Dr Mohamed Kirat
By Dr Mohamed Kirat
Millions of citizens turn to the news media daily and ‘the media’ is a cornerstone institution in modern democracies. One influential way that the media may shape public opinion is by framing events and issues in particular ways. Framing involves a communication source presenting and defining an issue. The notion of framing has gained momentum in communication disciplines, giving guidance to both investigation of media content and study of the relationship between the media and public opinion. The term framing is referred to with significant inconsistency in professional literature. Moreover, most previous studies of framing have focused on either content or the effects of framing. Becoming aware of different types of frames is necessary to understand when and why different frames are at work. Framing is a process that includes production, content, and media use perspectives. The potential of the framing concept lies in the focus on communicative processes. Communication is not static, but rather a dynamic process that involves frame-building (how frames emerge) and frame-setting (the interplay between media frames and audience predispositions). Frames have several locations, including the communicator, the text, the receiver, and the culture. These components are integral to a process of framing that consists of distinct stages: frame-building, frame-setting and individual and societal level consequences of framing.
The myth that news media content is a mirror image of events and happenings of the world was dismissed decades ago. Traits, states, and contextual factors — ranging from individual journalists’ psychologies and role perceptions to professional routines and practices, and from market competition and organisational profit orientated to the structural pluralism of a community-have long been acknowledged as influencing “all the news that’s fit to print.”
Professional journalists, as well as journalism students and professors, have difficulty defining “news.” It is difficult to find a formula that wins consensus on what is “newsworthy.” Journalists report what happens at a certain time in a certain place with certain people using a certain language. By definition journalists are news reporters, not newsmakers. Nevertheless, the whole process of gathering and reporting news is largely subjective from the moment one decides what is newsworthy until the news is disseminated to the audience . While the volume of certain news — the amount of information reported on a certain event — plays a great role in deciding the newsworthiness of certain events, the way the news is presented, in terms of style and wording, often reflects the schema a news reporter or a news organisation transmits to the audience. How journalists select what they chose to report and how it is reported is the essence of the growing literature on frame theory. Such a message, which could be political ideological or cultural, is the basis on which the public, politicians, newsmakers and researchers classify a news provider, whether it is a reporter or a correspondent, a newspaper, a radio or a TV station. However, if it could be easy to classify reporters, newspapers, newsmagazines or individual TV stations that have clear political affiliation, such a classification is an extremely difficult one when it comes to professional news providers whose declared intent is to provide a reliable coverage of the events independently of any political, economical or cultural influences.
International news agencies place themselves in the last category as a non-agenda-setting media. As they gather information from all over the world and provide news and information to global audiences, wire services claim providing news coverage that is advertised as free from any bias or influence whether financial, cultural or political. Such a claim constitutes theoretically the core element around which the strategy of an international news agency revolves, at least for financial reasons, given the multi-ethnic, political and cultural aspects of the subscribers and audiences it serves. Nonetheless, international news agencies are imposing their styles, values and systems on the media by dominating the flow of global news. As the international news agencies that dominate the market of news gathering and dissemination are American (the Associated Press and United Press International), British (Reuters), and French (Agence France Presse), the news flow is overwhelmingly dominated by the Americans and Europeans.
The general perception among scholars, journalists and the public is that those agencies are imposing, not only their media-system for disseminating news, but also their news selection criteria of what is or is not newsworthy. In other words, news values that reflect the Western view of the world that surrounds us.
A minority of editors and journalists are thus imposing their points of view and perceptions on the majority. They not only restrict the amount of news disseminated, but also what type of news will be covered, and how this news is characterised.
Such practices entail bias, but this bias has become highly structural and systematic to the point that it is difficult to discern for journalists.
The more striking aspect of this bias is the language bias, and especially during conflicts where words constitute an essential component of a propaganda war. Journalists covering conflicts are trapped in the “war of words” in their struggle to maintain independence. A news agency is eager to preserve its credibility and therefore claim they are unbiased when reporting news by using neutral wordings to present events and the people behind them. As the perceptions of journalists play a great role in shaping the news they present, very often the same event is presented differently and some events are highlighted where others are thrown in the trash basket.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in its search for truth and defence of justice, in actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state and the global order.
The writer is a professor of public relations and mass communication at the College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar University.
By Dr Mohamed Kirat
Millions of citizens turn to the news media daily and ‘the media’ is a cornerstone institution in modern democracies. One influential way that the media may shape public opinion is by framing events and issues in particular ways. Framing involves a communication source presenting and defining an issue. The notion of framing has gained momentum in communication disciplines, giving guidance to both investigation of media content and study of the relationship between the media and public opinion. The term framing is referred to with significant inconsistency in professional literature. Moreover, most previous studies of framing have focused on either content or the effects of framing. Becoming aware of different types of frames is necessary to understand when and why different frames are at work. Framing is a process that includes production, content, and media use perspectives. The potential of the framing concept lies in the focus on communicative processes. Communication is not static, but rather a dynamic process that involves frame-building (how frames emerge) and frame-setting (the interplay between media frames and audience predispositions). Frames have several locations, including the communicator, the text, the receiver, and the culture. These components are integral to a process of framing that consists of distinct stages: frame-building, frame-setting and individual and societal level consequences of framing.
The myth that news media content is a mirror image of events and happenings of the world was dismissed decades ago. Traits, states, and contextual factors — ranging from individual journalists’ psychologies and role perceptions to professional routines and practices, and from market competition and organisational profit orientated to the structural pluralism of a community-have long been acknowledged as influencing “all the news that’s fit to print.”
Professional journalists, as well as journalism students and professors, have difficulty defining “news.” It is difficult to find a formula that wins consensus on what is “newsworthy.” Journalists report what happens at a certain time in a certain place with certain people using a certain language. By definition journalists are news reporters, not newsmakers. Nevertheless, the whole process of gathering and reporting news is largely subjective from the moment one decides what is newsworthy until the news is disseminated to the audience . While the volume of certain news — the amount of information reported on a certain event — plays a great role in deciding the newsworthiness of certain events, the way the news is presented, in terms of style and wording, often reflects the schema a news reporter or a news organisation transmits to the audience. How journalists select what they chose to report and how it is reported is the essence of the growing literature on frame theory. Such a message, which could be political ideological or cultural, is the basis on which the public, politicians, newsmakers and researchers classify a news provider, whether it is a reporter or a correspondent, a newspaper, a radio or a TV station. However, if it could be easy to classify reporters, newspapers, newsmagazines or individual TV stations that have clear political affiliation, such a classification is an extremely difficult one when it comes to professional news providers whose declared intent is to provide a reliable coverage of the events independently of any political, economical or cultural influences.
International news agencies place themselves in the last category as a non-agenda-setting media. As they gather information from all over the world and provide news and information to global audiences, wire services claim providing news coverage that is advertised as free from any bias or influence whether financial, cultural or political. Such a claim constitutes theoretically the core element around which the strategy of an international news agency revolves, at least for financial reasons, given the multi-ethnic, political and cultural aspects of the subscribers and audiences it serves. Nonetheless, international news agencies are imposing their styles, values and systems on the media by dominating the flow of global news. As the international news agencies that dominate the market of news gathering and dissemination are American (the Associated Press and United Press International), British (Reuters), and French (Agence France Presse), the news flow is overwhelmingly dominated by the Americans and Europeans.
The general perception among scholars, journalists and the public is that those agencies are imposing, not only their media-system for disseminating news, but also their news selection criteria of what is or is not newsworthy. In other words, news values that reflect the Western view of the world that surrounds us.
A minority of editors and journalists are thus imposing their points of view and perceptions on the majority. They not only restrict the amount of news disseminated, but also what type of news will be covered, and how this news is characterised.
Such practices entail bias, but this bias has become highly structural and systematic to the point that it is difficult to discern for journalists.
The more striking aspect of this bias is the language bias, and especially during conflicts where words constitute an essential component of a propaganda war. Journalists covering conflicts are trapped in the “war of words” in their struggle to maintain independence. A news agency is eager to preserve its credibility and therefore claim they are unbiased when reporting news by using neutral wordings to present events and the people behind them. As the perceptions of journalists play a great role in shaping the news they present, very often the same event is presented differently and some events are highlighted where others are thrown in the trash basket.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in its search for truth and defence of justice, in actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state and the global order.
The writer is a professor of public relations and mass communication at the College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar University.
