mass-communication-theory

news reality
frames
News accounts in
which interested
elites involve
journalists in the
construction of
news drama that
blurs underlying
contextual
realities
Chapter 11 Media and Culture Theories: Meaning-Making in the Social World 337
serve to reinforce or consolidate an existing social order and to marginalize frames
that raise questions about or challenge the way things are.
Some framing research examines the strategies used by political and social
elites to manipulate how journalists frame events. This practice was startlingly evident
in internal marine memos that surfaced during the 2007 murder and
dereliction-of-duty trials of men involved in the 2005 killing of twenty-four Iraqi
men, women, and children in Haditha. In response to a series of questions posed
by Time reporter Tim McGirk as he worked to confirm the official account that
the deaths “occurred during combat and were justified, if regrettable,” the commanding
officers of the unit involved met and developed “talking points” designed
to shape McGirk’s account. They wrote: “One common tactic used by reporters is
to spin a story in such a way that it is easily recognized and remembered by the
general population through its association with an event that the general population
is familiar with or can relate to. For example, McGirk’s story will sell if it
can be spun as ‘Iraq’s My Lai massacre.’ Since there was not an officer involved,
this attempt will not go very far. We must be on guard, though, of the reporter’s
attempt to spin the story to sound like incidents from well-known war movies,
like Platoon” (von Zielbauer, 2007, p. K5).
Obviously, like the authors of this Marine memo, other elites have extensive
knowledge of how news is produced. They are also quite cognizant of how committed
reporters are to their news production practices. This allows them to stage
events likely to be framed as they choose and to effectively suggest to journalists
how events should be framed. The conflict in Iraq—with its accounts of weapons
of mass destruction, the mushroom cloud as smoking gun, the heroic private Jessica
Lynch, the toppling of Saddam’s statue, the Mission Accomplished aircraft carrier
landing, President Bush’s Thanksgiving visit, and the gallant death of football
star–turned-army ranger Pat Tillman—provided numerous examples of journalists
framing events exactly as elites wished them to (Baran, 2011, pp. 310–311). They
represent what W. Lance Bennett (2005b) calls news reality frames, because in
each case, an interested elite “involves journalists in constructing news drama that
blurs underlying contextual realities, ranging from passive reporting of routine
pseudo events (such as the campaign stop), to more active co-production on the
part of the press (such as the carrier landing), to a growing stream of
journalistically-driven rumor, spin, and speculation-based stories” (p. 174). The
rise of public relations as an increasingly important profession has served to institutionalize
this control over framing. All major social institutions, most notably corporations
and government, employ public relations staff to promote frames that
enable them to maintain or extend their control over the social world (Entman,
2004; Entman and Rojecki, 1993; Martin and Oshagen, 1997). The Pentagon
alone, for example, employs more than seven thousand public relations specialists
(Seitel, 2004).
Goffman (1979) observed that most news is about frame violations; that’s
what makes news newsworthy. Newscasts report deviations from normality: “Dog
Bites Man” is not news; “Man Bites Dog” is. When journalists report frame violations,
they are implicitly serving as protectors of the status quo. Some of the most
important frame violations involve events that severely disrupt the status quo.
These news stories provide detailed coverage of the disruption, but more
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