An Insidious Poison or a Door to the Story?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to grasp the influence of the newsroom on frame-building processes. First, journalists’ own understanding of “frames” and “framing” is discussed. Second, from an academic interpretation of these concepts, journalists’ framing practices are studied. To this end an ethnographic study was conducted at two newsrooms, one in Belgium and one in the Netherlands. The findings reveal that while the noun “frame” is sporadically used as a tool, the verb “framing” is considered as something from which a journalist should refrain. This is explained by the associations journalists make with strategic framing from sources as well as by the newspapers’ explicit attempt to no longer view the world from a single ideological frame. It is argued that the studied newsrooms have replaced ideology by, respectively, a counterframing strategy that strives to disprove existing frames (deframing) and a narrative approach that, one the one hand, sharpens existing frames but, on the other hand, offer more opportunities to create alternative frames (reframing) for events.

KEYWORDS:

• counterframing
• frame-building
• frame diversity
• framing
• news ethnography
• newspapers

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. These figures, provided by the newsrooms themselves, include layout and photo editors but exclude administrative staff.

2. These are the figures at the time of the fieldwork. In Belgium, CIM (Centre for Information about the Media, see www.cim.be) collects and publishes data about media distribution. Its counterpart in the Netherlands is NOM (National Research Multimedia, see www.nommedia.nl).

3. The main selection criteria was that these stories must have been prominently discussed during the observations. As an additional practical requirement, the author of these stories had to be available in the newsroom for an interview.

4. We should point out that these figures are overestimated because there is a slight overlap between the two databases and because some results are not relevant to this study. Nevertheless, these figures provide an idea of the concept’s increasing frequency over the years.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FWO-Vlaanderen (Foundation for Scientific Research) [grant number G.0A35.12].