ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a conceptual framework for understanding the journalistic contribution to framing from within a cultural constructionist approach. In this conceptualization, framing devices and reasoning devices are presented as the building blocks of frames, and news values are perceived as their driving forces in the process of frame building. It is argued that, in the practice of news production, journalistic news values lead to cultural news frames through the implementation of news pegs and story angles. The challenge for research is to identify the conditions that determine the adherence to news pegs and the pre-determined features of story angles. To investigate the journalistic frame building process, we propose an ethnographic four-phase model in which multiple methods are interwoven: newsroom observations, reconstruction interviews, frame analyses of news products (which illustrate what is made salient), and production documents (which also reveal what is silenced). The framework and the methodology will be illustrated with a case study about the framing of science fraud by Belgian newspaper journalists.
