A Two-Tiered Method for Identifying Trends in Media Framing of Policy Issues: The Case of the War on Terror

Research on media framing of policy issues has flourished. Yet the varied approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing issue frames that make this literature rich also hinder its advancement. Here, we document the benefits of a two-tiered method: the first level accounts for issue-specific frames, while the second level tracks frames that generalize across issues. For this study, we draw on generalizable frames from prospect theory (loss vs. gain frames) and social identity theory (self-referential vs. other-referential frames). We discuss the theoretical merits of a two-tiered approach, arguing that it should yield compound insights greater than the sum of its parts. Applying this method to newspaper coverage of the war on terror, we find a strong trend at the generalizable level: media framing of the war shifted over time from a predominant use of fear (self-referential loss) frames to an increasing use of charity (other-referential gain) frames. Our approach further reveals that the fear frames used in the lead-up to the Iraq War were not driven by issue-specific frames related to terrorism or weapons of mass destruction as we might have thought, but rather by frames related to the anticipated threats to U.S. troops. This study sharpens our understanding of how framing of the war evolved, but more broadly it suggests that a two-tiered approach could be applied both within and across policy issues to advance our understanding of the framing process.