ABSTRACT
Artists know that the frame placed around a painting can affect how viewers interpret and react to the painting itself. As a result, some artists take great care in how they present their work, choosing a frame that they hope will help audiences see the image in just the right way. Journalists-often subconsciously-engage in essentially the same process when they decide how to describe the political world. They choose images and words that have the power to influence how audiences interpret and evaluate issues and policies. The simplicity of this analogy belies the complexity of the process and effects of framing in the news, however. Framing in the field of communication has been characterized by equal degrees of conceptual obliqueness and operational inconsistency (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007). Part of this vagueness at different levels stems from the fact that framing researchers have often approached the theory very inductively and examined framing as a phenomenon without careful explication of the theoretical premises and their operational implications.
