The salience of media frames

Jay D. Hmielowski

This exploratory study takes stories from The New York Times and uses the issue of global warming as a case study to analyze whether the frames appearing at the beginning of news stories are different from the frames appearing after the first three paragraphs. The study examines whether the paragraphs discuss several issues, global warming's causes, effects, and possible solutions, and whether to take action against it. In addition, this study looks at where sources of information appear in the text. To analyze where frames appear in news stories, this study examines each paragraph of the stories for relevant frames. In the end, this study analyzed 42 news stories, which came to 890 paragraphs of news text. This study attempts to see whether the first three paragraphs give an accurate reflection of the whole story. It also tries to get a better sense of where information appears in the story. To do this, this study used both quantitative and qualitative research methods. The quantitative analysis included cross-tabs and a difference in proportion test to see the differences between the first three paragraphs and the balance of the stories were statistically significant. In addition, the qualitative analysis examined single stories in two ways. In one analysis, the research examined whether a single story matched the aggregate analysis of the data. In the other analysis, the research analyzed a story, paragraph by paragraph, to get a better sense of where information appears in news stories. The aggregate analysis shows small differences between the beginning and the rest of the story. The difference in proportion test reveals these differences are not statistically significant. The analysis of individual stories challenges some of the aggregate findings. One story shows that the prominence of frames in the first three paragraphs does not always match the prominence in the balance of the story. In addition, this analysis points out a concern that even when frames in the opening paragraphs match the balance of the story, the frames may appear well into a story. By taking into account reading behavior, this study attempts to bridge the gap between content and media effects research. In addition, this study challenges the use of the whole story and supports the use of proxies as an accurate substitute for content analysis research.

The salience of media frames

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