scholarly journals Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

Author(s):  
Eike Mark Rinke ◽  
Hartmut Wessler ◽  
Carina Weinmann ◽  
Charlotte Löb

News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed.

Author(s):  
Shawn J. Parry-Giles

This chapter features the extensive television news coverage of Hillary Clinton as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. In many ways, the news broadcasts reflected the memory frames that circulated throughout her time as first lady, from her image as a political lightning rod who suffered from personality problems to that of a victimized wife. Questions surrounding her political authenticity were central to the news frames from the early murmurs of a possible Clinton Senate run. Clinton was correspondingly depicted as an inauthentic political candidate because of her questionable motives for office, her lack of geographical ties to the state of New York, her lack of political experience, and her shifting views on contentious political topics. These inauthenticity judgments suggested to the press and Clinton's Republican opponents that she lacked an overall fitness and preparedness for elective office.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pnina Shukrun-Nagar

This paper discusses the potential of semantic, pragmatic and grammatical devices used in the Israeli television news coverage of a dispute to promote one agenda, negate a contradictory one and position the correspondent as a participant in the dispute. Moreover, I argue that viewers of news identify at least some of these devices and attribute an argumentative role to them. To support this, I analyze questionnaires in which native speakers relate to a specific news item, focusing on the three most common devices interpreted: implicatures, emotionality and textual planning. The discussion sheds light on dialogical interactions between, first, correspondents and their addressees; second, between the correspondents’ words and their co-texts, contexts and other occurrences of these words or their synonyms in public discourse. The corpus includes 19 items on a struggle between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews in Israel broadcast in 2009 on Israel’s Channel 2 television news.


Author(s):  
Khadijah Costley White

This chapter lays out the Tea Party’s history as a mass-mediated construction in the context of journalism, political communication, and social movement studies. It argues that the news coverage of the Tea Party primarily chronicled its meaning, appeal, motivations, influence, and circulation—an emphasis on its persona more than its policies. In particular, the news media tracked the Tea Party as a brand, highlighting its profits, marketability, brand leaders, and audience appeal. The Tea Party became a brand through news media coverage; in defining it as a brand, the Tea Party was a story, message, and cognitive shortcut that built a lasting relationship with citizen-consumers through strong emotional connections, self-expression, consumption, and differentiation.


Author(s):  
Agatha Kratz ◽  
Harald Schoen

This chapter explores the effect of the interplay of personal characteristics and news coverage on issue salience during the 2009 to 2015 period and during the election campaign in 2013. We selected four topics that played a considerable role during this period: the labor market, pensions and healthcare, immigration, and the financial crisis. The evidence from pooled cross-sectional data and panel data supports the notion that news coverage affects citizens’ issue salience. For obtrusive issues, news coverage does not play as large a role as for rather remote topics like the financial crisis and immigration. The results also lend credence to the idea that political predilections and other individual differences are related to issue salience and constrain the impact of news coverage on voters’ issue salience. However, the evidence for the interplay of individual differences and media coverage proved mild at best.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Gollust ◽  
Erika Franklin Fowler ◽  
Jeff Niederdeppe

Television (TV) news, and especially local TV news, remains an important vehicle through which Americans obtain information about health-related topics. In this review, we synthesize theory and evidence on four main functions of TV news in shaping public health policy and practice: reporting events and information to the public (surveillance); providing the context for and meaning surrounding health issues (interpretation); cultivating community values, beliefs, and norms (socialization); and attracting and maintaining public attention for advertisers (attention merchant). We also identify challenges for TV news as a vehicle for improving public health, including declining audiences, industry changes such as station consolidation, increasingly politicized content, potential spread of misinformation, and lack of attention to inequity. We offer recommendations for public health practitioners and researchers to leverage TV news to improve public health and advance health equity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 2046147X2199601
Author(s):  
Diana Zulli ◽  
Kevin Coe ◽  
Zachary Isaacs ◽  
Ian Summers

Public relations research has paid considerable attention to foreign terrorist crises but relatively little attention to domestic ones—despite the growing salience of domestic terrorism in the United States. This study content analyzes 30 years of network television news coverage of domestic terrorism to gain insight into four theoretical issues of enduring interest within the literature on news framing and crisis management: sourcing, contextualization, ideological labeling, and definitional uncertainty. Results indicate that the sources called upon to contextualize domestic terrorism have shifted over time, that ideological labels are more often applied on the right than the left, and that definitional uncertainty has increased markedly in recent years. Implications for the theory and practice of public relations and crisis management are discussed.


Author(s):  
Michael R. Greenberg ◽  
Peter M. Sandman ◽  
David B. Sachsman ◽  
Kandice L. Salomone

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