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.