They Are Not Us: Framing of American Indians by the Boston Globe

Abstract

This framing analysis of news, feature, and editorial texts identified the frames used to depict American Indians in the Boston Globe from 1999–2001. The results suggest that stereotypical good and bad Indian depictions are less frequent than in turn-of-the-century media but emerge more subtly through frames of degraded and historic relic Indians. Thus, whereas contemporary mores have produced a newspaper largely devoid of the most flagrant narratives of denigration that prevailed a century ago, today's newspaper continues to de-humanize and silence American Indians as it gives voice to the dominant culture. Furthermore, differences among the frames across story types support theories that structure and organization influence content frames.

Keywords:

• American Indian
• content
• discourse
• framing
• marginalize
• narrative
• Native American
• news
• news frames
• newspaper
• stereotypes

Notes

1 The Boston Globe is the 14th largest newspaper in the nation and the largest metropolitan daily in the region of the country and in one of the states with the smallest proportion of Americans Indians in its total population. Our choice of the Boston Globe allows us to shed light on how regional differences, in population, are related to differences in news content and framing.

2 The time period chosen was dictated, in part, by the availability of newspapers. That is, this study used papers published between 1999 and 200l because these papers were the most current ones available at the time the study was conducted.

3 This sample of stories stratified by story type allowed close reading of a balance of the three types of texts to enable contrast and comparison by story type. The universe of articles studied included all the editorials and sampled the news and feature stories to avoid undue weighting of the frames in news and feature stories. This subset of texts accurately reflects both the content of each type of story and the framing of the Boston Globe during the study period, and it affords more detailed reading and reporting of each text under study.