Identifying the Discourse in the Dominant Three Frames

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III. Identifying the Discourse in the Dominant Three Frames

Gamson and Modigliani said that a frame is a “central organizing idea or storyline that provides meaning” to events related to an issue (1987: 143). The purpose of this thesis is to identify the different frames used in two French national dailies of differing political tendencies following Hallin and Mancini‟s (2004) theory of political instrumentalization of the media.

Review of existing body of literature shows that media play an important role in shaping people‟s opinion about issues reported in the news, while the media are influenced by political ideologies and influence the political discourse in a never ending loop. The articles will first be carefully analysized, to identify the main discourses in the three frames about immigrants, namely: economization, securitization and nationalism. Each time one of these discourses is identified, the author examines if the discourse found is presented in a positive frame favorable to the Roma issue or a negative frame unfavorable to the Roma issue. The purpose of this cross-analysis is to ultimately compare what discourses are most represented with a pro-Roma frame and what discourses are most represented with an anti-Roma frame and see differences or resemblances of dominant discourse and dominant tone between Le Monde and Le Figaro. We expect to find significant differences between both newspapers given their differing editorial stance.

Sources and responsibility attribution. Aside from pro-Roma/anti-Roma frames and discourse types analysis, the identification of the sources cited in the news reports can give us an interesting insight of which is the dominant discourse in the news in this immigration issue and consequently which is the dominant group in this issue. We first need to identify the stakeholders and classify them in order to understand their contribution to the media reconstruction of the issue.

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The selection of sources in the news reports reveals a lot about what the media want the audience to believe or think. Fairclough (1989) noticed that “the people and organizations that the media use as „sources‟ in news reporting do not represent equally all social groupings in the population” (1989: 50), leading thus to an unequal influence of social groupings in the news media. Groups whose perspective is broadly adopted in reports can be considered as the power-holders and their discourse as the dominant discourse. Fairclough contended that “exclusion of people from particular types of discourse and subject positions lowers their publicly acknowledged status” (1989: 64). The debate was about the Roma immigration, but what place was given to the Roma‟s discourse in the news media? How many times were they quoted in a news article? We believe it is important to identify the sources and examine with which frequency they were quoted to identify the prevailing perspective in the issue reconstruction and consequently understand the formation of the public‟s opinion regarding that issue. The choice of news sources over others is one of the components revealing how the media intend to frame an issue.

The review of previous studies on immigration news showed that most of these studies focus on the frames and do not include a sources analysis. The particularity of the debate on the Roma immigration under study is that all news reports relied on sources quotations at length. In Le Monde and Le Figaro, few articles reported mere facts, and a large majority based their reports on different stakeholder‟s reactions, reconstructing the debate for the audiences under the perspective of the sayings of the chosen sources. Since the use of sources was paramount in the Roma debate, It is thus interesting to analyze which sources were quoted in each daily, compare the differences in the selection of sources, and examine the correlation between pro-Roma and against Roma frames and the selections of sources.

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The choice of episodic and thematic frames (Iyengar, 1991) related to the choice of sources is also a good indicator of the political stance adopted by the news media under study. The episodic frame focuses on a discreet event without extensive presentation of the background and long-term implications of the issue, emphasizing only the most recent developments. The thematic frame provides more general knowledge of public affairs and a broader perspective about events, linking events to one another so as to give the audience an overall comprehensive perspective of the issue. Iyengar (1991) hypothesized that structural pressures inherent to news organizations and news production reinforces episodic framing. This practice “simplifies complex and influences a topical, disorganized, and isolated, rather than general and contextual understanding of public affairs and social issues” (de Vreese, 2005: 56). The choice of an episodic frame or a thematic frame reveals who is held responsible in the issue at stake. Price and Tewksbury inferred that “the predominance of event- and person-related information in episodic news increases the likelihood that audiences will make personal attributions (e.g. people are responsible for their poverty) rather than systemic attributions [thematic news] (e.g. poverty is due to institutional condition” (1997: 183).

Given that the choice of an episodic or a thematic frame heavily contributes in the perception and the responsibility attribution on an issue, it is important to relate in the analysis the chosen news sources to the episodic or thematic frames used in news reports. This analysis will help us examine to whom and by who the responsibility is attributed. Furthermore, we will discuss the relation between sources and episodic/thematic frames, and the results of the pro-Roma and anti-Roma frames analysis. We believe that putting together the different pieces of the jigsaw will provide us with a more thorough idea of the French news media‟s operational ways when reconstructing a sociopolitical issue such as the Roma immigration debate.

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Identifying the frames in news reports. The present study will analyze the frames by examining the first two paragraphs of each article. Headlines will be taken into account, but they are not expected to be highly indicative of the media‟s frames since Le Monde for example used the same title for many news articles throughout several weeks, presenting news updates about the Roma issue like different chapters of a same book. The lead of the news articles is not sufficient for the analysis as leads often repeat what is already in the title, yet in a more developed manner. The inclusion of the second paragraph is believed to give us a deeper and more complete insight of how the issue is framed.

We will examine the framing devices used in the news reports. A news text is “a system of organized signifying elements that both indicate the advocacy of certain ideas and provide devices to encourage certain kind of audience processing of the texts” (Pan and Kosicki, 1993:

56). The signifying elements of framing are “structurally located lexical choices of codes constructed by following certain shared rules and conventions” (Pan and Kosicki, 1993: 58).

They are recognizable and can be conceptualized into concrete elements of a discourse. The signifying devices identified in the text can be used to construct a frame. We will be looking for semantic cues, disclaimers, sentences of contrast, emphasis of „us‟ versus „them‟ with positive and negative meanings for „us‟ and „them‟, active sentences versus passive sentences, and other rhetorical structures (Van Dijk, 2006). We will pay close attention to lexical choices of words or labels that act as „designators‟ and which signify the presence of a particular frame. Labeling reveals cognitive categorizations on the part of the newsmakers: “Choosing a particular designator is a clear and sometimes powerful cue signifying an underlying frame” (Pan and Kosicki, 1993: 63).

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The next chapter will report the findings by identifying and classifying the signifying elements and markers used by the two national dailies Le Monde and Le Figaro in their news reports of the Roma issue. This thesis is concluded in the final chapter by a discussion of the major findings and their conceptual implications.

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Chapter 4 Findings

As discussed in the previous chapter, we want to identify the dominant frames regarding the reporting of the Roma immigration issue in Le Monde and Le Figaro, two national French dailies with known ideological and political difference, and assess how these frames account for the political instrumentalization of the French press.

Previous research on frames in news reporting of immigration have differentiated such frames as the threat frame, the ethnic discrimination frame, the economy frame, the securitization frame, and the nationalism frame, and so on. These frames hold an overall negative perspective of immigration. However, very few studies, such as that by Merolla and Pantoja (2008), mentioned that frames used in immigration reports could be either negative or positive.

In the present study, that each of the nationalism, securitization and economization frames are also expressed in either positive, i.e. pro-Roma immigration, or negative, i.e. against Roma immigration, manner. Projecting from Hallin and Mancini‟s (2004) observation of political instrumentalization of media in Southern Europe, and France included, and from what is known about the editorial stance of the two dailies under study, Le Monde is expected to use mainly pro-Roma immigration frames and Le Figaro, frames against pro-Roma immigration.

After careful inspection, the articles were categorized according to the frames described above. Among the 240 articles, 100 articles in Le Figaro and 140 articles in Le Monde respectively, Le Monde counts almost half more articles than Le Figaro about the Roma issue.

This shows the prominence Le Monde gave to this issue in its columns, and the efforts of Le Figaro to downplay the importance of the Roma issue. The Roma debate took off because of two

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reasons: first, because President Nicolas Sarkozy had in mind to turn this issue into an example of his struggle against social insecurity, and an example to show the government‟s will to address illegal immigration problems. Usually, governments repatriating illegal immigrants do not do it in the open light, for fear of controversies. Second, the problem took a political dimension after the opposition groups protested against what they considered to be abuses from the part of the government. From that moment on, the government lost control of the issue and instead of gaining the public‟s approval it started embroiling in a debate growing bigger every day. The controversy peaked in September when the European Commission and the Committee for the Eradication of Racial Discrimination (CERD) of the UN both launched investigations.

During that month, Le Monde published 79 articles on the Roma immigration issue, while Le Figaro published “only” 51 articles. That is more than a third less and is quite indicative of Le Figaro‟s will to downplay the importance of the issue. Along the same line, Le Figaro chose not to publish any article on the CERD‟s reaction, and merely mentioned the CERD‟s investigation in an article together with other news on the Roma issue. Refusing to give the CERD, an international organization, an article on its own proves Le Figaro‟s attempt to disparage the gravity of the situation.

The analysis also found that 11 of the 240 articles did not match the selected frames, nationalism, securitization and economization. Le Monde accounted for 9 of these articles while Le Figaro had 2. However, these articles were not disparaged from the sample as their analysis brought valuable insight on how local populations perceive the Roma. These articles were historical retrospectives and reportages presenting the Roma‟s living conditions, history and culture. They aimed at fighting the usual negative stereotypes and reconstructing a fairer image of the Roma community for the newspapers‟ audiences. Although these articles do not fit in the

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three selected frames, they still account for the dailies‟ positive slant in favor of the Roma and were thus retained.

Chart 4.1 shows the frequency of frames used in the two dailies. It provides the reader with the results in a glance, allowing him to have a first idea of the difference of uses between the frames by each daily. Next the author will address in detail the discourse for each of the three dominant frames in the two dailies.