Abstract:

This chapter reviews the ample scholarship on framing the news in light of what it can contribute to understanding the specific role and contribution of journalists. Journalists are framers. Within the journalistic news production process, one of the key decisions that every journalist needs to make time and again concerns what “aspects of a perceived reality” to foreground; what “connection among them” to weave; and thus what meaning to provide “to an unfolding strip of events”. In academic scholarship, the framing of journalistic news has also received an immense amount of attention. One difficulty in assessing the role of journalism within this public process of negotiating frames derives from the relative scarcity of research directly addressing journalistic framing practices. Owing to the power of news frames to shape public opinion and political agendas, scholars have accumulated a huge body of literature scrutinizing the specific frames used for covering virtually any kind of issue.

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