AGENDA SETTING

The concept of agenda-setting can be traced to political scientist
Bernard Cohen (1963), who wrote that ?the press may not be successful
much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly
successful in telling its readers what to think about.? (Cohen, as
cited in Lowery & De Fleur, p. 380)

The term ?agenda-setting,? as well as the theory itself, were
introduced by McCombs and Shaw (1972) in a paper, which reported the
results of their study during the 1968 presidential election. The
authors made an argument that the mass media played an important part
in shaping political reality through making choices in regards to what
news to publish or broadcast. The paper?s hypothesis stated that
although the mass media may have little influence on the audience?s
attitudes, they do ?set the agenda for each political campaign,
influencing the salience of attitudes toward the political issues.?
(p. 176) The methodology of the study consisted of content analysis of
mass media content and a survey of 100 respondents. The authors study
attempted to match what voters considered to be key issues of the
presidential campaign with the content of the mass media used by them
during the campaign. By restricting this study to one community, other
sources of variation, such as regional differences or variations in
media, were controlled. The scholars found a high correlation between
the rank order in salience of the issues reported in the mass media
and the importance rank assigned to these issues by survey responders.

FRAMING

The concept of framing is based on the assumption that how an issue is
characterized by mass media may have an influence on how it is
understood by audiences.

Scholars agree that framing spans multiple disciplines. Although the
concept can be traced to Walter Lippmann?s ?Public Opinion,? where he
refers to the media creating ?pictures in our heads,? (1922) framing?s
roots are considered to be in psychology and sociology. (Scheufele &
Tewksbury, 2007, p. 11) Scheufele & Tewksbury attributes the concept?s
psychological origins to the work of Kahneman and Tversky (1979,
1984), who studied how different presentations of the same information
influenced people?s decisions. (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007, p. 11)
The sociological origins of framing, as well as introducing the term
itself, are usually attributed to Goffman (1974), who defined framing
as a ?schemata of interpretation, ? which allows its user to locate,
perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete
occurrences defined in its terms.? (p. 21)

Today, there are multiple approaches to defining framing as a concept.
Dimitrova et al., citing various scholars, offer several definitions:
?the central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an
unfolding strip of events.? (Gamson & Modigliani, 1987, as cited in
Dimitrova et al., 2005); ?framing stems from a process of selection,
emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration by the news organization,? which
could mean, for example, focusing on the destruction caused by war
versus freedom, invasion versus an attack, etc. (Tankard, 1997, as
cited in Dimitrova et al., 2005). Reese (2007) defined framing as
?organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over
time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social
world.? (p. 150) Noting the interdisciplinary nature of the concept,
Reese also described framing as a ?bridging model for media research.?
He saw framing?s values in its ability to bridge parts of the field of
communication (which is itself interdisciplinary) that ?need to be in
touch with each other: quantitative and qualitative, empirical and
imperative, psychological and sociological?? (p. 148)

Entman (1993), discussing its interdisciplinary nature, noted that
?the concept of framing consistently offers a way to describe the
power of a communicating text.? (p. 51) He also observed that there
was no ?general statement of framing theory that [showed] exactly how
frames become embedded within and make themselves manifest in a text,
or how framing influences thinking.? (p. 51) To provide ?a more
precise and universal understanding? of the various uses of the term,
Entman developed a theory of framing, according to which frames define
problems, diagnose causes, suggest moral judgments, and recommend
treatment. [I can discuss this is more detail next time in class]

Here's more from Entman: "To frame is to select some aspects of a
perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text,
in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal
interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for
the item described."