ABSTRACT
Framing is a pervasive phenomenon in media discourse that foregrounds a particular aspect of reality while excluding other elements. Metaphors are rhetorical devices that trigger a framing. The cognitive linguistic approach provides a powerful descriptive framework for metaphor analysis. Journalists can use metaphorical framing to influence thoughts and beliefs and manipulate impressions and evaluations of an issue. Focusing on newspaper articles, which typically include alternating authorial accounts and quotations, one can compare journalists’ framing with that of non-journalists. A case study on the metaphorical framings of the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan from 2020 to 2021 revealed that there were significant diachronic changes in proportions between the three principal source frames (i.e., war, journey, and disaster), implying that the war and journey framings in authorial texts preceded the trends in quoted texts, which might be a sign of non-journalists’ unconscious acceptance of the conceptual framework provided by journalists. In this respect, metaphor-based framing strategies in media discourse can give rise to a trend of framing in public opinion and influence people’s perspectives on a social issue. Future research dealing with metaphors in media discourse will provide critical analyses of various social issues and new insights for qualitative and quantitative framing research on mind engineering.
