Amber E. Boydstun

The Media Frames Corpus: Annotations of Frames Across Issues

We describe the first version of the Media Frames Corpus: several thousand news articles on three policy issues, annotated in terms of media framing. We motivate framing as a phenomenon of study for computational linguistics and describe our annotation process.

Two Faces of Media Attention: Media Storm Versus Non-Storm Coverage

A media storm is a sudden surge in news coverage of an item, producing high attention for a sustained period. Our study represents the first multi-issue, quantitative analysis of storm behavior. We build a theory of the mechanisms that drive media storms and why the “anatomy” of media storms differs from that of non-storm coverage. Specifically, media storm coverage should change less explosively over time, but be more sharply skewed across issues, compared to non-storm coverage. We offer a new method of operationalizing media storms and apply our operationalization to U.S. and Belgian news. Even in these two very different cases, we find a common empirical storm anatomy with properties that differ from those of non-storm coverage in the predicted fashion. We illustrate the effects of media storms on the public through discussion of four key examples, showing that online search behavior responds strongly to media storms.

Sticky prospects: Loss frames are cognitively stickier than gain frames

Research across numerous domains has highlighted the current--and presumably temporary--effects of frames on preference and behavior. Yet people often encounter information that has been framed in different ways across contexts, and there are reasons to predict that certain frames, once encountered, might tend to stick in the mind and resist subsequent reframing. We propose that loss frames are stickier than gain frames in their ability to shape peoples thinking. Specifically, we suggest that the effect of a loss frame may linger longer than that of a gain frame in the face of reframing and that this asymmetry may arise because it is more difficult to convert a loss-framed concept into a gain-framed concept than vice versa. Supporting this notion, loss-to-gain (vs. gain-to-loss) reframing had a muted impact on both risk preferences (Study 1) and evaluation (Study 2). Moreover, participants took longer to solve a math problem that required reconceptualizing losses as gains than vice versa (Studies 3-5), and reframing changed gain-based conceptualizations but not loss-based ones (Study 6). We discuss implications for understanding a key process underlying negativity bias, as well as how sequential frames might impact political behavior and economic recovery.

What We Should Really Be Asking About Media Attention to Trump

In her piece for the November 2016 issue of The Forum, “How the News Media Helped to Nominate Trump,” Julia Azari contends that the media played a crucial coordination function for Donald Trump’s rise. In the absence of a coherent Republican party response to the Trump insurgency, Trump’s campaign messages were widely disseminated despite his campaign’s lack of expertise and organizational strength. Indeed, Azari argues, 2016 demonstrates that “the media’s main institutional role comes from repeating, rather than challenging, [campaign] promises, frameworks and narratives.” Other research from the 2016 campaign seasonwould seem to agree that Trump infiltrated the media system. As Wells and colleagues illustrate in their November Forum piece, “How Trump Drove Coverage to the Nomination,” Trump appeared to have played the media expertly, with a combination of staged and unscheduled appearances and a vigorous social media presence. Specifically, their findings point to Trump’s success in running a hybrid media campaign (Chadwick, 2013)—driving news coverage through conventional (public relations) tactics and through newer/less conventional methods (Twitter). The authors conclude their examination of Trump’s media presence with a compelling provocation: “Journalists should reflect on what prompts their attention to Trump as we head into the general election and beyond” (p. 675). We join the conversation by positing, first, that journalists and political communication scholars alike are, in fact, fairly cognizant of what prompts attention to Trump. Theories from news values to evolutionary biology support the idea that Trump’s entertaining, sensational, inflammatory words and actions make him the kind of phenomenon we just can’t look away from. Second, we believe even more important is a follow-up question, the answer to which could benefit scholarship and democracy alike: How—if at all—has mainstream media coverage of Trump really mattered?

Women Also Know Stuff: Meta-Level Mentoring to Battle Gender Bias in Political Science

Women know stuff. Yet, all too often, they are underrepresented in political science meetings, syllabi, and editorial boards. To counter the implicit bias that leads to women’s underrepresentation, to ensure that women’s expertise is included and shared, and to improve the visibility of women in political science, in February 2016 we launched the “Women Also Know Stuff” initiative, which features a crowd-sourced website and an active Twitter feed. In this article, we share the origins of our project, the effect we are already having on media utilization of women experts, and plans for how to expand that success within the discipline of political science. We also share our personal reflections on the project.

Agenda Control in the 2008 Presidential Debates

Research indicates that, when engaging their opponents, strategic candidates will draw (and redraw) lines of conflict, pulling attention to their advantaged topics. But do these expectations hold up in debates, where candidates are at the mercy of those asking the questions? And do strategic debate behaviors matter? This study draws on past literature to hypothesize the specific types of agenda-control behaviors we should see in debates. These hypotheses are tested in the 2008 presidential debates, using quantitative content analysis to examine candidate agenda setting, issue framing, and tone. The results show that both Obama and McCain used all three means of agenda control to continually displace the line of conflict in their favor.  These findings offer empirical support for theories of strategic agenda control and heighten our understanding of agenda setting, framing, and tone as agenda-control mechanisms.  Additionally, media and public opinion data suggest these debate agenda-control behaviors had real effects during the 2008 election.

Analyzing Framing through the Casts of Characters in the News

We present an unsupervised model for the discovery and clustering of latent “personas” (characterizations of entities). Our model simultaneously clusters documents featuring similar collections of personas. We evaluate this model on a collection of news articles about immigration, showing that personas help predict the coarse-grained framing annotations in the Media Frames Corpus. We also introduce automated model selection as a fair and robust form of feature evaluation.

A Negativity Bias in Reframing Shapes Political Preferences Even in Partisan Contexts

Humans evolved to attend to valence and group membership when learning about their environment. The political domain offers a unique opportunity to study the simultaneous influence of these two broad, domain-general features of human experience. We examined whether the pervasive tendency for negatively valenced frames to “stick” in the mind applies to both intergroup and intragroup political contexts. In a preregistered experiment, we tested the effects of negative-to-positive (vs. positive-to-negative) reframing on people’s candidate preferences, first in the absence of party cue information and then in two partisan contexts: an intergroup context (analogous to a U.S. general election between opposing political parties) and an intragroup context (analogous to a U.S. primary election between candidates of the same party). We observed a persistent negativity bias in reframing effects, even in the presence of party cues. The results pave the way for future research at the intersection of psychology and political science.

The Nonlinear Effect of Information on Political Attention: Media Storms and U.S. Congressional Hearings

Agenda-setting scholars have claimed that the typical punctuated pattern of governmental attention is a consequence of disproportionate information processing. Yet these claims remain unsubstantiated. We tackle this challenge by considering mass media coverage as a source of information for political actors and by examining the relationship between preceding media information and subsequent governmental attention. Employing data capturing U.S. media attention and congressional hearings (1996–2006), we find that the effects of media attention on congressional attention are conditioned by the presence of “media storms”—sudden and large surges in media attention to a given topic. A one-story increase in media attention has a greater effect on congressional attention in the context of a media storm, since media storms surpass a key threshold for catching policymakers’ attention. We find evidence that the influence of media attention on political attention is nonlinear; agenda-setting operates differently when the media are in storm mode.

In the wake of a terrorist attack, do Americans’ attitudes toward Muslims decline?

When a terrorist attack occurs, a natural response may be increased public concern about terrorism. But when a self-described Muslim perpetrates a terrorist attack, do negative attitudes toward Muslims also increase? If so, is this effect conditional on the nature of people’s past personal experiences with Muslims? We present natural experiment data based on a 2015 web-based survey of 2105 non-Muslims in the US, a survey that happened to span the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November and San Bernardino on 2 December. We thus test Americans’ feelings toward Muslims immediately before and after both an international and a domestic terrorist attack. We find that, although the attacks significantly affected Americans’ concerns about radicalism both in the US and abroad, they did not negatively affect Americans’ thermometer feelings toward Muslims in the aggregate—a null finding conditioned only slightly by the nature of past personal experiences with Muslims.