From Stalin to Mr Bean

Lib-Dem Vince Cable hit the headlines yesterday and today. No it wasn't for something particularly good he did, or bad, he just got in the funniest and most memorable comment in the parliamentary questions time yesterday.

As the Sun reported today in its top news story: “From Stalin to Mr Bean.” Gordon Brown grinned, but this jibe from Lib-Dem Vince Cable must have hurt. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/sun_says/article244723.ece

Cable's opportunist jibe had all the ingredients to propel himself onto the news, and give himself some good publicity: comedy, history and cultural relevance.

Let's hope Mr Bean turns into a Mr Churchill soon!

No conspiracy, no interest

The current Labour fiasco reminded me of what Robert Harris, who was working as a journalist for BBC’s Newsnight programme during the Falklands War, concluded on the media coverage:

‘The episodes which caused the most disquiet, and which have been described in this book, were not necessarily unique to the Falklands crisis. The instinctive secrecy of the military and the Civil Service; the prostitution and hysteria of sections of the press; the lies, the misinformation, the manipulation of public opinion by the authorities; the political intimidation of broadcasters; the ready connivance of the media at their own distortion…all these occur as much in peace time Britain as in war.’[1]

Yes, I used to believe all those conspiracies, which are founded on the belief that our leaders are all some kind of James Bond (or Bond villains), and everything is worked out so cleverly and efficiently that only a mastermind conspiracy breaker (that's you/them) can get to the truth.

But most nations' histories are full of foolhardy and shambolic decisions by their leaders, with countries' futures and the lives of their citizens and soldiers threatened on a leaders' whim. The Iraq war at the moment is one of them, with Blair and Bush having little knowledge about the region or populations before the war, and apparently no plan for the place after the military conflict.

But the war has made me less inclined to believe conspiracy theories, because if ever there was a conspiracy the UK/US needed to implement, it was to plant some weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That would have settled the reason for war argument, apart from the conspiracy theorists of course, who would of course have had a case.

But when it didn't happen, did the conspiracy theorists hold their hands up and say they expected a conspiracy. I didn't hear them. And do those who still think the US bombed themselves on 9/11, or let the Israelis do it, really believe that a country that doesn't even plant a few WMD's in Iraq will destroy its own landmark building and kill thousands of its citizens?

[1] R. Harris., Gotcha! : the media the government and the Falklands crisis (London : Faber, 1983), p. 151.

What price democracy? US elections turning nasty

As the American political bandwagon hits South Carolina, Tim Reid in today's Times writes that 'This state’s primary race has already become the sleaziest leg of the 2008 presidential campaign.'

And this isn't the first time its happened, as Reid explains, back in 2000 there was a similar attack on a candidate: 'After losing badly to Mr McCain in New Hampshire, the Bush team knew – as one operative says – that they had to “chop him up” in South Carolina. Flyers appeared saying that Mr McCain had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman (he and his wife have an adopted Bangladeshi girl). A whispering campaign was started claiming that his five years as a Vietnamese prisoner of war had made him mentally unstable. His wife was a drug addict, people were told in anonymous telephone calls. Mr Bush and his former chief strategist, Karl Rove – another Atwater protégé – always denied any involvement. But Mr McCain’s campaign never recovered.'

This time in South Carolina it has been 'claimed that Hillary Clinton was having a lesbian affair with Huma Abedin, her beautiful aide' (I wish...to see the photos), and 'Flyers appeared on cars accusing Barack Obama (a Christian) of being a Muslim extremist.'

I've heard SC has a nice side too, so please don't judge it by the actions above.

Brown x Green = Grey

So the government has given the thumbs-up to a new runway at Heathrow. Coming about a year after it raised airport tax to apparently lower the number of flights it sends a contradictory message, unless its decoded as one of getting more taxes for the government coffers...so they can build their new nuclear power plants!

George Monbiot recently commented on the government's framing and blurring of environmentalism in the Guardian: 'The law the British government passed a fortnight ago - by 2010, 5% of our road transport fuel must come from crops - will, it claims, save between 700,000 and 800,000 tonnes of carbon a year. It derives this figure by framing the question carefully. If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts, you find they cause more warming than petroleum.' http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2205761,00.html

Ruddslide deposes Howard in Australian election

A victory for Labor's Kevin Rudd has removed Australian leader John Howard after eleven years in office, with the media terming it a 'ruddslide'. Rudd won the vote with promises of signing up for the Kyoto treaty, and withdrawing combat troops from Iraq.

Paul Ham in the Sunday Times wrote that 'His victory was largely attributed to his ability to convince Australians that he is an economic conservative who will rein in public spending, unlike his profligate Labor predecessors. He persuaded the electorate that he would continue rather than undo Howard’s economic achievements: Little distinguishes Rudd from Howard in terms of economic management, and quoted Peter Hartcher, political editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, as considering that “Kevin Rudd is basically John Howard without the nasty bits.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2937099.ece

Entman on framing

According to Robert Entman, who set out to clarify frame theory, framing ‘essentially involves selection and salience. To frame is to select 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, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’. Echoing Goffman’s original definition of framing, Entman argues that culture is the stock of commonly invoked frames, and communicators make conscious or unconscious framing judgements, guided by their belief system, and that the decisions are then manifested in the text by the presence or absence of keywords, phrases, stereotyped images, sources and sentences that provide thematically reinforcing clusters of facts or judgements; Entman also considers that what is omitted from the news is as important as what is included.[1]
[1] R. Entman; Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm, in Journal of Communication, Volume 43 (4), Winter, 1993, pp. 51-8, p. 52.

Wolfsfeld on framing by journalists in the media

Gadi Wolfsfeld considers Gitlin’s to be a ‘cogent summary’ of framing, and sums up the process of media framing as one in which the news media construct frames for conflicts by attempting to fit the information they are receiving into a package that is professionally useful and culturally familiar; journalists attempt to find a narrative fit between incoming information and existing media frames. Wolfsfeld therefore thinks that news is not information driven or frame driven, but is a combination of the two, and there are always alternative frames that can be used.[1] Wolfsfeld suggested that ‘those who hope to understand variations in the role of the news media must look at the competition among antagonists along two dimensions: one structural and the other cultural.’[2] Wolfsfeld explained that many political conflicts centre on disputes over frames as each antagonist attempts to market its own package of ideas to the mass media and the public. It is therefore important to examine the level of correspondence between the frames adopted by the media and those offered by each of the political antagonists in order to understand better this competition. Wolfsfeld considers that transactions between antagonists and the news media are more than a business deal; they are a set of cultural interactions in which antagonists promote their own frames of the conflict while the news media attempt to construct a story that can be understood by their audience. Therefore, Wolfsfeld considered that the most useful way for researchers to deal with this aspect of the relationship is to focus on the interpretive frames constructed by the news media about political conflicts,[3] and imagine editors and reporters asking three questions when they first get news of a conflict: How did we cover this conflict in the past? What is the most newsworthy part of the conflict? Who are the good guys?[4]
[1] G. Wolfsfeld., Media and Political Conflict: News from the Middle East, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 33-34.
[2] Ibid., p. 4-5.
[3] Ibid., p. 31.
[4] Ibid., p. 49.

Todd Gitlin on journalistic framing in the media

Todd Gitlin was one of the first to use frame analysis in the study of news coverage, and described frames thus: ‘What makes the world beyond direct experience look natural is a media frame….Frames are principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters. Media frames, largely unspoken and unacknowledged, organise the world both for journalists who report it and, in some important degree, for us who rely on their reports. Media frames are persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organise discourse, whether verbal or visual….Any analytic approach to journalism - indeed, to the production of any mass-mediated content - must ask: What is the frame here? Why this frame and not another? What patterns are shared by the frames clamped over this event and the frames clamped over that one, by frames in different media in different places at different moments? And how does the news-reporting institution regulate these regularities? And then: What difference do the frames make for the larger world?’[1]
[1] T. Gitlin., The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the making and unmaking of the new Left, (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1980), p. 6-7.

The origins and development of frame analysis in media research

Reese wrote that Erving Goffman is often credited with introducing the framing approach, along with the anthropologist-psychologist Gregory Bateson, whom Goffman credited with originating the metaphor.[1] Goffman used frame analysis in his examination ‘of the organisation of experience,’ and with regard to the question of what influences the journalism process, Goffman considered that reporters’ understanding of the world precedes the stories they write about, ‘determining which ones reporters will select and how the ones that are selected will be told.’[2] Goffman later wrote that: ‘When the individual in our Western society recognises a particular event, he tends, whatever else he does, to imply in this response (and in effect employ) one or more frameworks or schemata of interpretation of a kind that can be called primary… a primary framework is one that is seen as rendering what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful.’[3]
[1] S. D. Reese., Prologue – Framing Public Life: A Bridging Model for Media Research, in S.D. Reese., O.H. Gandy., and A.E. Grant., Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, (Mahwah, New Jersey and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001), p. 7.
[2] E. Goffman., Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience, (Middlesex, Victoria and Auckland: Penguin, 1974), p. 14.
[3] Ibid., p. 21.

In media analysis, framing is a modern term for the conscious or unconscious way that media workers decide what to include or omit from a news story, and also how to construct that story. Media professionals usually have to work to rigid deadlines, and this limits the amount of time they have to construct a news story around the day’s events. This means they have to analyse and process the information they receive in a very short time, and frames offer a quick and convenient way to package news information that will be understandable to the audience. Stephen D. Reese recently suggested a working definition of framing, influenced by definitions from those who have used framing in their research; most of whom are also included in this study. Reese considered that: ‘Frames are organising principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world.’[1]

[1] S. D. Reese., Prologue – Framing Public Life: A Bridging Model for Media Research, in S.D. Reese., O.H. Gandy., and A.E. Grant., Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, (Mahwah, New Jersey and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001), pp. 7-31, p. 11.