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What Is “Media Framing” and Why Is It So Effective?
You probably have less control over your political opinions than you think.
Framing has been defined in many ways by many people. It’s been defined as simply as “the way a message’s delivery affects the interpreter’s understanding.”
And it’s been defined more formally, as “framing in the field of mass communication generally refers to process by which meaning is given to an account of a political issue or event” (from Robin Nabi & Mary Beth Oliver’s The SAGE Handbook of Media Processes and Effects).
However these popular definitions of framing imply that meaning-creation is a passive process that occurs as a byproduct of communication. While this may be true of everyday conversations, commercial media organizations are actively involved in assigning meaning to events, particularly in the way they report on politicial issues. I would propose the following functional definition:
“framing” is the process of carefully constructing a message to achieve a deliberate effect on the receiver.
Framing has an extremely powerful effect on our decision making. This was largely uncovered through the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in their development of Behavioral Psychology and heuristic-driven information processing. Before their research in the 1970s, we thought of humans as perfectly rational creatures capable of making perfectly rational choices. Daniel and Amos discovered this isn’t the case, and that humans actually make incredibly irrational choices depending on how a decision is presented to them. Since their Nobel-prize winning work, media organizations have been refining their priming + framing skills to better control the reactions of their audience.
The power of media framing has been confirmed in several studies since the original:
· Perhaps none put it as bluntly as Todd Gitlin back in 1980 when he said, “politicians and journalists…
