Media Framing Effects

Consumers of news are impacted in two primary ways by mass media—what is referred to as agenda-setting and framing effects. Agenda-setting is fairly straightforward—there has to be a basic consensus regarding what constitutes newsworthy items so elite media become the gatekeepers for what information we have access to. The agenda that is put forth by the media impacts consumers’ perceptions regarding issue importance and also how salient or on a person’s mind a given topic is. Framing effects go one step farther than this.

Framing effects have to do with the way that a given story is packaged and presented to consumers of news. It is strongly impacted by the language that is used to describe given events or ascribed to actors who are identified as critical features of a given story. Language is critical in these presentations because it serves as the cognitive framework in which we understand the world around us and in the case of exposure to news make sense of a given event or story.

Thus in this regard, media plays a very significant role in how we perceive events based on their reporting. In the case of public acts of mass violence, there is a growing debate regarding when it is appropriate to use the term “terrorism” or “terrorist”. This is not merely an academic debate, what actors or actions we refer to as terrorist or terrorism versus using other terminology (e.g. “lone wolf,” “hate crime,” “public shooter,” etc.) has huge implications in shaping public perceptions of other groups, inciting stereotypes, and in validating or marginalizing the victims of such attacks.

A common critique of the corporate media today is that who or what is identified as terrorism is not based on an objective framework regarding the definition of terrorist acts, but rather, the specific demographics of the perpetrators of mass violence. For example, if the perpetrator is foreign born or Muslim, the act is far more likely to be labeled terrorism than other similarly waged acts of violence when the perpetrator is white or a citizen of the country in question. In line with this apparent disparity, the demographics of who is victimized in acts of mass violence also appears to impact how the violence is labeled.

For instance, Fisher (2017) recently reflected that, “as attacks against Muslims have risen, many have been labeled something other than terrorism. For Muslim victims, this seemed to confirm suspicions that society sees them as potential threats more readily than as fellow citizens to be protected” (para 4). In fact, scholarly work by Kearns et. al (2017) has identified that when Muslims are the perpetrators of terrorist attacks, they receive a disproportionate amount of media coverage relative to non-Muslim perpetrators—44 percent more coverage than other attacks.

In fact, the researchers go on to note that, “Given the disproportionate quantity of news coverage for these attacks, it is no wonder that people are afraid of the Muslim terrorist. More representative media coverage could help to bring public perception of terrorism in line with reality” (Kearns et al., 2017, Abstract). In other words, the agenda-setting effect is the excessive coverage these attacks get, while the framing effect is fusing Muslims as a group with acts of terrorism.

It is noteworthy to also include in this analysis that Muslim-perpetrated terrorist attacks on American soil are far less common than other forms of mass violence—however, since these other types of mass violence are not labeled as terrorism, they are not perceived as similarly threatening by the general public.

In fact, contrary to what the current administration or corporate media has led consumers to believe, only 5 percent of all terrorist attacks committed in the United States since 9/11 have been from foreign-born, Muslim perpetrators (as reported by Kearns et al., 2017). However, the disproportionate media coverage of these attacks and the use of the term terrorism in these cases—to the exclusion of the term in other similar acts of mass violence—leads to incitement of negative perceptions more generally towards Muslims.

The takeaway from such research is that language matters. Terms such as terrorism have been politicized in the culture, leading to opinions or corporate determinants of when to use them versus basing it on the objective reality of whether or not a given act meets the standard of how terrorism is defined. Why was terrorism not used to describe the gun violence of white perpetrator Dylann S. Roof, who had ties to white supremacy groups and specifically targeted an African American church because of his racial hatred? And if in fact his act was a hate crime (which is one of the many charges against him), does that exclude it from also being an act of terrorism?

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In a corporate media environment, consumers of news cannot rely solely on the packaging of news stories to get the full scope of what is going on in the world. As consumers of news with the media landscape what it is today, we need to ask ourselves probing questions such as what are the reasons behind how a story is being packaged or presented to us. Just as significantly, we need to be more vigilant in our own use of language—for it could reveal hidden or disguised biases and even stereotypes.

Such deliberation shouldn’t be marginalized or dismissed as “overly politically correct.” Rather, if language is one of the primary cognitive structures we use to process and understand the world around us, every word we hear (and say) matters.

Copyright 2017 Azadeh Aalai