ABSTRACT
Framing is a rapidly growing area of study in communication research. Framing analyses noticeably populate our professional conferences, and hardly an issue of a communication journal is published today without a framing study. Much framing research focuses on ways that politicians, issue advocates, and stakeholders use journalists and other news professionals to communicate their preferred meanings of events and issues. The word use is important. Its dual meaning-use as a conduit of information and use as a manipulated channel for information dissemination-captures the essence of framing: sources frame topics to make information interesting and palatable to journalists, whom they need to communicate information to wider publics, and journalists cannot not frame topics because they need sources’ frames to make news, inevitably adding or even superimposing their own frames in the process (see Gamson & Modigliani, 1989; Kuypers, 2006).
