IMPLICATIONS: EFFECT AS PROCESS

IMPLICATIONS: EFFECT AS PROCESS

Since individuals and groups may reject the preferred reading embedded in a news story, why is it important to understand the process of making news? The “constructionist” approach to news offered by Gamson and his associates (Gamson and Lasch, 1983; Gamson and Modigliani, 1987; 1989) suggests the reason is grounded in the

symbolic condensation of frames inherent in media discourse. 5 As Gamson and Modigliani (1989:3) explain,

media discourse can be conceived of as a set of interpretive packages that give meaning to an issue. A package has an internal structure. At its core is a central organizing idea, or frame, for making sense of relevant events, suggesting what is at issue…. This frame typically implies a range of positions, rather than any single one, allowing for a degree of controversy among those who share a common frame.

The frames or “condensing symbols” of news packages are a form of “shorthand, making it possible to display the package as a whole with

a deft metaphor, catchphrase, or other symbolic device” (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989:3). They may resound with cultural themes, as does the frame that nuclear energy involves a “bargain with the devil.” People who have read an editorial identifying nuclear energy as a devil’s bargain may debate the terms under which such a bargain should be made. But whether they agree with the editorial or contest it, they are reacting to the embedded meaning of the news story (the frame of “devil’s bargain”).

As do other discourses, indeed as does culture itself, frames mutate as structural conditions change. (“Devil’s bargain” is a relatively recent frame.) Thus the frames themselves constitute “contested terrain” (Hall, 1979); proponents of each frame try to establish their way of organizing information about nuclear power as the way to debate issues. As news sources, these proponents deliver their frames as organizing ideas for stories about nuclear power.

Journalists need not passively accept these frames. Reporters and editors engage in an active process. They both make and consume their society’s culture. I construe culture “as a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems” (Swidler,

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1986:273; also van Dijk, this volume). Reporters and editors necessarily use some of the same tools as their readers and viewers. The idea of nuclear power as a bargain with the devil draws upon Christian cosmology and is meaningful to residents of even the most secularized Western nations. Similarly, the frame of nuclear power as progress encodes twentieth-century adaptations of the nineteenth- century faith that humanity marches toward a better world. By (re)producing symbols familiar to their audience, reporters and editors proclaim the “preferred reading” of a text.

Members of the audience for news may reject that preferred reading. It may not resonate with the conditions of their own lives, including personal concerns set by the structural conditions influencing their mundane affairs. Nonetheless, even the rejection of a preferred reading is a response to the frame promulgated by the media, as seen in the following examples about illegal drugs.

Stories about the horrors of illegal drug-use frequently employ the frame that drugs destroy lives (see Reinarman and Levine, 1989, and literature reviewed therein). This frame may prompt some to use drugs even as it inhibits others. Consider two possibilities. First, the preferred reading may be antithetical to the “cognitive schema” of a news consumer (Graber, 1984). The frame may contradict the news consumer’s experience; she or he may know individuals whose lives have not been destroyed by illegal drugs or, with eternal optimism, may view herself or himself as the exception to the rule. Second, the preferred reading may produce a response antithetical to that intended by “news promoters” (Molotch and Lester, 1974) and media workers. Media stories—even televised anti-drug public service announcements—often note that some illegal drugs provide a powerful high. Recent research indicates that some news consumers yearn to experience that “orgasmic high” and therefore seek out the condemned drugs (Reinarman and Levine, 1989).

Finally, the process of making news embeds the effect of news in yet another way. Even stories as dramatic as coverage of Watergate, including the Senate hearings about impeaching President Nixon, had their greatest impact on politicians, many of whom used these accounts as indicators of public opinion (Lang and Lang, 1983). Ultimately, then, the process of transforming occurrences into news stories feeds on itself; it resembles the hermeneutic circle. Official interpretations set the news frames inherent in packaged stories; these packages are

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in turn interpreted by officials, who use them as guides to action. Interpretation spawns interpretation; news makes news.

As Raymond Williams explained in Marxism and Literature (1977),

a cultural hegemony spawns the terms of its own rejection. Williams was discussing early Marxist reactions to capitalists’ criticism of their theory and politics, but his insight also applies to news. Qualitative researchers have demonstrated that the process of making news encodes both cultural understandings and official sources’ frames in news packages. Thus, news consumers are pulled into the frames vital to the news process. Even when news consumers use interpretive strategies that reject specific news frames, they react to the discourse of their culture. Like reporters and editors, they participate in the creation of news as a cultural response to structural conditions.