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chapter two

Good Pictures vs. Talking Heads: Iyengar’s Episodic and Thematic Frames

Although those who are reading this volume may be familiar with Shanto Iyengar’s book Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues, we would like to provide a quick overview of the work for those who need a primer or review.

Iyengar’s (1991) book proposed the way journalists frames stories matters for the ways audiences attribute responsibility for the causes and solutions of political issues. Iyengar specifically examined two types of storytelling frames—episodic and thematic. Iyengar argues news generally takes either an episodic or thematic frame. “The episodic news frame focuses on specific events or particular issues, while the thematic news frame places political issues and events in some general context” (Iyengar, 1991, p. 2). Episodic frames might detail the journey of an individual experiencing a health issue, focusing on their personal experience, while thematic frames might provide background about the health issue at large, with statistics explaining things like the national rate and cost of the issue. Iyengar said, “Visually, episodic reports make ‘good pictures,’ while thematic reports feature ‘talking heads’” (1991, p. 14).

Iyengar’s two types of frames—thematic and episodic—are attractive for journalists and for journalism researchers. Journalists use these frames. For example, one way we, the authors of this book, learned how to write trend stories in our own journalism education was through deliberately pairing these frames—while we were taught to explain the statistics, research, predominance etc. about an issue, we ←7 | 8→were told to create a more compelling story about the issue by adding to the more thematic writing an episodic example of a person who is experiencing the issue. One story model looks like this: the trend story started with an episodic section about our exemplar, went into a thematic section about the issue as a whole, and finished with an ending section that finished the story about the exemplar. These episodic portions of the story would, in theory, capture the audience’s attention and give them a face of an issue that might be difficult to understand through just numbers.

Iyengar also acknowledged his content analysis on television news also found very few stories were only episodic or thematic, but rather a mixture of the two. However, he said a predominant frame emerged a majority of the time. His content analysis found TV news was highly episodic. Research on newspapers, some of which is discussed in this book, has also found that the newspaper medium is highly episodic (see, for example, Carlyle, Slater, & Chakroff, 2008).

Although the content analysis in Iyengar’s book was important to capture the real-world explanation of thematic and episodic frames in political coverage on television news, the book turns to media effects of those frames. Iyengar used an experimental design to test the impact of frames on attribution of responsibility. His argument is throughout public opinion, attribution of responsibility matters for how we allocate resources and hold political figures accountable. He argues when people attribute more responsibility to individuals rather than political actors, it “decreases the public’s control over their elected representatives and the policies they pursue” (Iyengar, 1991, p. 3).

Iyengar focused his research on political issues such as poverty, crime, and unemployment, examining attribution of responsibility based on thematic and episodic frames for these separate issues. He found generally when people encountered episodic frames, they were more likely to attribute responsibility to individuals, while those who encountered thematic frames were more likely to attribute responsibility to society.

It sounds simple.

It’s not.

Throughout his work, Iyengar acknowledges the complexities of the attribution of responsibility paradigm, of testing responses to content while acknowledging the larger culture, of humans in general. We see differences in results based on who or what is in the stories; for example, individual causal attribution in stories about black crime was not affected by framing. Iyengar describes this effect as part of the impact of individual responsibility for black crime being a dominant ←8 | 9→cultural judgment. Ericson (1993), in his review on Iyengar (1991), had a similar cultural critique even for the experiments that statistically supported Iyengar’s thesis: “In essence, Iyengar exposed people with a lifetime of political socialization to a breathtaking hurricane of television news, then documented how their attributions, opinions, and attitudes might have become a little bent in the process” (p. 1461), arguing further that examining what happened to those ideas and attributions once the participants left the experiment was lost.

Iyengar saw differences in framing effects based on political ideology of the participants, the issue studied, issue salience, and agreement to the article’s frames. Furthermore, we have seen other research, such as Stone (1989, 2002) and Nathanson (1999), examine the nuances of different types of blame and causality impacting the ways we think about issues. Focusing on causality here leaves out the multitude of research on other types of frames that interact with thematic and episodic to impact audiences (see, for example, Kahneman & Tversky, 1979, 1981). There are surely more variables impacting attribution of responsibility.

Although we acknowledge, as did Iyengar, these types of distinctions can impact responsibility attribution, the bottom line for the importance of Iyengar’s (1991) work is the frames we see in the media are the frames that not only become the “pictures in our heads” (Lippmann, 1922), but also an influence on our political and social policy, our very way of life itself.

References

Carlyle, K.E., Orr, C., Savage, M.W., & Babin, E.A. (2014). News coverage of intimate partner violence: Impact on prosocial responses. Media Psychology, 17: 451–571. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2007.00379.x

Carlyle, K.E., Slater, M.D., & Chakroff, J.L. (2008). Newspaper Coverage of Intimate Partner Violence: Skewing Representations of Risk. Journal of Communication, 58(1), 168–186. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2007.00379.xEricson, R.V. (1993). [Review of the book Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues by S. Iyengar]. American Journal of Sociology, 98(6), 1459–1462. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2781827

Iyengar, S. (1991). Is Anyone Responsible: How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/Chicago/9780226388533.001.0001

Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk. Econometrica, 47: 263–291. doi:10.1017/CBO978051

Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. doi:10.2307/1943740

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Nathanson, C.A. (1999). Social movements as catalysts for policy change: The case of smoking and guns. Journal of Health Politics and Law, 24(3): 421–488. doi:10.1215/03616878-24-3-421

Stone, D. (2002). Policy paradox: The art of political decision-making (rev. ed.). New York: Norton.

Stone, D. (1989). Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas. Political Science Quarterly, 104: 281–300. doi:10.2307/2151585

Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211: 453–458. doi:10.1126/science.7455683

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