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.