The Love/Hate Relationship With The United States: Media Framing by Tony Palmeri Department of Communication UW Oshkosh (920)424-4422

Note: On October 30, 2001 I participated on a forum panel dealing with the "love-hate relationship" existing between the United States and the rest of the world, especially the Middle East. Also on the panel were: Serhat Khan, a student at UW Oshkosh from Pakistan; Syrian native Nihal Shahbandar of Appleton who has lived in the United States for 30 years; Dr. Daniel Shaw, a UW Oshkosh visiting professor of religious studies and a specialist in Islamic studies; and UW Oshkosh political science professor Thomas Bickford. About 150 people attended the forum. I was asked to speak about the way American media frame issues. Below is the handout material I provided the audience, along with some additional commentary.

Contents:

• What is a News Frame?
• Example News Frames
• Media Framing of United States Intervention in Afghanistan
• Problems with Mainstream News Frames Regarding the Afghan War
• Coverage Review: TV/Radio Form
• Additional References
• More News Frames
  

1. What Is A News frame?:

"News frames are almost entirely implicit and taken for granted. They do not appear to either journalists or audiences as social constructions but as primary attributes of events that reporters are merely reflecting. News frames make the world look natural. They determine what is selected, what is excluded, what is emphasized. In short, news presents a packaged world." (William Gamson, quoted in Charlotte Ryan's Prime Time Activism: Media Strategies for Grassroots Organizing. Boston: South End Press, 1990, p. 54).

An important point to remember about news frames is that they represent choices made by reporters and editors about what parts of a story to emphasize or minimize. Of course it is very difficult--and it would be unreasonable for us to expect, that any reporter or editor could be completely "objective" when making such choices. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to expect that reporters and editors would be fair when making choices.

Take a look the example news frames below, and ask yourself which one seems to be the most fair way of presenting a story about an infant being bitten by a rat.

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2. Example News Frames:

Version 1: Rats Bite Infant	Version 2: Rats Bite Infant: Landlord, Tenants Dispute Blame	Version 3: Rat Bites Rising in City's "Zone of Death"
An infant left sleeping in his crib was bitten repeatedly by rats while his 16-year-old mother went to cash her welfare check. A neighbor responded to the cries of the infant and brought the child to St. Joseph's Hospital where he was treated and released into his mother's custody. The mother, Angie Burns of Milwaukee, explained softly, "I was only gone five minutes. I left the door open so my neighbor would hear him if he woke up. I never thought this would happen in the daylight."	An eight-month-old Milwaukee boy was treated and released from St. Joseph's Hospital yesterday after being bitten by rats while he was sleeping in his crib. Tenants said that repeated requests for exterminations had been ignored by the landlord, Henry Brown. Brown claimed that the problem lay with the tenants' improper disposal of garbage. "I spend half my time cleaning up after them. They throw the garbage out the window into the back alley and their kids steal the garbage can covers for sliding in the snow."	Rats bit eight-month-old Michael Burns five times yesterday as he napped in his crib. Burns is the latest victim of a rat epidemic plaguing inner-city neighborhoods labeled the "Zone of Death." Health officials say infant mortality rates in these neighborhoods approach those in many third world countries. A Public Health Department spokesman explained that federal and state cutbacks forced short staffing at rat control and housing inspection programs. The result, noted Juan Nunez, M.D., a pediatrician at St. Joseph's Hospital, is a five-fold increase in rat bites. He added, "The irony is that Michael lives within walking distance of some of the world's best medical centers."

Notice how the first version of the story finds relevance in the fact that the child's mother is a teenager on welfare. As with much reporting about poverty in the United States, the story implies that ignorance and lack of personal responsibility are at the root of America's urban problems. The second version of the story is another typical way of discussing poverty in the United States, as a kind of "contractual dispute" between parties. The implication of such stories is that "if we had better landlords" (or better teachers, doctors, etc.) and "more responsible tenants" (or more responsible students, patients, etc.), then horrible things like children getting bitten by rats would not happen. Stories like this often lead to calls for "more effective communication" between the parties.

The third version of the story frames the rat bites as a sympton of a broader public health crisis facing a poor community. This story assumes a relationship between public policy choices (e.g. cutbacks in housing inspection programs) and human behavior. Unlike the first two versions, version 3 implies that the reader must share some responsibility for this state of affairs; after all, anti-poverty programs would not be cut if the people would put pressure on politicians to fund them.

A final important point to remember is that rarely if ever is the dominant story frame obvious and/or explicitly identified by the reporter or speaker. Clark Kent and Lois Lane never come out and say "we are framing our stories about street-widening in Metropolis as a contest between bureaucratic city planners and neighborhood activists concerned with urban sprawl." Many times news reporters are not even themselves aware of how a story is framed; for some it simply feels "natural" to cover stories in a certain way. Often news reporters learn "that there are certain ways to cover stories around here and certain ways not to cover them." Regardless of how or why a story gets framed in a particular way, critical readers, watchers, and/or listeners are good at identifying news frames and making an assessment as to their appropriateness for the topic under discussion.

Let's try to identify some common news frames employed to cover issues of war and peace. The current war in Afghanistan will serve as our test case.

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3. Media Framing Of United States Intervention In Afghanistan: Look For Core Frame, Core Position, Metaphor, Historical Example, Catch-Phrases, Depictions, Visual Images, Roots, Consequences, Appeals To Principle

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4. Problems With Mainstream News Frames Regarding Afghan War:

• The frames do not resonate with audiences outside the United States, especially in the Middle East. Notice how the freedom v. terror, the humanitarian intervention, and the quagmire frames all situate the United States as essentially a "good cop" on the world stage. At this point in world history, that simply is not credible. Much of the world does see the United States as being too ready to resort to violence to solve disputes, as being too ready to sell weapons all across the globe at the same time we call for disarmament, and as being too ready to use food and medicine as political weapons. When former Secretary of State Madeline Albright was quoted on "Sixty Minutes" a few years ago as saying that a half-million babies dying in Iraq as a result of the sanctions was "worth the price" in order to force Saddam Hussein from power, her comments were met with shock and revulsion around much of the globe (especially in the third world). Many more examples could be cited; the major point is that these frames carry with them a kind of arrogance that does not resonate well outside of the United States.
• The frames are limited by a lack of relevant historical parallels. We are not sure yet exactly what kind of "war" it is we are in. The war against terror is not World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, or Kosovo. If American soldiers do start to come home in body bags, it will be vital for the government and mainstream press to frame the war in a way that more clearly identifies what are the goals in Afghanistan and why this kind of war is the way to meet them.
• Sources consulted are primarily "institutional." As is common in war time, the sources consulted to substantiate dominant frames tend to military leaders, politicians, and other institutional "experts." Such sources provide "official" views, and in the pre-Internet age the mainstream media could be content with relying on such sources. Today, there is so much more information available from a variety of sources that to rely on "institutional" wisdom immediately calls the credibility of the news organization into question.

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5. Coverage Review: TV/Radio Form

Note: Use This Form To Try And Make More Sense Out Of News That You Watch.

Basic Information:

Station___________________ Date__________________ Time____________________

News Program_______________________________________________________________

Reporter's Name_____________________________________________________________

Order of Appearance____________________ Time Allotted__________________________

Content:

Main Message Conveyed

How It Was Conveyed:

Reporter's Lead

Visuals

Key Phrases

Interviews

Reporter Commentary

Other

On what constituencies did the coverage focus? (e.g. government officials, academics, religious leaders, suburbanites, white, people of color, etc.)

Summary: Did you find the coverage sympathetic to a point of view, mixed, carefully neutral, negative, confusing, erroneous, boring, other?

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*Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

*Institute for Public Accuracy

*Media Channel

*The Freedom Forum

*Solomon, Norman and Lee, Martin (1990). Unreliable Sources: A Guide To Detecting Bias In News Media. New York: The Carol Group.

*Bagdikian, Ben (2000). The Media Monopoly, 6th Edition. Boston: Beacon Press.

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*Two Stories on "Auto Culture"

1. Ebert Story On Auto Culture Incomplete

2. Contrast The Ebert Story With The Center On Wisconsin Strategy's Analysis of Wisconsin's Auto Culture

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