Prologue—Framing Public Life: A Bridging Model for Media Research

quality. The frame is not the same as its symbolic manifestation, which means we must get behind surface features to the generating principle that produced one way of framing a story, but is at work in many others as well. This suggests that we must often infer the organizing principle from media discourse, which is a conglomeration of inter-locking and competing organizing ideas. Or we must ask what principles are held by journalists or frame sponsors that give rise to certain ways of expressing them. Ultimately, frames may best be viewed as an abstract principle, tool, or “schemata” of interpretation that works through media texts to structure social meaning. Gamson and Modigliani (1989), for example, refer to a frame as an “organizing idea.” These interpretive principles are made manifest in discourse; symbolic devices making up media texts constitute the epiphenomena of the underlying principle. Entman (1993) suggests that frames can be located in the communicator, the text, the receiver and the culture. More accurately perhaps we should say that frames are principles of organizing information, clues to which may be found in the media discourse, within individuals, and within social and cultural practices. While we may consider whether information is in or out of a text, we need to also consider the principles that naturally lead to it being excluded or included, such that one may not even notice the exclusion. In Gitlin’s (1980) view, for example, frames are inevitably part of a much larger set of structures, or societal ideology, that finds its manifestation in the text. To ignore the principle that gives rise to the frame is to take media texts at face value, and to be misled by manifest content. A focus on the organizing principle should caution us that what is seen in media texts is often the result of many inter-related, competing principles from contending sources and media professionals themselves. The framing principle may generate a coverage blackout, yielding little discourse to analyze. This is the case, for example, with stories identified by Project Censored in both the U.S. and Canada (1996), watchdog groups that look for issues not getting the coverage their importance deserved. Thus, we may ask whose principle was dominant in producing the observed coverage? How did the principles brought to bear by journalists interact with those promoted by their sources? These questions require looking behind the scenes and making inferences from the symbolic patterns in news texts.