Framing the President: the Dominant Ideology – Comprehensive Repertoire of News Frames // Enquadrando o Presidente: a ideologia dominante – repertório compreensivo dos quadros midiáticos

Authors

  • Frederick Schiff University of Houston

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.9771/contemporanea.v9i1.4594

Keywords:

news frames, dominant ideology, President Bill Clinton

Abstract

The theory of a dominant ideology underlying the news remains unacceptable for the commercial press and undermines its legitimacy. For social constructionists, no description or categorization is neutral. If all reporting has a point of view and the news inherently evaluates and frames events, the heuristic task is to demonstrate the existence of a single inventory of repeatedly used and shared “stock phrases” that consistently interpret “objective” events. Our case study examines coverage of U.S. President Bill Clinton in his first two years. Despite the wide number of events occurring and the large number of articles reviewed (N=513), the Clinton presidency was consistently portrayed using a finite and relatively small number of frames. We provide preliminary evidence of an industry-wide inventory of frames used by news workers over time and in a range of newsroom settings.

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Author Biography

Frederick Schiff, University of Houston

Frederick Schiff teaches news writing, media sociology and critical cultural studies at the University of Houston, where he is an associate professor in the Valenti School of Communication. He earned his B.A. at Reed College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political sociology at UCLA. Schiff does research on news content, media corporations and ideological conflict. He worked as a reporter and foreign correspondent for 10 years in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. Dr. Schiff won a major federal grant from the National Science Foundation to study daily newspapers in more than 120 cities. He is writing a book to evaluate the merits of all the competing theories of news bias, agenda setting and censorship, based on the first nationally representative sample of the entire U.S. newspaper industry. Most recently, Schiff won a Fulbright Fellowship to teach and do research at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. The comparative project is studying the semi-secret links between the upper classes, oligopoly corporations, the media and plutocratic politics in metropolitan regions. Schiff is the director of the Research Institute for Metro-Urban Communication (RIM-Com). His research has been published in leading scholarly journals.

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Published

2011-05-31

How to Cite

Schiff, F. (2011). Framing the President: the Dominant Ideology – Comprehensive Repertoire of News Frames // Enquadrando o Presidente: a ideologia dominante – repertório compreensivo dos quadros midiáticos. Contemporanea, 9(1), 22–55. https://doi.org/10.9771/contemporanea.v9i1.4594

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 1 (2011): Dossiê A comunicação na passagem dos séculos

Section

New Section Title Here

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