The framesetting effects of news: An experimental test of advocacy versus objectivist frames

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 83, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 767-784

  Aday, Sean ^a  

^a GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADVOCACY; COGNITION; MEDIA ROLE; PUBLIC ATTITUDE;

EID: 34047262559     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900608300403     Document Type: Article

References (84)

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2. Shanto Iyengar and Don Kinder, News That Matters: Television and American Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
3. Maxwell McCombs and Tamara Bell, "The Agenda-setting Role of Mass Communication," in An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and Research, ed. Michael B. Salwen and Don W. Stacks (Mahwah, NH: Erlbaum, 1986), 93-110;
4. Everett M. Rogers, and J. L. Dearing, "Agenda-setting Research: Where Has It Been, Where Is It Going?" in Communication Yearbook 11, ed. James A. Anderson (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988), 555-94.
5. Robert Entman, "Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm," Journal of Communication 43 (4, 1993): 51-58;
6. Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
7. Joseph Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
8. Salma Ghanem, "Filling in the Tapestry: The Second Level of Agenda Setting," in Communication and Democracy: Exploring the Intellectual Frontiers in Agenda-Setting Theory, ed. Maxwell McCombs, Donald L. Shaw, and David Weaver (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 3-14;
9. Maxwell McCombs and Salma Ghanem, "Conver-gence of Agenda Setting and Framing," in Framing Public Life: Perspectives on the Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, ed. Steven Reese, Oscar H. Gandy, and August E. Grant (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001).
10. McCombs and Ghanem, "Convergence of Agenda Setting and Framing."
11. Gerald M. Kosicki, "Problems and Opportunities in Agenda-Setting Research," Journal of Communication 43 (2, 1993): 100-27.
12. T. Michael Maher, "Framing: An Emerging Paradign or a Phase of Agenda Setting?" in Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and our Understanding of the Social World, ed. Reese, Gandy, and Grant, 67-82.
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14. Amy Jasperson, Dhavan Shaw, Mark Watts, Ronald J. Faber, and David P. Fan, "Framing and the Public Agenda: Media Effects on the Importance of the Federal Budget Deficit," Political Communication 15 (2, 1988): 205-24;
15. Esteban Lopez-Escobar, Juan Pablos Llamas, Maxwell McCombs, and Federico Rey Lennon, "Two Levels of Agenda Setting Among Advertising and News in the 1995 Spanish Elections," Political Communication 15 (2, 1988): 225-38;
16. McCombs and Bell, "The Agenda-setting Role of Mass Communication";
17. Maxwell McCombs and George Estrada, "The News Media and the Pictures in Our Heads," in Do the Media Govern? Politicians, Voters, and Reporters in America, ed. Shanto Iyengar and Richard Reeves (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 237-47.
18. Iyengar and Kinder, News that Matters.
19. Guy Golan and Wayne Wanta, "Second-level Agenda Setting in the New Hampshire Primary: A Comparison of Coverage in Three Newspapers and Public Perceptions of Candidates," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78 (summer 2001): 247-60;
20. Spiro Kiousis, Philemon Bantimaroudis, and Hyun Ban, "Candidate Image Attributes," Communication Research 26 (4, 1999): 414-29.
21. McCombs and Ghanem, "Convergence of Agenda Setting and Framing";
22. Ghanem, "Filling in the Tapestry."
23. McCombs and Ghanem, "Convergence of Agenda Setting and Framing," 77.
24. William A. Gamson, "News as Framing," American Behavioral Scientist 33 (2, 1989): 157-61;
25. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).
26. Steven H. Chaffee and John L. Hochheimer, "The Beginnings of Political Communication Research in the United States: Origins of the 'Limited Effects' Model," in Mass Communication Review Yearbook, Vol. 5, ed. Michael Gurevitch and Mark R. Levy (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985), 75-104;
27. Joseph T. Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960);
28. John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
29. Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki, "Freezing Out the Public: Elite and Media Framing of the U.S. Anti-Nuclear Movement," Political Communication 10 (1993): 155-73.
30. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980);
31. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, "Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action," in Process and Effects of Mass Communication, ed. Wilbur Schramm (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1948), 554-78.
32. Scott L. Althaus, "When News Norms Collide, Follow the Lead: New Evidence for Press Independence," Political Communication 20 (2003): 381-414;
33. Phillip E. Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in Ideology and Discontent, ed. Clifford Geertz, Joseph W. Elder, Robert A. Scalapino, and Leonard Binder (New York: Free Press, 1964), 206-61;
34. Richard M. Perloff, The Dynamics of Persuasion (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993).
35. Sean Aday, "The Real War Won't Be Shown on Television: An Analysis of Casualty Imagery in American Television Coverage of the Iraq War," in Media and Conflict in the 21st Century, ed. Phil Seib (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 141-56;
36. W. Lance Bennett, "The News About Foreign Policy" in Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War, ed. W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 12-42;
37. but see Althaus, "When News Norms Collide."
38. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching;
39. Larry Gross, Up From Invisibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
40. Sean Aday, Public Journalism and the Power of the Press: Exploring the Framesetting Effect (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1999);
41. Jennie Buckner, "Public Journalism: Giving Voters a Voice," in Assessing Public Journalism, ed. Edmund B. Lambeth, Philip E. Meyer, and Esther Thorson (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 15-36;
42. Doug Clifton, "Creating a Forum to Help Solve Community Problems," Miami Herald, March 6, 1994, sec. C, p. 4;
43. Ed Fouhy, "A Sense of Community" Communicator, August 1994, 15-16;
44. William Glaberson, "A New Press Role: Solving Problems," New York Times, October 3, 1994, sec. D, p. 6;
45. Jay Rosen and Davis L. Meritt, Public Journalism: Theory and Practice (Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation, 1994).
46. Herbert Gans, Deciding What's News (New York: Vintage, 1980);
47. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978).
48. Entman, "Framing."
49. To be clear, objectivist and advocacy frames should not be confused with non-partisan or partisan narratives. Objectivist stories do not, by definition, contain more arguments than advocacy framed stories. One can imagine many arguments being marshaled to make a one-sided case. Similarly, advocacy stories could have more arguments than objectivist stories. The difference between them is that objectivist stories are more passively written whereas advocacy stories come closer to making or supporting (perhaps by leaving unchallenged) a given perspective.
50. David Weaver, "Political Issues and Voter Need for Orientation," in The Emergence of American Political Issues: The Agenda Setting Function of the Press, ed. Donald L. Shaw and Maxwell McCombs (St. Paul, MN: West, 1977), 107-19.
51. Dietram Scheufele, "Agenda-Setting, Priming, and Framing Revisited: Another Look at Cognitive Effects of Political Commu-nication," Mass Communication & Society 3 (2, 2000): 297-316.
52. Wayne Wanta, Guy Golan, and Cheolhan Lee, "Agenda Setting and International News: Media Influence on Public Perceptions of Foreign Nations," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 81 (summer 2004): 364-78.
53. 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): 22-36.
54. Maxwell McCombs, Juan Pablo Llamas, Esteban Lopez-Escobar, and Federico Rey Lennon, "Candidate Images in Spanish Elections: Second-Level Agenda-setting Effects," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (winter 1997): 703-17.
55. For example, Kiousis, Bantimaroudis, and Ban, "Candidate Image Attributes."
56. Alice H. Eagly and Shelly Chaiken, The Psychology of Attitudes (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993).
57. Eagly and Chaiken, The Psychology of Attitudes.
58. Aday, "The Real War Won't Be Shown on Television."
59. Kurt P. Frey and Alice H. Eagly, "Vividness Can Undermine the Persuasiveness of Messages," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 32-44.
60. Thomas R. Koballa, Jr., "Persuading Teachers to Reexamine the Innovative Elementary Science Programs of Yesterday: The Effect of Anecdotal Versus Data-Summary Communications," Journal of Research in Science Teaching 23 (1986): 437-49.
61. Jon A. Krosnick, Li Fan, and Darrin R. Lehman, "Conversational Conventions, Order of Information Acquisition, and the Effect of Base Rates and Individuating Information on Social Judgments," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 1140-52.
62. Sean Aday, Steven Livingston, and Maeve Hebert, "Embedding the Truth: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Objectivity and Television Coverage of the Iraq War," The Harvard International Journal of Press /Politics 10 (1, 2005): 3-21.
63. Cole Campbell, "We Must Discuss Issues to Ensure a Stronger and Less Divisive Society," Virginian-Pilot, April 9, 1995, sec. A, p. 2;
64. Alicia C. Shepard, "The Real Public Journalism," Columbia Journalism Review, January/February, 25, 1995.
65. Cappella and Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism, 78.
66. Vincent Price and David Tewksbury, "News Values and Public Opinion: A Theoretical Account of Media Priming and Framing," in Progress in the Communication Sciences, ed. Franklin J. Boster and George Barnett (New York: Ablex, 1997): 173-212.
67. On its face, this runs counter to Wanta, Golan, and Lee's finding that greater involvement can lead to heightened agenda-setting effects (a result consistent in some ways with Weaver's aforementioned argument about a need for orientation). The issue in that study, however, seems to be whether the story is personally involving. In this study, stories are not likely to have that level of personal involvement. See Wanta, Golan, and Lee, "Agenda Setting and International News";
68. and Weaver, "Political Issues and Voter Need for Orientation."
69. To be clear, this study is agnostic on whether or not this is desirable. The point is merely to posit a causal mechanism for advocacy frames hypothesized effects.
70. Cappella and Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism.
71. Klaus Krippendorf, Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methods (London: Sage, 1980).
72. It is important in a study of framing that participants see the same differences in news frames as does the researcher, what is known as representational validity (Cappella and Jamieson, Sprial of Cynicism, 89). Usinga 7-point scale, participants in a pre-test were asked to rank each story on eight measures, including reliance on official sources rather than ordinary citizens, emphasis on conflict or consensus, and whether the story described an event or discussed solutions. On all eight measures, analysis of means tests showed that objectivist and advocacy framed articles differed significantly in the hypothesized direction, confirming the representational validity of the materials. A similar measure included in the questionnaire administered to participants in the final study served as an internal check of representational validity and reconfirmed the results of the pretest.
73. The terms will be used interchangeably throughout this paper as there is no important difference between them.
74. For example, the advocacy stories focused on the efforts of individuals to address crime problems.
75. No other issues on either the national or local level competed with crime.
76. It is important to note the differences between the two types of solutions discussed here and those used by Iyengar in Is Anyone Responsible? Iyengar's terms had more to do with the ability of news frames to influence attributions of responsibility. This study is not addressing responsibility, per se. Furthermore, Iyengar's use of "episodic" and "thematic" also refer to the way a news story is written (e.g., episodic stories are event-oriented and often provide little background), whereas here individual/community and systematic/policy refer specifically to the orientation the story takes to crime as a social problem. The concepts are similar, however, in that episodic stories often focused on individuals and thematic on institutions or systems.
77. It should not be surprising that those in the advocacy condition were not more likely to propose individual-level causes to crime, despite the fact that they did so when asked about solutions to crime. The advocacy stories in a public journalism campaign, including those used in this study, are designed to be solution-oriented. Indeed, this could be said to be a central tenet of public journalism's ideology.
78. Carl I. Hovland, Irving L. Janis, and Harold H. Kelley, Communication and Persuasion: Psychological Studies of Opinion Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).
79. C. K. Atkin, "Political Campaigns: Mass Communication and Persuasion," in Persuasion: New Directions in Theory and Research, ed. Michael E. Roloff and Gerald R. Miller (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980), 285-308.
80. Wanta, Golan, and Lee, "Agenda Setting and International News."
81. Aday, Livingston, and Hebert, "Embedding the Truth."
82. Aday, Livingston, and Hebert, "Embedding the Truth."
83. Steven Kull, "Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War," http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/Media_10_02_03_Report.pdf, retrieved November 19, 2004.
84. A small number of responses did not fall into these categories and were labeled system missing for statistical analysis.