Literature Review | Framingfeminism

Framing

Whenever journalists write stories, no matter how objective they may pledge to be, they are clearly being subjective when selecting the information that will be presented in their work. This is referred to as framing. Framing is “selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues, and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution” (Entman, 2005, p. viii). Framing can also be defined as “the way events and issues are organized and made sense of, especially by media, media professionals, and their audiences” (Reese, 2003, p. 7).

A journalist privileges certain kinds of information over others during the writing process to get a specific point across to readers. As a consequence of framing, readers will view an issue in a certain way depending on the way the writer chooses to frame it. Leaving information out is just as telling: “If a frame produces ‘omission,’ we ask how that omission is naturalized, made to seem as a logical exclusion or common-sensical irrelevancy” (Reese, 2003, p. 19).

When journalists choose to represent one side of an issue over others, this may allow for biases to reveal themselves. News framing can leave out voices and cast favor on one side of an issue without revealing explicit bias (Reese, 2003). Journalists have a lot of power in determining whose side is represented more favorably, and can even influence readers in this way.

Cultural Differences

There are cultural implications for framing as well: “The frame metaphor draws our attention to this structure—how the principles of organization create a coherent ‘package’ by combining symbols, giving them relative emphasis, and attaching them to larger cultural ideas” (Reese, 2003, p. 17). This is important in identifying the differences in how the U.S. and France frame feminism in their news stories. Different cultures directly affect the way the same issue of women’s movements is framed in two different countries.

Cross-cultural differences in framing also account for differing perspectives. Very little literature was found on the way the French frame news stories, partially because “framing” itself is an English term. The Worlds of Journalism Study reports on the ideologies of journalists in different countries, giving an idea of what they value most. For example, France and the U.S. are remarkably similar in that their journalists both prioritize the following categories in their top five roles: report things as they are, let people express their views, and provide information people need to make political decisions (Hanitzsch et al., 2017; Vos & Craft, 2016).

For journalists in the U.S., “91.4 percent said they had ‘complete’ or a ‘great deal’ of freedom in deciding what aspects of a story to emphasize” while only 67.5 percent of journalists in France said the same (Hanitzsch et al., 2017; Vos & Craft, 2016). This editorial freedom directly affects the extent to which a journalist frames a news story.

Framing Feminism

When applied to women’s movements, framing has the power to win or lose followers. Frames affect public support of movements, but conversely they can cause opposition from those who want to see the movement fail (Bronstein, 2005).

Both #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc were movements with feminist attributions, in which women felt empowered to come forth about the sexual abuse they had suffered at the hands of employers, co-workers, friends, spouses, partners and more.

The framing of women as feminists in movements has taken on many forms throughout the years. Feminist research addresses how a story containing sexism, such as gender-related myths, can affect bigger decisions and greater society. These frames “impact social policy decisions and reinforce commonsense assumptions that privilege men in the social hierarchy” (Hardin & Whiteside, 2010).

Several tropes about women as specifically feminists exist in news coverage. These can be relayed to different ways of framing women in the media, since they have been so heavily used in many other academic studies that follow print coverage of women’s movements. Feminists have been “othered” and labeled as “social deviants” (Van Zoonen, 1992; Ashley & Olson, 1998). They have also been framed as struggling to obtain their goals (Terkildsen and Schnell, 1997). Often, the subject of feminism isn’t reported on enough and coverage will address a woman’s appearance, trivializing her (Rhode, 1997).

Frames of demonization, personalization and trivialization, goals, victimization, agency and site of struggle function to package an image of a feminist. These six frames have been used in content analyses of women in electronic media and of newspaper articles of third wave feminism (Lind & Salo, 2002; Bronstein, 2005).