Gerald M. Kosicki

Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse

Abstract In the American political process, news discourse concerning public policy issues is carefully constructed. This occurs in part because both politicians and interest groups take an increasingly proactive approach to amplify their views of what an issue is about However, news media also play an active role in framing public policy issues. Thus, in this article, news discourse is conceived as a sociocognitive process involving all three players: sources, journalists, and audience members operating in the universe of shared culture and on the basis of socially defined roles. Framing analysis is presented as a constructivist approach to examine news discourse with the primary focus on conceptualizing news texts into empirically operationalizable dimensions—syntactical, script, thematic, and rhetorical structures—so that evidence of the news medias framing of issues in news texts may be gathered. This is considered an initial step toward analyzing the news discourse process as a whole. Finally, an ex...

Local Community Ties, Community-Boundedness, and Local Public Affairs Knowledge Gaps

This study focused on the roles that community integration and community-boundedness (the relevance of a topic for a specific community) play on knowledge gaps. Given the extensive evidence linking media exposure with community ties, the authors hypothesized that ties with the local community could potentially mitigate local public affairs knowledge gaps. They also examined if the relevance of a topic to a subgroup would lead to lower knowledge gaps. A survey of 661 residents of Franklin County, Ohio, showed that whereas community ties were unrelated to knowledge, community-boundedness could be an important determinant of knowledge gaps on local public affairs. Additional analysis of the data also suggests that length of association with the community could be a potentially important contingent condition in the amelioration of knowledge gaps. The authors argue that their findings extend traditional findings of knowledge gaps that apply to geographically defined communities to studying “communities without propinquity.”

Cognitive strategies for media use during a presidential campaign

This study investigates whether attention to political news and attention to debates during a presidential campaign are affected by audience members’ cognitive schemata concerning media and politics and the information‐processing strategies they claim to use when encountering the media. Data come from a telephone survey of a probability sample of 706 registered voters in a metropolitan area. Hierarchical regression using political and sociological controls provides support for the general hypothesis. Four sets of cognitive constructs are studied: images concerning how the news media work and why; campaign information‐processing strategies such as reading between the lines or reflecting on the news; schema‐based orientations toward or preference for particular types of campaign‐related information; and patterns of salience for each set of cognitive constructs. Some support is found for the hypothesis that audiences compensate for perceived shortcomings in the media by increased attention to the news and mo...

TalkShow Exposure as an Opinion Activity

By analyzing data from a national probability sample, this study shows that call-in talk shows on television and radio reach a significant segment of the mass audience. The audiences for these shows are more conservative in their self-reported ideological orientations. Exposure to these call-in talk shows is found to be an empirically distinct dimension of media exposure behavior. This dimension overlaps with exposure to other forms of news and public affairs information, and is also associated with certain modes of political participation, namely contacting elected officials and contributing to or being affiliated with political organiz ations for specific causes. This article argues that exposure to call-in talk shows is more than media exposure per se. It is also a type of opinion activity. Because of the participatory and interactive features, call-in talk shows constitute an important venue for viewers and listeners to be politically energized and to participate in the construction of public discours...

Personalized News Portals Filtering Systems and Increased News Exposure

In this study, we investigated the impact of personalized news web portals on selective exposure. Results from analyses of secondary survey data from national random samples of U.S. adults show a positive relationship between personalized news and increased exposure to offline news. Users of personalized news report viewing more sources and categories of news online compared with nonusers. Partisan users of personalized news do not report increased partisan news exposure. No difference in preferences for perspective sharing or challenging news sources is found between personalized news users and nonusers. The implications for future research on personalized information systems and selective exposure are discussed.

Buses and Ballots: The Role of Media Images in a Local Election

This study examines the role of media in a local election using media use and public perceptions of media and their interactions as key independent variables. Some support is found for the notion that media do not exert direct effects on behavioral outcomes, but rather this process depends on how people perceive the media they use in terms of their ties to special interests in the community and the interaction of this perception with media use.

Racial Differences in Evaluations of the Mass Media

Analysis of two national data sets reveals that African-Americans in general know less about how the mass media operate, see fewer outside influences on the media, see themselves as having less influence on the media and are less cynical about the media than are whites. African-Americans who have the most contact with the dominant white society do evaluate the media as being more biased, compared with those with less contact with white people. Blacks and whites alike judged the news media to be influenced by advertisers, big business, unions and to be influenced by the two major political parties. If many news media are part of large corporations, this fact has not gone unnoticed by audiences, fairly or not.

Cognitions and Attitudes about Community: Compensating for Media Images.

bIntuitively, it seems that people have ideas about how the news media operate and why, and it seems that these ideas affect what people get out of the news. These notions are studied here by capitalizing on two research programs. One has identified a core of ideas that individuals have about how the ncws media work.’ The other has investigated the relation of media use to the framework of thoughts and opinions people have about the community in which they live.2 People3 ideas about how the news media work are investigated by studying their effects upon that framework concerning community.

Finding Work and Getting Paid: Predictors of Success in the Mass Communications Job Market

This article focuses on the determinants of success in occupational entry for persons trained for work in mass communications. Two separate criteria are used to judge success in entry: actual employment and salary and benefits earned upon employment. Experiences in media organizations (internships or working on college media), specialization in any area of study, and grade point average (GPA) were all positively associated with finding a job. Prior experience with the employer was a positive predictor of salary, whereas a generalized job seeking strategy and being a woman were negative predictors of salary. Women, however, were more likely to have a job with a large number of benefits than were men.

How Way-Finding is Challenging Gatekeeping in the Digital Age

This paper re-evaluates the relevance of the gatekeeping framework in the twenty-first century, arguing that in an age of digital journalism the gatekeeping metaphor has begun to restrict our study of journalism. Reviewing current research and utilizing a variety of surveys, case studies and theoretical work, the paper proposes a new framework. It argues that rather than online journalism studies focusing on the packaging of a news product by a news source (gatekeeping), it should instead focus on the paths taken by news users to individual stories via search engines, gatewatchers and social media (way-finding). To support this, five key areas of change are investigated: the increased capacity for storing and publishing news; new tools for news creation; increased use of aggregators and gatewatchers; competition on a story-by-story basis; and immediate audience feedback.