ABSTRACT
The framing concept brings an intuitively appealing and provocative openness, a bridging model that resists being pinned down to any one paradigm, a program of research made useful by its theoretical diversity (D’Angelo, 2002; Reese, 2007). My own defi nition of frames broadly captures this diversity and bridging quality: “organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world” (Reese, 2001, p. 11). This idea suggests that frames manifest themselves in a number of different sites and across a number of domains: policy, journalistic, and public. Other defi nitions have focused on the idea that in framing certain aspects of the world can be communicated “in such a way as to promote a particular problem defi nition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993, p. 52). I am especially interested in the “in such a way” aspect, the way in which frames accomplish these results, which is determined by the nature of the organizing principle.
