Frame diversity and citizen competence: Towards a critical approach to news quality

This article identifies two basic models of citizen competence ( the ignorant citizen and the rational citizen) in which normative theories of journalism and standards of news quality are grounded. I propose the interpreting citizen as an alternative view of citizen competence. According to this model, the availability of diverse interpretive frames in the public realm, particularly in the news media, is an important precondition for enhancing citizen competence. Given flaws in existing standards for evaluating journalism quality, the news media should be judged in terms of their performance in presenting diverse interpretive frames, rather than in terms of informational goals.