How do we recognize/find frames?

Answer 8

• In keywords, concepts, symbols, catchphrases, taglines, examples, metaphors, visual images, adjectives, descriptions, etc.
• Frames can be implicit or explicit
• Can recognize frames in persistent pattern of recognition, interpretation, and presentation of selection, emphasis, and exclusion of information.
• Interpretive packages that give meaning to an issue
  > at core of these packages is a central organizing idea (frame) for making sense of relevant events, suggesting what is at issue.

Question 9

According to Entman, to frame is to what?

Answer 9

To frame is to select some aspects of a percieved reality and make them more salient in a communicating text in such a way to promote a particular problem definition, casual interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described

Question 10

Framing can lead to what?

Answer 10

• Distortion bias: when the reality is falsified
• Content bias: when news favors one side rather than providing equivalent treatment to both sides
• Decision-making bias: when journalists/corporations motivated by particular aspects and mindsets produce biased content.

Question 11

How is framing influenced during reporting?

Answer 11

• The way the media select and report stories is driven largely by factors attributed to sominant class biases inherent within the media.
• Mainstream media is largely owned by corporate conglomerates and run almost exclusively by educated, upper-income white males

Question 12

Communication is a dynamic process that involves frame building and frame setting. What is frame building?

Answer 12

• how frames emerge
• Refers to internal factors (editorial policies, news values, deadlines, etc) and external factors (sources, governments, PR companies) to journalism that determine how journalists and news organizations frame issues
• They affect the structural quality of the news