Significance of Research and Research Questions

As elsewhere, labor is often left with little attention in Taiwanese media. Empirical research of labor news coverage is, not surprisingly, scarce. In addition to the

infrequency, the other major observation for news about labor is its negative portrayal in media.

Ever since the Foxconn jumps happened in the beginning of 2010, this particular piece of suicide news has created a wave of hysteria in the mainstream media. Media contributed a great amount of resources to cover the incident from an industrial perspective that has aroused the public awareness of labor issue. The active coverage makes the incident appear to be especially extraordinary than other labor news, which used to account for very limited space in media.

However, does quantity guarantee quality? Does the high exposure provide the audience with detail to form a comprehensive and fair picture of the labor issue?

Since mass media are always regarded as a major information source for the audience to know the outside world, how media cover the event and portray workers and employers through the coverage of the suicide jumps decides the audience’s

perception on the labor issue and therefore, highlights its significance as a research topic.

Also, compared to the relatively developed literature about labor news research in western countries, scholars in Taiwan have shown very little concern in this topic. Most of the research findings quoted in this thesis mainly comes from western studies. In view of the social, cultural and historical divergence between Taiwan and western countries, western literature, though with certain reference value, is yet able to completely fit in the local context in Taiwan. Therefore, this thesis hopes to enrich the existing body of literature about local labor news research.

The present study aims at examining the news coverage of the Foxconn event in Taiwan’s newspapers, to sort out the news frames that have been employed in reporting. Although “suicide” in the incident is also an important issue, this thesis would only cover media’s attitude toward the labor issue. To be more specific, it focuses especially on media’s treatment of workers and employers in their reporting

and pay attention to if the way the press frames the incident changes with time and the pattern. In addition, also it will examine if political affiliation would bring any

influence to a newspaper’s coverage on the incident. The thesis will also provide an in-depth analysis to the lexical detail in hopes of gaining more insights into how Taiwanese dailies “construct” the image of workers and employers in the coverage of Foxconn suicide jumps by way of their respective editorial routines and news frames.

Having laid out the background information of the news event in detail and presented the significance and purpose of the study, the following second chapter will review current research on framing studies and labor in news. The third chapter discusses the methods of data collection and analysis for the research. Finally, the findings are presented to be followed by discussions and conclusions.

Chapter 2 Literature Review

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading the newspaper is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”

Ben Hecht, Guide for the Bedevilled

The quote from the famous American screenwriter is as true of commentary as of news. People rely on mass media for information and interpretation of the outside world. Most people tend to assume that news media are neutral gatekeepers, who always keep objectivity as the top priority and the only principle when covering events or places. However, media are never mirrors that faithfully reflect what happens in reality. What they present is not a complete picture, nor a faithful one.

Instead, they only show a very limited part of social reality. If what we read in news is, as what Hecht suggested in the quote, “the second hand of a clock,” what is the gap between the exact time and the time we know from the clock?

So, what has happened to the news? How do media shape people’s images and affect their thinking of a news event or actors in the news? What are the images that media have built for workers, employers and suicide? These questions will be explored by reviewing the related theorizing and research on framing in different fields before the thesis examines how labor in the Foxconn suicide jumps was covered.

2.1 Conceptualization of Framing Analysis

The concept of framing was first brought up by Erving Goffman (1974) in his ethnographic theorization. He described frames as “schemata of interpretation” that generates from people’s past experience where words help individuals communicate

between cultural beliefs and worldviews. Frames enable individuals to interpret and understand the real world, answering the question of “what is it that’s going on here”

(Goffman, 1974). In the wake of Goffman’s theorizing, research on framing and framing effects has mushroomed during the past decades (Tuchamn, 1978; Entman, 1991, Gamson, 1992; Neuman et al., 1992; Iyengar, 1991).

Continuing Goffman’s work, researchers have developed their own definitions and characteristics of “frame”. Scheufele (2010) defined frame as “the applicability of semantic or visual devices in communication to underlying culturally shared audience schemas”. It notes the essence of the issue by providing “meaning to an unfolding strip of events, weaving a connection among them” (Gamson & Modigliani, 1987).

Frames allow individuals to “locate, perceive, identify, and label issues, events, and topics” (Goffman, 1974). Framing is a selection of certain aspects of perceived reality

“in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993).

With its rich theoretical implication, framing has been applied to various research topics. The concept of framing also differs with different purposes of applications. Nisbet (2010) concluded that frames are used by audiences as

“interpretative schema” to make sense of and discuss an issue; by journalists to translate complex events into interesting and appealing news stories; by

policy-makers to define policy options and make decisions; and by experts to communicate to other experts or to broader audiences. In short, framing can be seen as a function of simplifying an area of reality.

In the media industry, framing is an important and essential component of news production. Gamson (1989) defined news frame as “a central organizing idea for making sense of relevant events and suggesting what is at issue” in the form of

metaphors, keywords, concepts, symbols, and visual images (Entman, 1991).

However, as an event is always in its way of developing itself, media would also need to adjust themselves to present the ever-changing world.

News Frame and Frame-changing

“Frame-changing”, in news production, refers to a certain journalistic practice in which news media reframe an event or issue during its life span to keep the story alive and fresh (Chyi & McCombs, 2004). The notion of frame-changing originally comes from Downs’ “issue-attention cycle” (1972) in agenda setting. In an early attempt to illustrate the process in which problems are discovered by the media, gain prominence, and then fade from public attention, the research identified five stages of the

“issue-attention cycle”: the pre-problem stage, alarmed discovery and euphoric

enthusiasm, realizing the cost of significant progress, gradual decline of intense public interest and the post problem stage. Downs (1972) argued that issues that go through each stage of the cycle tend receive more attention in its life span. In spite of its original focus on public attention, the issue-attention cycle has later received extensive discussions in news communication studies.

In the research examining the coverage of the Columbine school shooting in the New York Times in 1999, Chyi and McCombs (2004) documented the use of multiple frames and identified certain frame-changing patterns in the coverage of this highly salient news event. They suggested that during the dynamic process of news making, news media manipulate the issue by emphasizing various attributes at

different stage. Gamson and Modigliani (1989) also found that media discourse of the nuclear power issue has changed with the occurrence of some historic news events,

disaster, during the past decades. These key events accelerate the shift of news frame during the presence of the issue and also increase issue’s complexity to extend its life span.

Review of the concept of frame-changing demonstrates that a news event is not always static. Instead, it is dynamic, and so is the news frame used to present it.

The Foxconn suicide jumps lasted for more than a year. During the period, every response from the worker, company or social groups could become the key to activate the shift of media discourse. By examining the coverage of the incident, the present thesis intends to find out how media covered the incident with special focus on the presence of frame-changing when describing workers and employers.

News Frame, Ideology and Bias

Lee and Craig (1992) argued that the complexity of media’s political-economic and ideological aspects make news organizations part of a larger social network that frames and propagates dominant ideological inflections. Hartley (1982) contended that news texts are subject to the social constraints and institutional relations within which business and government are considered as the major media-constraining institutions. For financial survival, corporate media are required to follow commercial dictates by translating capitalist interests into general or national interests. Under such circumstances, Morley (1981) suggested that news events are inevitably presented in the media through some particular conceptual frameworks, where media tend to incline to maintain and emphasize the present situation and social values, while sometimes ignore or even oppress those in opposition of it (Tichenon et al, 1980).

To bring out the ideology in news, framing is one of the approaches. As the

concept of news frame focuses on media’s message content, researchers found that contexts and issues included in news are presented through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration (Hendrickson & Tankard, 1997). In one research that examined CBS’s news coverage of student movement, Gitlin (1980) found that

“selection” and “reconstruction” are the two key factors in news production to represent what happens in reality. News staff “selects” the topics, angles and

statements from the facts they gather from the scene and “reconstructs” the news by deciding what deserves more emphasis and elaboration or what should be excluded.

Researchers argued that the process of reconstruction even starts right in the early phase of the news production. Chung and Tsang (1993) contended that when reporters receive news assignments and leave for interview, they have several news frames set even before arriving at the scene, by forming goals for the story and listing out interview questions. Interview is only a “hypothesis-oriented” action that gathers seeming facts to support reporters’ perspectives (Gitlin, 1980; Tsang, 1998). When journalists organize the facts that they collect on their assignments, they are engaging in the process of news framing cognitively and so do the editorial teams in the

newsroom (Parson & Xu, 2001).

In other words, frame is a specific issue in news making, bringing out the ideology that embedded with media texts. In the process of constructing news, news frame work among media, source and the audience with the influence from media autonomy, source, media regulation, journalist’s ideology and the social context.

Journalists and news organizations are not passive actors in the frame building process, and neither is the audience (Pan & Kosicki, 1993; Entman, 1993).

Under such news production process, unsurprisingly, what presents in media is sometimes not necessarily the case in reality. In a research that examined news

articles about labor movement in Taiwan from 1983 to 1989, Weng (2002) found that the attribution of industrial disputes that the press put more stress on was found very different from what was published by the formal statistics from Council of Labor Affairs (CLA). For instance, the top 3 causes of industrial disputes documented by CLA from 1983 to 1988 were “compensation disputes”, “dismissal for cause” and

“back pay”, while in the press, “request of salary increase”, “others” and “back pay”

became the focus of news (Weng, 2002). The result shows that although media draw the symbolic reality from the details of real events, the facts presented by media can still be very different from the reality after selection and reconstruction during the news production.

Yet, the discrepancy sometimes can become the source of stereotype and prejudice (Gitlin, 1980; Chung & Tsang, 1993; Tichenon, et al., 1980; Parenti, 1986).

Chung and Tsang (1993) argued that people are so used to applying certain frames that they are familiar with to explain, recount or comment the outside world that they sometimes intentionally or unintentionally “skip” the facts that are not included in the frames (Chung & Tsang, 1993). Bias thus generates and sees no exception in news frames.

In Cirino’s (1971) research that examined the news coverage in general by the contemporary American media between 1950s to 1960s, he identified twelve forms of bias, arguing that the press’s bias is in favor of itself to achieve higher circulation, which include bias in the source of news, bias through selection of news bias through omission of news, the art of interviewing, bias through placement, bias through

“coincidental” placement, bias in the headlines, bias in words, bias in news images, bias in photographic selection, bias in captions, the use of editorials to distort facts, and the hidden editorial (p.134-179). Moreover, in the research that studied American

media’s coverage on the student movements in 1960s, Gitlin (1980) found that the mainstream media tend to discredit the protesters by using news frames such as trivialization, polarization, emphasis on internal dissention, marginalization, and disparagement by numbers and of the movement’s effectiveness.

Review of existing body of research about framing revealed that while tendency and bias occur in news coverage through media’s use of news frame when media present an issue, the complexity of media ideological nature tends to play an essential role in the process. The following section reviews the existing body of research about news framing of industrial relations journalism.

2.2 Research on News Framing about Labor

News content is constructed by ideological framework. Concern with ideological character of news has especially received more attention in labor news. The extensive research interest has also helped accelerate the generation of rich literature in this field. Due to the social, cultural and historical difference between Taiwan and other western countries, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, it would not be appropriate to bring them into comparison when it comes to the development of labor and industrial journalism (Feng, 2001). Therefore, a separate discussion of the

western and Taiwanese research about labor and industrial journalism would be helpful in this section to sort out its development within each’s own historical contexts.

Research of Labor and Industrial Journalism in the West

Many studies on labor and industrial journalism have been conducted. The

English-language social science research literature contains a wide range of topics,

including media representation of industrial disputes, industrial actions and strikes, the relationships between labor news and public opinion, and the representation of other forms of media on labor’s life. After decades of research, scholars concluded that the two most observable characteristics of labor news are infrequency and the negative portrayal of labor. For instance, labor news has been noted as a topic without receiving much attention in media industry. Tasini (1990) found that only slightly more than 1 percent of the airtime of more than one thousand network news broadcasts was devoted to U.S. unions. Studies by the Glasgow University Media Group (1976, 1980) also demonstrated poor coverage of labor issues in the British media. As for the printed media, labor news has almost disappeared in the coverage as little money and limited space were allocated for labor reporting (Martin, 2004).

Martin (2004) argued that one possible cause to the scarcity of labor news is because to conduct routine news reporting on the subject, a newspaper has to be large enough to designate a labor section and that requires a professional commitment from the publisher, editor, and reporter. As it takes more time and money, labor beat has thus faded out from most media. Martin (2004) even regarded the most distinctive characteristic of mainstream coverage of labor is that “the media are often not covering labor at all.” It is of great contrast that while labor news accounts only for very limited coverage after almost a century’s development, business news, which reports the employers’ decision or development, has become such an essential section in press that almost every newspaper owns one.

Aside from its rare appearance in news, the treatment of workers and

employers in news always appears to be in an unfair balance- labor in media has been and continues to be negative, while the enterprise is always described as brilliant and positive (Parenti, 1986; Puette, 1992). Long before more than half a century ago,

research has noted that unions are usually described as the “wrong” party in

workplace disputes (Sussman, 1945). As contextual structure of news is not simply a description and collection of facts, the use of lexical items is usually considered as a specific kind of reality reconstruction according to the norms and values of society (Glasgow, 1976, 1980). The Glasgow Media Group (1976, 1980) found that media tend to use more positive nouns and verbs when delivering employers’ actions, while workers receive more negative description in the same piece of news. For example, the workers “demand”, while the employers “offer.” Under such circumstances, labor is commonly regarded as less credible when it comes to industrial disputes and conflicts. Studies also noted that in coverage of industrial disputes, quotes and interviews are most typically from management representatives, occasionally from union representatives, and least likely from regular workers (Martin, 2004). The unbalanced information source tends to lead the audience to rather biased news coverage of labor.

Even when the reporter has told the story fairly and evenly, newsroom operation (i.e. headline, size, placement, etc) can still bring the news to the opposite from where it was. In the United States, studies noted that labor coverage in many newspapers is placed next to police beat or other reports of criminal activities (Cirino, 1971; Puette, 1992). Findings suggested that the public image of labor is likely to be spoiled by criminal association even with a 10 percent occurrence of labor headlines next to criminal reports (Cuperfain & Clarke, 1985). While no studies to date come to a conclusion that if it is carried out by coincidence or on purpose, similar editorial operation somehow is bound to have an effect on readers.

Given the prevailing newsroom operation in a market-oriented society, the negative presentation of labor seems to have become a stereotype. Usually, when

issues are relegated to effects and consequences, media focuses on strikes and boycotts rather than on the working conditions or wage inequities that may have occasioned them (Puette, 1992).

Furthermore, Cirino (1971) and Parenti (1986) found that stories in line with the stereotype are encouraged, while others that appear to be inconsistent with the

Furthermore, Cirino (1971) and Parenti (1986) found that stories in line with the stereotype are encouraged, while others that appear to be inconsistent with the