Frames and Framing Research

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As political symbols, editorial cartoons employ a range of potential rhetorical tools to define actors and processes of political and societal culture (Diamond, 2002). Furthermore, Kertzer (1988) notes some very important assets for political cartoons when he notes that “three properties of symbols are especially important: condensation of meaning, multivocality, and ambiguity” (p. 11) and Abner Cohen (1979) coincides: “It is the very essence and potency of symbols that they are ambiguous, referring to different meanings, and are not given to precise definition” (p. 87). Symbols are vague, consequently cartoons are meaningful to those who understand something about the larger discourse in which they are constructed. This discourse includes the visual language of signs, conventions and rhetorical devices to convey and interpret meanings which can be grouped under the broad categories of caricature and visual analogy (Hou & Hou 1998). Thus, in a world increasingly dominated by visual forms of communication, many scholars believe that the ability to make sense of visual texts is becoming even more important (Sturken & Cartwright, 2001:1). The present study has benefitted from this tradition and it will contribute not only to the literature concerning analysis of visuals but also to the decoding of the Mexican-American border issue as they are portrayed in the editorial cartoons from both nations.

2.4 Frames and Framing Research

Goffman (1974) has insightfully noted that human beings organize or “frame” everyday life in order to comprehend and respond to social phenomena. Frames enable individuals to “locate, perceive, identify and label the world around them” (p.10). He also postulated that the context and organization of messages affect audience’s subsequent thoughts and actions about those messages.

Gitlin (1980) took a functional approach to framing. He defined frames as the devices that facilitate journalists to organize a vast amount of information and package it effectively for their audiences. He saw frames as “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion” organizing the information for both

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journalists and their audiences (p. 7). Later, Entman (1991), one of the framing research pioneers, proposed that news frames exist at two levels: (1) as mentally stored principles for information processing (audience frames) and (2) as characteristics of the news itself (news frames). When applied to media framing, the issues can shape the way the public understands the causes of and the solutions to central political problems (Iyengar, 1991).

Media frames then, allow the audience to identify the multiple issues of the social world in a way that could be meaningful to them. In this sense, framing essentially involves selecting

“some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, casual interpretation, moral evaluation and or treatment recommendation for the item described” (Entman, 1993: 52) frames then, define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments and suggest remedies.

According to Gamson and Modigliani (1989), a news frame is the “central organizing idea or storyline that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events… The frames suggest what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue” (p. 143).

News organizations use different words, phrases and images, including those mentally produced through the use of metaphors to define and construct political issues and controversies.

These depictions may shape people’s reasoning and attitude about these issues (Nelson et al., 1997). The framing and presentation of events and news in the mass media can thus systematically affect how recipients of the news come to understand these events (Price, Tewksbury & Powers, 1995). According to Hertog and McLeod (2001) frames derive their power from their symbolic significance as they use recognizable myths and metaphors in the narratives. They also carry “excess meaning” as they activate some related ideas or thoughts and they have an accepted, shared meaning within a culture as they resonate with its members. Such attributes become more potent in the case of visuals as framing devices.

Images and signs are powerful framing tools because they are less intrusive than words and requires less cognitive load. Thus, some images have international effectiveness and become apparently universal signs owing their widespread use to the international structures of mass communication (Morgan & Welton, 1992). Images used in news, advertising, arts and literature

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have not only a high attractive value but also they often give the first impression of a story, and they are readily remembered (Rogers & Thorson, 2000). Therefore, visuals are good framing devices because, according to Wischmann (1987), they are “capable of not only obscuring issues but [also] of overwhelming facts” (p. 70).

Editorial cartoons can be analyzed for the frames they suggest. According to Messaris and Abraham (2001), visuals have three distinguishing characteristics to frame news issues: (1) the analogical quality of images refers to the fact that association between images and their meanings are based on similarity. The authors propose that because images are relatively analogous to the real objects they represent, no grammar or rules of usage have to be learned first to understand them. (2) the indexicality of images. Because of their true-to-life qualities or indices, “photographs come with an implicit guarantee of being closer to the truth than other forms of communication” (p. 217); images then, become evidence for something and due to indexicality, most viewers may not question what they see because they see what they believe it exist in the illustration. (3) the lack of an explicit propositional syntax in images refers to the fact that visuals do not have a set of conventions for making propositions like cause-and-effect relationships. It offers a clear stumbling block in the identification of frames because claims are less likely to be perceived in visual depictions of reality that stand without text. Viewers mostly make sense of images with the help of contextual or other cues and might be less conscious of being presented with pre-selected information, which may omit certain visual cues.

For example, Borah and Bullah, (2006) examined how five newspapers from different parts of the world depicted the Indian Ocean tsunami and hurricane Katrina during their first week. The salient frames identified across the five newspapers were categorized in six groups:

lives lost, lives saved, physical damage, emotional frame, political frame and other.

In a qualitative analysis of newsmagazine photos about stem cell research, Smith (2006) found four themes that emerged as news frames—science, politics, medical and religion. Fahmy et al. (2006) analyzed images of hurricane Katrina, comparing the photo offerings of the Associated Press and Reuters against the pictures on the newspaper front pages and they found

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significant difference in the presence of frames that relate to “timeframe, location, victims, race, emotional portrayal, officials, aerial depictions, death, and portrayals of officials” (p. 12).

However, frame studies for visuals have been focused only on photographic evidence in newspapers and magazines. This thesis intends to extend frame studies to cartoons as visuals by identifying the frames and symbols in the cartoon representation of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.