Browsing by Subject "framing"

This study aims to analyze the abortion debate in the United States by examining the Senate’s debate over ‘The Women’s Health Protection Act 2022’. The ‘Women’s Health Protection Act. 2022’ pursued to codify Roe v. Wade in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft planning to overrule the constitutional right to abortion. This study analyzes the values the Senators use in their arguments for and against abortion, and thus proceeds to identify the worldviews behind their abortion stances. The debate around the ‘Women’s Health Protection Act’ occurred in May 2022 and the focus is on the Republican and Democrat Senators’ rhetoric. This study answers two research question about the values and worldviews represented in the Senators’ speeches during the debate’s first day. New rhetoric, a theory on argumentation and a tool for its analysis serves as the study’s method in identifying the values used by the Senators. The study’s theoretical framework combines Lakoff’s framing theory with theories of political polarization. The theoretical framework allows for critical assessment of the values the analysis identifies. Lakoff’s framing theory pursues understanding of contemporary American politics through the concepts that constitute people’s thoughts and shape their worldviews. Political polarization aims to explain growing fundamentalist political positions and the lack of effective negotiations and compromise in the 21st century. The ‘Women’s Health Protection Act 2022’ debate is the object of the analysis and 35 speeches from the two-day debate’s first day serve as this study’s data. The speeches vary in length from approximately 210 words to 2500 words. The speeches were analyzed according to Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s new rhetoric by coding the values with ATLAS.ti. The analysis identified 34 different values and the most used values per party were defined as the party’s core values within the debate’s context. For the Republican Senators these values were human life, the rights of healthcare practitioners, safety, legitimacy, the rights of the children and unborn, and science. The core values of the Democrat Senators were women’s rights, freedom, safety, legitimacy, and health. The study found the Senators’ most prominent values to resemble Lakoff’s theory on the Republicans and Democrats’ worldviews. The only contradiction was found in the Republican Senators demonstrating empathy towards women. The application of political polarization to the study’s findings showed signs of a polarized Senate and a polarized debate. The study was able to provide an account of what the Democrat’s rhetoric and frames in abortion debate may look like, as previous research mainly focuses on the Republicans. Furthermore, the study demonstrates the need to study the dynamic between the Senate and the electorate, as the findings suggest the Senate may enforce more extreme abortion legislation than the public wants.

In this paper, I examine the discussions around the concept of carbon sinks. From those discussion of Finnish forestry, I identify frames based on a media material of 108 news articles combining the methodologies of frame analysis and content analysis. I aim to contextualize the carbon sink discussions of the latter half of 2010s and examine how the natural science-based term is used to support varying policy agendas. Building from background literature on the media as a societal actor and a context around Finnish forest discussions and mismatches between science and forest policy, I reflect on the ways that Finnish media frames and contextualizes carbon sink-related forest discussions. Eventually, I identify three dominant and eight secondary frames that describe the ways of using and the transforming of carbon sink as a term in detail. The dominant frames divide the discussion into two clashing ways to communicate carbon sink issues and a third middle ground way of understanding and using the term. The middle ground frame identifies the conflict between the clashing frames and suggests reaching to an understanding as a priority goal in terms of optimal climate change policy. I discuss the results in terms of the frames' policy implications. In addition, I ask how they signal potential developments in forest and climate policy and discourse. The analysis shows that the clearest disagreements in the carbon sink conflicts raise from how forestry restricting policies are seen to affect carbon sink levels and how prominent a role should forest industry have in meeting national and international climate policy targets. The study confirms that carbon sink as a term transforms into altering forms to support distinct, even controversial policy goals because of both definitional and calculative uncertainties.

The aim of this Master’s thesis is to explore the cultural and discursive aspects of defense procurement in the United States. The thesis examines how an American multirole combat aircraft, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighter, has been framed by Members of the U.S. Congress in 2010—2020. Focused on congressional communication towards the domestic audience, the study examines what kinds of meanings of the F-35 are conveyed by the frames and how they relate to American strategic culture. This is a study in the multidisciplinary field of American Studies, making use of previous research and concepts from congressional studies, defense and strategic studies, and political culture studies. The research material consists of public statements from Members of the Armed Services Committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. Informed by a social constructivist viewpoint and a semiotic approach to culture, the study adopts framing theory/analysis as a theoretical-methodological framework through which a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the research material is conducted. As a background for understanding the research material, the study defines a certain kind of American strategic culture and discusses the role of Congress in defense spending. This study finds that Members of the two Armed Services Committees have invoked broad, culturally resonant concepts and timeless storylines to contextualize and justify the F-35 to the domestic audience in a way that has remained fairly consistent over time. The study identifies three distinct but overlapping frames: an economic frame, a strategic-technological frame, and an apolitical patriotic frame. The framing of the F- 35 has highlighted its economic and financial aspects but has also discussed what the aircraft provides or means to the United States on the global arena, supported by a perception of war and military power as technology-centered and focused on competition between great power rivalries. The framing has also given voice to an understanding of the F-35 as a nonpartisan issue that evokes patriotic sentiments and was permeated with a general narrative of American national greatness and continued hegemony in the world. All the frames identified in this study are interpreted as having a basis in American strategic culture, but a more thorough understanding of the F-35 discourse arises by paying attention to a wider cultural context. The study suggests that the process and impacts of framing the F-35 are rooted in the existence and public acceptance of an American ‘culture of war’.

The topic of forest fires has gathered a lot of media attention in recent years as it relates closely to climate change and other sustainability issues. The media has an important role in communicating these issues as it affects, how the public percieves them, how different sustainability problems are defined and what kind of solutions are seen plausible. I became interested in how the media represents the issue of forest fires. My aim in this thesis is to find out, how the Colombian news media has framed the Amazon rainforest fires. As my material I used the news articles from the Colombian news media El Tiempo. I definined my timeframe from July 2019 to september 2019 because at that time the news subject was of high interest. After the initial search I went through the articles and left out any irrelevant ones. I was left with 24 news articles. As an analytic tool I utilized qualitative frame analysis guided by Robert Entman´s definition of frames and used ATLAS.ti to make an initial thematic coding. After that I mapped out all the actors that were cited in the news articles and divided them into groups. Using these actor groups, I searched for the frames. There were eight actor groups, politicians and political organizations being the most prominent one. Looking at how these actors talked about the forest fires, two main frames came out: populist and scientific. The populist frame concentrated mainly on Jair Bolsonaro. In this frame there was a lot of nationalist and economic arguments and responsability was directed away from him. There seemed to be a lot of enemies also. The second frame concentrated in deforestation, climate change and the forest fires being a global issue. In this frame international actors used economic and political pressure in order to affect Bolsonaro´s policy solutions. The research showed, how difficult it can be to solve shared global problem and made visible a historical political division between authoritarianism and democracy. An other important notion is the lack of marginalized groups in the news media.

The world in which we live and communicate is complicated and complex. This is also true for political communication, which has moved, in some part, to newer forms of media, such as social media platforms. Politicians have gained the opportunity to communicate directly with their followers online, without any mediators. This allows political actors to present the image of themselves and the version of reality they want to convey. Twitter is one example of such a platform, which provides an interactive channel of communication between political actors and their audience. This thesis aims to analyse how the 280 characters long tweets are used as forms of communication by employing and combining Erving Goffman’s concepts of framing and self-presentation. Frames are interpretative frameworks which are activated by our brains to make sense of situations and events and the understanding of self-presentation describes how actors portray themselves in social settings. (Political) actors can change the way the narrative is framed, depending on which frame of reference they are highlighting in their communication. For the case sample, 1785 tweets by the German party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have been collected over a period of four weeks at the beginning of 2020. Their categorisation as a right-wing party as well as their active presence on Twitter makes them an interesting subject of study. To structure the collected data, the tweets are divided into 12 categories of framing strategies, which are based on the differentiation between a Positive Self-Presentation and a Negative Other-Presentation. The analysis of the tweets and the employed framing strategies showed that the party emphasised the (perceived) differences between themselves and the other, which ranges from political elites, oppositional political parties and their supporters to civilian groups such as activists, migrants or critics of the party. Language is important for the portrayal of the framing strategies, either through the usage of personal pronouns – for example, “us” or “them” – or through the invention of mocking names classifying the other. The self, here the AfD, is always presented positively and the others are depicted in a negative light. It has been found that the combination of different framing strategies can lead to a stronger emphasis on the positive self and the negative other. The tweets generally portray one version of reality or one version of the narrative that fits best to the objective the party wants to portray. The data sample and the period of data collection are rather limited and would need to be expanded for further analysis. Nonetheless, the results give an indication of how framing strategies can be used daily in political communication, which can add to the knowledge of political researchers and communicators.

The objective of this thesis is to utilise the frame-building perspective to study how the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat framed the case of the Chibok schoolgirls who were abducted by the terrorist group Boko Haram in April 2014 in Nigeria. The data of this study is based on 105 news articles published by Helsingin Sanomat between April 2014 and December 2018. The structure of the thesis consists of four main sections. The first section focuses on mapping the case in the Nigerian context and providing information to understand the Nigerian situation with regard to its historical background, the rise of Boko Haram, and the case of the abducted Chibok girls. The second section focuses on the theoretical frameworks. News framing theory is an appropriate tool for studying media content that deals with terrorism. While the case consists of foreign news, there are also brief references to the theory of newsworthiness and foreign news transmission processes in the Finnish media. Also, the ambiguous relation between media and terrorism is addressed: terrorists need media for conveying information about their attacks, and correspondingly, their attacks serve as material for the news media. The third section focuses on terrorism and its victims, and its relation to conflict-related gender-based violence. In the Chibok schoolgirls’ case one perspective to violence is the concept of abduction. The fourth section focuses on the implementation of the frame building perspective to examine the selected Helsingin Sanomat news data. The study reveals that in reporting the Chibok schoolgirls’ case, Helsingin Sanomat favoured material from western news agencies and the most referred to news agencies were AFP and Reuters. Local Nigerian media was referred to as a source only in five of the news. The categorization of the quote source types reveals that Nigerian authorities dominated as sources for the citations in the news. From the news data a total of 12 frame theme categories are recognized and these categories are further organized into four main frame theme groups. In the group “Understanding the circumstances” the prevailing background information is the description of Boko Haram and the dichotomy of the country, but discussion of the ethno-religious historical background of the conflict remains limited. The second group “Government inactivity and politics” reveals that the news mainly concentrate on the negotiations and the international interventions to resolve the conflict between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram. The third group “Terrorism and violence” concentrates on the case of the Chibok schoolgirls, and the other attacks are described as chains of events. The Nigerian government’s role in the atrocities is recognized but not widely discussed. In the last frame theme group “Community and compassion” the communities’ active role in conflict resolution is recognized as the voice of the victims of Boko Haram. In general, the Chibok schoolgirls are depicted as a cohesive group which is subject to terrorism and collective violence. Despite the wide media coverage, the schoolgirls’ story is told by others in the news or via the reports of human rights organizations. The conflict in the country is depicted to be that between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram, although the unstable situation in the country has developed from a complex web of socio-cultural, economic, ethno-religious, and regional elements. The Chibok girls themselves, although referred to in the news, are mainly presented as victims whose own voice is hardly heard.

The 2022 energy crisis heightened concerns about energy sufficiency. In response, Finland launched a nationwide energy-saving campaign, Astetta alemmas, to encourage Finns to take concrete and effortless energy-saving actions in their daily lives. The aim of this thesis was to analyze which energy-saving behaviors the media emphasize in the campaign and how the campaign messages are framed in the media. The analysis of media response was chosen because there is a lack of this type of study related to energy-saving campaigns. The data consisted of 94 news articles collected from the five national online news media from October 1st to December 31st, 2022. The data was analyzed using frame and content analysis. The analysis was based on a pre-determined theoretical framework consisting of nine energy-saving and general news frames: economic, social, environmental, personal, moral, health, conflict, responsibility, and human-interest frames. In addition, two new frames were recognized from the data. The energy-saving behaviors found were classified as curtailment and efficiency behaviors. The campaign was portrayed as an opportunity to save money through effortless energy-saving measures such as lowering the room temperature. Most of these actions were categorized as curtailment behaviors. The media showed the importance of individuals’ efforts to save energy in a society by emphasizing that saving energy has paid off and that new saving habits have become a routine part of daily life. On the other hand, energy-saving actions led to compromises in living standards, resulting in suffering and high electricity bills. The media portrayed the negative consequences by emphasizing conflicts and showing how far people are willing to go to save energy while risking their health. The impact on the environment was seen as a secondary principle. The crisis was a suitable moment for the media to highlight the importance of energy conservation. The campaign was well justified as a campaign of the whole nation, highlighted by solidarity and shared responsibility to save energy. Nevertheless, some of the tips given were targeted at specific households. The media raised a dichotomy by highlighting individuals as heroes or sufferers through their experiences. This is a novel contribution to previous studies. This dichotomy provides room for further studies that could focus on the people behind the news stories and the long-term effects of post-campaign energy-saving measures. This thesis provides initial insights into the media response to the Astetta alemmas campaign during the first three months and in specific news media, but the results cannot be generalized to the response of all news media during the campaign.

På grund av konflikter i bland annat Syrien har ett stort antal människor flytt från sina hemländer under 2015 och 2016. Dessa migrationsrörelser har i stor utsträckning haft Europa som mål, vilket i sin tur skapat en utmaning för europeiska länder att ta emot dessa människor. Inte sällan har flyktingfrågan, t.ex. hur många ett givet land ska ta emot, skapat politiska spänningar och reaktioner bland folk i Europa, så även i Finland. Den finländska befolkningen är rätt splittrad vad gäller inställningen till flyktingar. Somliga vill stänga gränserna helt och hållet, medan andra tycker Finland borde välkomna avsevärt fler. Denna splittring syns även på det partipolitiska fältet. Splittringen löper inte skarpt mellan regeringen och oppositionen, men regeringspartierna är i regel mindre villiga att ta emot flyktingar än oppositionspartierna. Som parlamentsfinansierat public service-bolag har Yle i uppgift att informera medborgarna om angelägenheter. I sin rapportering ska det oberoende rundradiobolaget gynna varken regering eller opposition. Därför är det befogat att granska hur Yle rapporterar om en så känslig fråga som flyktingfrågan. Detta gör det här arbetet genom att jämföra Yles gestaltning av flyktingfrågan gentemot regeringens. Materialet består av regeringens olika program och meddelanden om vad den ämnar göra åt flyktingfrågan, och Yle Uutisets webbartiklar som skrivits om dessa regeringstexter (samtliga regeringstexter och artiklar är bifogade som bilagor). Avsnittet från vilket materialet sållades ur sträcker sig från regeringsförhandlingarna i maj 2015 till maj 2016. Texterna som ingår i det slutliga urvalet är publicerade mellan september 2015 och mars 2016. Teoretiskt stöder sig arbetet på gestaltningsteori (eng. framing), alltså hur ett ämne gestaltas eller ramas in. Samma teori tjänar också i det här arbetet som metod, närmare bestämt Robert M. Entmans version av gestaltningsteorin. Enligt hans version bjuder en text in läsaren att tolka ett ämne på ett visst sätt, beroende av hur ämnet ramas in i texten. Denna ram består av fyra funktioner: texten definierar ett problem, diagnostiserar orsaken eller pekar ut den ansvariga till problemet, dömer den utpekade och föreslår och rättfärdigar åtgärder för problemet. Denna metod tillämpas alltså i arbetet på såväl regeringens texter som Yles artiklar för att jämföra hur de gestaltar flyktingfrågan. Resultatet talar inte direkt till Yles fördel. Som oberoende rundradiobolag ska det som nämnt inte gynna varken regering eller opposition, men i det här materialurvalet överlappar regeringstexternas och nyhetsartiklarnas ramar (alltså hur de gestaltar ämnet) rätt väl. Genomgående gestaltar båda parters texter flyktingarna som problemet och flyktingarna själva som ansvariga för problemet. Ställvis finns en diskrepans mellan regeringstexterna och artiklarna om problemet är ekonomiskt eller säkerhetsmässigt till sin karaktär, men även på denna punkt är de trots allt eniga i lejonparten av fallen.

Klimatförändringen är ett abstrakt koncept som inte går att fotografera, alltså har de bilder som representerar klimatförändringen vuxit fram i takt med ökad politisering och polarisering av miljöjournalistiken. Klimatförändringen visualiseras mest typiskt i dag av bilder på isbjörnar och andra djur, smältande is och glaciärer, extrema väderförhållanden, jordglobar och politiker. Tidigare forskning visar att avsaknaden av mänskliga berättelser i bilder minskar på anknytning till ämnet och på engagemang. Tidningen The Guardian är en av de få medierna som har valt att hålla sig till riktlinjer om hur de visualiserar klimatförändringen så att visualiseringen överensstämmer med deras mål. Svenska Yle har inga riktlinjer för hur de visualiserar klimatförändringen. Jag har därför analyserat 103 bilder som publicerats i artiklar som handlar om klimatförändringen, klimatbilder, av Svenska Yle och kategoriserat bilderna med metoden bildanalys och innehållsanalys samt gestaltningsteori som teoretisk ram för att svara på vad klimatbilder på Svenska Yle föreställer. Genom analysen har jag kommit fram till att de största kategorierna är politiker och experter samt natur, och de minsta kategorierna är orsaker och lösningar. En avsaknad av människor syns tydligt i materialet. Människor förekommer främst i kategorierna politiker och experter, samt demonstration. Bilderna i kategorin politiker, experter framför inte mänskliga berättelser utan är oftast stela och iscensatta. Bilder på demonstrationer väcker likaså, enligt tidigare forskning, främst negativa känslor hos den som iakttar bilden. Politiker, experter och demonstranter är enligt resultaten onekligen klimatförändringens ansikte utåt, men de här bilderna väcker inte enligt tidigare forskning engagemang i klimatförändringen hos iakttagaren. Bilder på natur väcker inte heller engagemang. Nästan inga människor framkommer i kategorin konsekvenser och de minsta kategorierna orsaker och lösningar. Människans roll i klimatförändringen uteblir och istället gestaltas naturen som bland annat den utsatta. Jag har diskuterat resultaten ur ett gestaltningsteoretiskt perspektiv, speglat resultaten mot tidigare forskning och kommit fram till att bilderna i materialet i stora drag inte väcker engagemang och anknytning till klimatförändringen.

This thesis sets out to investigate what frames are used in the U.S. media to discuss responsibility for climate change. Particularly, the study seeks to identify what frames are used to discuss action for climate change mitigation. The normative framework for analyzing responsibility is established by the social connection model by Iris Marion Young, which presents a forward-looking approach for addressing responsibility for issues of structural injustice. The theoretical framework of this thesis derives from existing literature on climate change, the media, and media framing. The study was conducted using a qualitative method of frame analysis. Data for the study was collected from the digital contents of three popular news media outlets in the United States: CNN, Fox News Channel, and The New York Times. The data consists of news articles that were published online in December 2019. The results of the study indicate that responsibility for climate change mitigation is rarely approached directly in the media. Rather, it is implied through discussions about what actions should be taken. The study identifies four main frames of responsibility. The first frame emphasizes the conflict between the younger and older generations and deems that collective efforts are required to address the situation. The second frame accentuates the political division over the issue of climate change by casting blame upon Asian nations while downplaying the respective responsibility of the United States. Similarly, the efforts of the Democratic party are ridiculed. The third frame emphasizes consumer action through practical efforts but does not promote buying less as a possible solution. Lastly, the study identifies a frame, in which corporate responsibility is approached in two ways: to hold highly polluting industries accountable and to promote green business as a solution. The study finds that the framing employed by Fox News Channel emphasizes the economic disadvantages of climate change mitigation and sees it as an issue of causal responsibility for Asian nations. On the other hand, the findings of the study suggest that the media coverage of the youth protests against climate change often yield notions of collective responsibility and frame the issue of responsibility in a more contextualized setting. The findings of the study support existing research of how media frames the issue of climate change and how polarization affects the framing. Through the application of the social connection model, the findings of this study contribute to the literature of news framing of climate change by demonstrating how the issue of responsibility is framed.