Media Framing Theory

Framing refers to the process of putting a news story or other type of media

message together, including the ways in which a story is organized and structured.

The organization of a story sends out cues about how to understand the

content being covered. Agenda setting identifies which issues are important;

framing tells us how to understand those issues. In fact, agenda setting theorists

view framing as a natural way to understand how second-level agenda setting

occurs. This section will explore traditional coverage about media framing and

then introduce prospect theory as a specific theory of framing.

Media framing highlights certain aspects of an issue and focuses attention

on that issue. As mentioned earlier, the concept of framing has been closely

associated with agenda setting over the years; however, it now has a sufficiently

large body of literature to stand as a field of study in its own right.65 In fact,

many believe that framing is not as closely associated with agenda setting as

originally thought and may suggest rather different processes at work.66

Todd Gitlin first applied the term framing to mass communication when he

studied the way in which CBS made the student movement of the 1960s seem

unimportant.67 Media depictions frame events in ways that constrain how audiences

can interpret these events. This can happen by various textual features of

the “story”—headlines, audio-visual components, metaphors used, and the way

in which the story is told, to name only a few of the ways framing functions.

Most framing theorists today do not believe that media by themselves create

new ways for individuals to understand concepts. Instead, the media select components

or structure messages in ways that resonate with schema already

embedded in cognition. Media therefore bring out frames that have been around

for a long time and are part of the culture. Frames are packages of message features

like organization and language choice that help simplify and provide a

perspective for understanding a subject. The frame package helps individuals

define, explain, and evaluate their experiences. Thus, frames are built in the
interaction between media, individuals, and culture; any given media message

may tap into various parts of these cultural and cognitive frames.

Nicky Lewis and Andrew Weaver explored the effects of sports media framing

on fans’ intentions, enjoyment, and attitudes toward athletes.68 They were interested

in whether stories that are framed around athletes’ in-game performance

(performance frames) or their personal lives (character frames) are more important

in shaping audience members’ overall perspectives about the athletes. Lewis

and Weber found that character-focused stories lead to more enjoyment and a

greater likelihood to support the athlete in the future than performance-based stories.

Further, the authors also factored in whether the person was a big sports fan

or a slight sports fan and whether the athlete was religious or not in their analysis

of the effect of framing on attitudes. They found that high sport fans who read a

character-framed story about a religious athlete were more likely to provide support

to the athlete than people who were low sport fans reading a character-framed story about a religious
athlete. Lewis and Weber conclude that characterframed

stories represent a way to increase support for some athletes in contrast to

the traditional focus of journalists providing stories about performance.

Prospect theory is a specific theory of message framing. Daniel Kahneman

and Amos Tversky developed prospect theory to illustrate how message framing

can influence decision making in uncertain conditions.69 Kahneman and Tversky

explain that people are not rational decision makers; they use heuristics, or

cognitive short cuts, to make decisions. These heuristics are influenced positively

or negatively by framing information. Positive messages are called gain

frames, and negative messages are loss frames. Gain frames point out what you

have to gain by making a decision. For example, if you brush your teeth every

day, you will have a beautiful smile. Loss frames identify what you will lose by

making a certain decision. For example, if you do not brush your teeth every

day, you may get tooth decay and lose teeth.

Prospect theory often is used to theoretically frame health promotions and

health communication campaigns because of the factor of uncertainty in terms

of health outcomes. Prospect theory suggests that gain-framed messages motivate

risk-averse choices (preventive behavior), and loss-framed messages motivate

risky or uncertain choices (detection of disease). In other words, if there is

a high certainty that an action will result in benefit, you want to frame it as a

gain. For example, moderate exercise three–five times a week will help you look

and feel better. If the outcome is uncertain, you want to frame the message as a

loss. For example, if you do not complete a breast self-examination or mammography,

you increase the risk of detecting cancer at a later stage, increasing the

risk of dying from breast cancer.

While prospect theory hypothesizes clear effects of gain- and loss-frame

messages on behavior, research demonstrates that these effects, while important,

are slight to modest. For example, a study by Jennifer Gray and Nancy

Harrington examined the impact of gain- and loss-framed messages on exercise

intentions among college students.70 They found that gain-framed messages had

a stronger impact on exercise intentions than did loss-framed messages. This

finding is consistent with a meta-analysis of 93 studies of gain- and loss-framed

messages for preventive behavior: Daniel O’Keefe and Jakob Jensen found that

gain-framed messages are more likely to lead to preventive behavior than lossframed

messages, although this was a small effect.71 Finally, Alexis Roth and

colleagues assessed whether loss- or gain-framed messages are more predictive

of whether women in the criminal justice system will get a herpes simplex type

2 detection test.72 The authors found that the loss-framed messages led to a

higher rate of getting the herpes test when compared to gain-framed or neutralframed

messages. However, this effect was small as well. Thus, the research

indicates that gain- and loss-framed messages are better with prevention and

detection behaviors respectively, but these effects are small.

In this section, we explored theories that discuss the content of mediated

messages and the effects these messages have on message receivers. While the
effects tradition illustrates a number of potential explanations for how messages

impact audiences, the theories in this section suggest that media content has a

strong impact on the attitudes, perspectives, and behaviors of message receivers.

The explanation for these strong effects ranges from cultivation to agenda setting to framing. The
message receiver tends to have a small(er) role in these

processes. The next section explores theories that identify a much larger role

for the receiver in determining the effects of medium and mediated messages.