Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

Abstract

News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): coding protocol used in content analysis.]

Keywords:

• Mediated deliberation
• news framing
• election campaigns
• normative assessment

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Tim Jones and Patricia Moy as well as three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on this article.

Notes

1. However, note that framing choices are not the only factor influencing news deliberativeness. A case in point is the independent influence of news event type on the level of news deliberativeness. For example, a fierce personal confrontation between two political candidates in a battleground state might induce journalists to report the event in a game frame, and this choice might influence levels of deliberativeness (e.g., by focusing less on the substantive backgrounds of the confrontation). However, the event itself (that is, “political reality”) of course may have a direct influence on the deliberativeness of the story: If the candidates go personal and avoid substantive confrontation, any framing of the event is likely to be less deliberative than had the confrontation been more substantive. The point is that we cannot assume pure causality running from framing choices to mediated deliberation, but only partial causality that is largely context-dependent.

2. Of the four criteria of deliberativeness mentioned here, civility is the most contested. It has been criticized for excluding more passionate speakers from public discourse. Habermas (1996, p. 381) concedes that “sometimes sensational actions, mass protest and incessant campaigning” are necessary to put an issue on the agenda. However, after successful agenda-building social conflict must be transformed into reasonable, civil debate if it is supposed to entice legitimate political decisions that serve to link acute grievances and outrage to more generalizable concerns and principles (see Dryzek, 2005). Thus, civility is a necessary component of mediated deliberation at least after the initial discovery of an issue.

3. In this conceptualization, contestation frames comprise what Cottle and Rai (2006, pp. 172–173) label as contest and contention frames. Their distinction, being a gradual one, does not bear on the theoretical and methodological question we address in this study. We thus employ the overarching concept of contestation.

4. Robertson (2010, p. 524) finds a much higher share of contestation stories (54.4%) than Cottle and Rai (2006) in UK television news, likely due to his broader operationalization.

5. The individual final intercoder reliabilities were as follows: topic, α = .85, n = 72; contestation, α = .83, n = 72; type of speaker, α = .96, n = 206; incivility, α = .85, n = 64; and reason-giving, α = .86, n = 325.

6. Since strategic game frames and contestation frames were not conceived as mutually exclusive, we were able to capture the overlap between the two frame types: 39.5% of all campaign stories with a strategic game focus contained substantive contestation. Conversely, a majority of 63.5% of all contestation stories had a strategic game focus (n = 47).