Research on framing analysis

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We understand that news media need frames to organize information about an event and report about it in a coherent, understandable, and meaningful way. That meaning–making is “a social activity, based on negotiating shared knowledge and constructing versions of events which could always also be told in different ways” (Van Hout and MacGilchrist, 2010: 170). The media discourse can thus shape the socially shared knowledge or social cognition, attitudes and ideologies on issues such as immigration.

II. Research on framing analysis

Research about news framing of economic, social or political issues in general. The framing process accounts for an important part of research in news media. De Vreese noted that

“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)” (2005: 51). Frame-setting has been the most investigated process as it refers to the media influence on learning, interpreting and evaluating of issues and events. Frames serve as a way of organizing what one knows about a public issue and making sense of the world around us as perceived through the news reports (Kosicki and McLeod, 1990).

Framing in news often focuses on political news, but it is also used for other topics such as economics and social issues. Kosicki and McLeod argue that “people, events, and policies discussed in the news have direct or indirect consequences for our lives” 1990: 72). However, the meaning of these people‟s acts, events or policies are not always transparent, which is why we need the news media to decode them and interpret them for the audiences. The media help the audiences to make sense of an issue through the use of frames.

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Pan and Kosicki (1993) present framing analysis as a constructivist approach where the news discourse is conceived as a sociocognitive process involving three players: sources, journalists and audience members. They examine news discourse with the primary focus on conceptualizing news texts into empirically operationalizable dimensions. Faming analysis is particularly relevant when analyzing how public discourse about public policy issues is constructed and negotiated since the framing analysis pays close attention to the systematic study of political language (Pan et Kosicki, 1993: 70).

Many scholars have addressed the problem of framing analysis, giving way to multiple definitions of what framing analysis is and how to identify frames in the news. The conclusion is that there is little consensus as how to identify frames in the news. In a synthesis of previous research on framing in news, de Vreese (2005) suggested that “certain frames are pertinent only to specific topics of events. Such frames may be labeled issue-specific frames. Other frames transcend thematic limitations and can be identified to different topics, some even over time and in different cultural contexts. These frames can be labeled generic frames. In his review about framing research, de Vreese (2005) cited the generic frames most commonly found by Neuman et al. (1992): „human impact‟, „powerlessnes‟, „economics‟, „moral values‟, and „conflict‟. These frames were found in relation to different issues, suggesting the general applicability of these frames. In the same line, Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) identified five news frames applicable to different issues: „conflict‟, „human interest‟, „attribution of responsibility‟, „morality‟, and

„economic consequences‟. Their study was based on an analysis of national print and television news. It found that the attribution of responsibility frame was the most commonly used followed by the conflict and economic consequences frames. The conclusion of this review is that the generic frames above cited are more generally applicable than issue-specific frames that are

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usually developed on a case-by-case ground. We will now review the body of research on news framing in immigration and see to which extent the above mentioned frames can be applied to the immigration field.

Research on news framing about immigrants. Frames are a tool contributing to popularizing research on media discourse. Van Dijk (1993) hypothesized that the news discourse determines specific mental processes and facilitates the formation of specific social representations like the representation of immigration and the representation of ethnic minorities – here, the Roma. The discourse succeeds in producing representations about events and having these representations accepted by the audience through the means of frames. It is consequently of high interest to decode the nature of the media discourse by identifying the frames used in the news reports on immigration issues. Such an examination helps us better understand the media discourse‟s processes and its influence on the audience.

Studies about immigration share in common the study of media images and representations of immigration and ethnic minorities, looking for negative representations and bias in the news reports that foster anti-immigration attitudes. These studies often focus on the role news media play in building representations of immigrants for the local populations, and their role in the relationship-building between the host population and the immigrant communities. It has been found that news media foster attitudes like racism when conveying representations of immigrant populations (Spoonly and Butcher, 2009).

Regarding immigration, some studies have constituted their own frames that were issue-related and cannot be generalized to all immigration studies. Light and Young‟s study (2009) found a “Balkanist” frame to account for news representations in the UK tabloids of immigrants from Romania. They define “balkanism” as related to “much longer standing imaginative

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geographies of the Balkans as an ambiguous or luminal space in Europe yet not fully European”

(Light and Young, 2009: 299). Their analysis of the news media revealed that the media convey enduring stereotypes and reinforce images such as the „threat‟ immigrants represent for host populations.

Among the usual frames found in the body of research on immigration issues the most commonly found are the threat frame also called „moral panic frame‟; the insecurity frame (when press coverage continuously focuses on crime and prostitutions as seen in Ferin‟s study, 2008); the ethnic discrimination frame where a dominant discourse marginalizes a minority; the economics frame and the national security frame.

In a study about news media effects on opinion-forming on Mexican immigration, Soderlund (2007) found that the main causes of prejudice against immigrants as portrayed by the media are economic competition and political conflict. “Negative stereotyping and prejudice increases when there is stress upon economics, politics or ideology” (2007: 175). The above mentioned frames tallies with the other generic frames found in studies on news framing, supporting the idea that these frames can be used in most issues. We find thus the „economic‟ frame (described by the preoccupation of profit and loss), the „conflict‟ frame (emphasizing conflict between individuals, groups, institutions or countries), the „powerlessness frame‟ (as referring to the dominance of forces over weak individuals or groups), and the „morality‟ frame (as interpreting in the context of moral prescriptions such as human rights).

The body of research on news frames about immigration reflects a majority of negative frames. However, the study of Merolla and Pantoja (2008) shows that frames can be positive as well as negative: economic benefits can also be found in immigration stories. Nonetheless, the main frame found in studies on immigration remains the threat frame. The latter encompasses

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national security concerns, social problems, crime, economic liabilities and so forth. It is very broad and acts somehow like a „ragbag‟ frame. The threat frame seems though to be the most important frame in immigration studies and the most used one, as this frame can account for most of the immigration issues countries have to deal with. Since this frame is very rich and complex, identifying a threat frame in the news reports for the present thesis would not allow to distinguishing the different nuances included in this frame and the study would lose in accuracy and thoroughness. The author proposes thus to break the threat frame down into three discrete although intertwined frames, relying on two frames used in Buonfino‟s (2004) study on immigration in Europe: the economization frame, the securitization frame. These two frames were used to examine the politicization of migration and to discuss the evolution of the immigration policy discourse in the Member States of the European Union. This topic is very similar to the topic of this thesis, with the difference that Buonfino‟s study was a general study on immigration laws in Europe while the author focuses here on the Roma immigration, and Buonfino‟s study did not examine the political instrumentalization of the media in an immigration debate. The third frame used for the present analysis is the nationalism frame. This last frame was selected according to Billig‟s (1995) theory on nationalism. He argues in his book Banal Nationalism that nationalism is constantly flagged in the media. People are constantly reminded o their national identity and national belonging through the use of “prosaic, routine words, which take the nation for granted, and which, in so doing enhabit them” (1995: 93). The two dailies selected for this thesis are known to belong to differing political leanings. If Hallin and Mancini (2004) were correct, then we can expect the two dailies selected for analysis will each reconstruct or frame the Roma immigration to correspond with its respective political of ideological leaning.

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