ABSTRACT
News items rarely stand by themselves. In order to grasp their meaning, news audiences need to interpret the news against a background of rich contextual knowledge, much of which is derived from previous news discourse. Accordingly, news frames can be understood as intertextual leads that guide audiences to contextualize events in specific ways, referring selectively to familiar entities and ideas and embedding present news items within the context of ongoing news stories, debates, and issues. In this chapter, I propose a semantic network approach to news framing analysis that acknowledges the many ways in which news frames transgress the boundaries of single news items, spanning an intertextual network. I show how a corpus of prior news can be used to go beyond the manifest news content and explicate the additional knowledge imported by intertextual framing devices. By bringing together textual, cultural, and psychological perspectives upon framing, I develop strategies for determining how audiences complete the missing information needed for constructing meaningful news frames, and discuss avenues for the treatment of subjectivity in framing research.
