Content area
Full text
Framing is the process by which a communication source, such as a news organization, defines and constructs a political issue or public controversy. Two experiments examined the effect of news frames on tolerance for the Ku Klux Klan. The first presented research participants with one of two local news stories about a Klan rally that varied by frame: One framed the rally as a free speech issue, and the other framed it as a disruption of public order. Participants who viewed the free speech story expressed more tolerance for the Klan than participants who watched the public order story. Additional data indicate that frames affect tolerance by altering the perceived importance of public order values. The relative accessibility of free speech and public order concepts did not respond to framing. A second experiment used a simulated electronic news service to present different frames and replicated these findings.
About 50 million Americans watch the CBS, NBC, or ABC network news on an average evening, and an even greater share of the public watches at least a portion of their favorite local news broadcast (Ansolabehere, Behr, and Iyengar 1993). Among those citizens who rely on only one news outlet, television is preferred over newspapers and other sources by wide margins (Ansolabehere, Behr, and Iyengar 1993), and television news also enjoys the most trust of any news source at the national and local level (Kaniss 1991). An institution with such broad reach and appeal would seem to carry great potential power to shape the political views and outlooks of ordinary citizens, yet media scholars have differed sharply about the effect of the news in general and of television news in particular, often dismissing media impact as "minimal" at best (McGuire 1985, Patterson and McClure 1976). While numerous individual and institutional reasons could account for weak media effects (Ansolabehere, Behr, and Iyengar 1993; Beck, Dalton, and Huckfeldt 1995), some failures to find media effects can be blamed on weak research designs or measurement error (Bartels 1993, Graber 1993). Further advancement of the conceptual and analytical tools needed to describe and measure the often subtle effects of the news is required.
One way the media may shape political opinion is by framing issues in distinct ways (Gamson 1992, Iyengar...