Media salience and frame changing across events: Coverage of nine school shootings, 1997-2001

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 83, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 747-766

  Muschert, Glenn W ^a   Carr, Dawn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK; MEDIA ROLE; VIOLENCE;

EID: 34047256281     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900608300402     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. James P. Winter and Chaim H. Eyal, "Agenda-Setting for the Civil Rights Issue," Public Opinion Quarterly 45 (autumn 1981): 376-83.
2. Hsiang Iris Chyi and Maxwell McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing: Coverage of the Columbine School Shootings," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 81 (spring 2004): 22-35.
3. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 23.
4. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 26.
5. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing."
6. Anthony Downs, "Up and Down with Ecology: The "Issue-Attention Cycle,'" The Public Interest 28 (spring 1972): 38-50.
7. Winter and Eyal, "Agenda-Setting for the Civil Rights Issue."
8. Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media," Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (summer 1972): 176-87.
9. McCombs and Shaw, "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media."
10. Maxwell E. McCombs and Tamara Bell, "The Agenda-Setting Role of Mass Communication," in An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and Research, ed. Michael Salwen and Donald Stacks (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 93-110.
11. Salma I. Ghanem, "Filling in the Tapestry: The Second Level of Agenda Setting," in Communication and Democracy, ed. Maxwell E. McCombs, Donald L. Shaw, and David H. Weaver (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997): 3-14.
12. Jarol B. Manheim, "A Model of Agenda Dynamics," Communication Yearbook 10 (1987): 499-516.
13. Spiro Kiousis, "Explicating Media Salience: A Factor Analysis of the New York Times Issue Coverage During the 2000 U.S. Presidential Campaign," Journal of Communication 54 (spring 2004): 71-87.
14. Craig Trumbo, "Longitudinal Modeling of Public Issues: An Application of the Agenda-Setting Process to the Issue of Global Warming," Journalism Monographs 152 (1995);
15. Everett M. Rogers and James W. Dearing, Agenda-Setting (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996).
16. Kiousis, "Explicated Media Salience."
17. Ghanem, "Filling in the Tapestry";
18. Maxwell E. McCombs and Salma I. Ghanem, "The Convergence of Agenda Setting and Framing," in Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, ed. Stephen D. Reese, Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., and August E. Grant (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001), 67-81.
19. Maxwell E. McCombs and Salma I. Ghanem, "The Convergence of Agenda Setting and Framing," 70.
20. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 24.
21. Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
22. Winter and Eyal, "Agenda-Setting for the Civil Rights Issue."
23. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 25.
24. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 24-6.
25. Discussed in Katherine Newman, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 231-5.
26. Newman, Rampage, 231.
27. See Table A.1 in Newman, Rampage, 308-9.
28. Brendan Maguire, Georgie Ann Weatherby, and Richard A. Mathers, "Network News Coverage of School Shootings," Social Science journal 39 (2002): 465-70.
29. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980).
30. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 26-7.
31. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing.
32. Downs, "Up and Down with Ecology."
33. Jian-Hua Zhu, "Issue Competition and Attention Distraction: A Zero-Sum Theory of Agenda-Setting," Journalism Quarterly 54 (winter 1992): 825-36;
34. Jian-Hua Zhu and James H. Watt, "Public Issue Priority Formation: Media Agenda-Setting and Social Interaction," Journal of Communication 43 (winter 1993): 8-29.
35. Maxwell E. McCombs and Jian-Hua Zhu, "Capacity, Diversity, and Volatility of the Public Agenda: Trends from 1954 to 1994," Public Opinion Quarterly 59 (winter 1995): 495-525.
36. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 23.
37. For details, see the coding scheme as outlined in Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing."
38. The New York Times is a potential source of bias along the space dimension. As a national news source, the Times may focus on larger-scale space frames, biasing empirical study of frame-changing. Comparative study of national, regional, and local news coverage of similar events might uncover evidence of spatial bias.
39. For the community category of the space frame, the coding employed in the present study differs from the original study. Chyi and McCombs conceptualized community as "If the story focuses on Columbine High School, or the town of Littleton, or any other single community" (27 [italics added]). In the present study, the community frame applied only when the article discussed the specific community in which the shootings occurred. Articles discussing the relevance of the shooting for other communities were coded as "societal" for the space frame. The rationale for this difference came from the supposition that the communities were being discussed as part of the discourse surrounding the relevance of the particular shooting for communities across the nation.
40. As in the community frame, the coding employed for the regional frame in the present study differs slightly from the original study. While Chyi and McCombs (27) included discussion of any other region within the "regional" category of the space frame, the regional frame in the present study includes only those articles focusing on the region in which the shooting occurs. Articles discussing the relevance of the shooting incident for other regions are coded as "societal" for the space frame.
41. Scott's π measures inter-coder reliability, accounting for the agreement likely to occur by chance. See William A. Scott, "Reliability of Content Analysis: The Case of Nominal Scale Coding," Public Opinion Quarterly 19 (fall 1955): 321-5.
42. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 29.
43. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 29-31. See especially Table 1, located on page 31.
44. Regarding this "societal and present" association, here are two example quotes: Amid talk of installing metal detectors at the school doors and in the first day of a new policy of searching students' backpacks for guns, a still-puzzled county sheriff wondered out loud whether the 14-year-old boy who killed three of his classmates in an early-morning prayer circle acted alone, or expected help. ("Theories but No Answer in School Shooting," New York Times, December 4, 1997)
45. Almost from the moment the bullets stopped flying outside Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., the explanations and analysis began whizzing by. It was guns. It was the violent culture of the South. It was the violent culture of American media. It was bad parenting. It was the breakdown of the family caused by liberal politics or economic stress. It was violence against women. It was lax juvenile justice laws. ("The Nation: Spin Cycle; Round and Round in the Search for Meaning" New York Times, March 29, 1998)
46. Regarding this "community and present" association, here are two example quotes: Springfield tried to act like a small town on a holiday today, with residents attempting to get on with their lives two days after this city became the latest embodiment of the nation's struggle with violence at schools. ("Shootings in a Schoolhouse: The Town; Springfield Struggles to Heal Itself in Wake of Shootings," New York Times, 24 May 1998)
47. A man in blue jeans stood in the foyer of the packed Farmers Union funeral home, his arms wrapped tightly around a little girl, as family, neighbors and classmates said goodbye to 12-year-old Paige Ann Herring in the first of two funerals this day. ("Arkansas City Begins Burying Its Young Dead," New York Times, March 28, 1998)
48. Regarding this "individual and present" association, here are two example quotes: Six teen-agers were charged today with conspiracy to commit murder in a case linked to a rampage last week in which a 16-year-old is reported to have stabbed his mother to death and fatally shot two schoolmates. ("National News Briefs; 6 Teen-Agers Charged With Conspiracy to Kill," New York Times, October 8, 1997)
49. The suspect, a 14-year-old student at Parker Middle School here, in rural northwestern Pennsylvania, was charged as an adult this morning with criminal homicide, three counts each of aggravated assault and reckless endangerment and gun and drug charges. ("Student Guns Down Science Teacher Chaperoning School Dance," New York Times, April 26, 1998)
50. Regarding this societal and future" association, here are two example quotes: In the days following shootings at schools in California and Pennsylvania last week, the new reality of gun control politics became starkly clear. Unlike in 1999, when Democrats reacted almost immediately to the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado with demands for tough new gun restrictions, there were few calls to action. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, one of Washington's most aggressive gun control proponents, simply suggested a voluntary "code of ethics" for gun owners and their families. ("The Nation: Over a Barrel; New Gun Control Politics: A Whimper, Not a Bang," New York Times, March 11, 2001)
51. By a vote of 73 to 25, the Senate tonight passed a juvenile-crime bill that contained an array of new gun-control measures, the fruit of the most significant debate over gun control in Congress in half a decade. ("Guns and Schools: The Legislation; Senate Votes Gun Curbs, Hours After School Shooting," New York Times, 21 May 1999)
52. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 24-6.
53. E.g., McCombs and Zhu, "Capacity, Diversity, and Volatility of the Public Agenda."
54. Chyi and McCombs, "Media Salience and the Process of Framing," 26.
55. There is a potential for further convergence between social problems agenda tracking in communications research and sociological research examining social problems in the news. See, e.g., Stephen Hilgartner and Charles L. Bosk "The Rise and Fall of Social Problems: A Public Arenas Model," American Journal of Sociology 94 Guly 1988): 53-78;
56. J. William Spencer and Elizabeth Triche, "Media Constructions of Risk and Safety-Differential Framings of Hazard Events," Sociological Inquiry 64 (spring 1994) 199-213;
57. William Gamson and Andre Modigliani, "Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach," American Journal of Sociology 95 (July 1989): 1-37.
58. Winter and Eyal, "Agenda-Setting for the Civil Rights Issue."