Thinking inside the frame: A framing analysis of the humanities in Danish print news media

1. Introduction

Studies of research-based knowledge in society tend to turn a blind eye to the humanities, probably due to an assumption that humanities’ knowledge production qualifies neither as scientific nor as socially relevant. This situation reflects a positioning of the sciences and humanities as strongly different cultures (Snow, 1959/1993), territories, and tribes (Beecher, 1989) deeply rooted in certain languages. However, although some languages frame the humanities as a distinctly unscientific form of knowledge production, others categorize both forms as different ways of systematic and scientific knowledge production: different objects, different epistemologies, different methodologies, and different forms of communication and argument, but shared orientation in producing valid expert knowledge of the world (Bod, 2013; Sala, 2013; Trowler, 2012). In fact, the humanities come in very different forms—as do the natural and social sciences. Sometimes they have as much in common across disciplines than within. The point here is not to argue one way or the other about whether the humanities qualify as a kind of scientific knowledge production or whether humanities knowledge production belong to another category entirely—but to point out that these disciplinary categories are permeable, variable, and situational. Second, as a publicly supported type of advanced knowledge production, the humanities deserve to be as much on the research agenda as the natural and social sciences are. Public understanding of the humanities seems to be an underdeveloped area of research within the public understanding of science agenda.

The humanities also appear to be considered of less social importance by policymakers since funding has been continuously downscaled for decades without the general public contesting this trend. The downsizing of the humanities education and research is a worldwide phenomenon as a result of governmental perception of humanities as unproductive in contrast to the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. A 2013 analysis of international trends in the funding of arts and humanities concludes this decline to be a clear trend particularly since 2009. In fact, funding almost halved between 2010 and 2011 (Halevi and Bar-Ilan, 2013). Humanities education is under pressure as well. In September 2015, the education minister of Japan instructed the universities of Japan to close or scale back humanities and social science education to “serve areas that better meets society’s needs” (Grove, 2015). In Denmark, similar policies have been executed leading to severe cuts and closing of several humanities study programs. While cutting the humanities, several countries have at the same time strengthened STEM research and education or even reallocated funds in that direction. While the United Kingdom in 2010 cut funding to arts and humanities by 40%, STEM subjects were left untouched (Morgan, 2010).

How come the humanities seemingly are so easy to discard? Although education in the humanities in recent decades has progressed toward including social context and relevance (Wilder, 2012), individual and social relevance may be more opaque to people outside the humanities themselves. Furthermore, humanities have until the last decade or two been quite securely set within the university system and have only recently been forced actively to secure external financing. Consequently, it seems that humanities have only just begun to realize the need for explicitly articulating social relevance of their research. Pitman and Berman (2009) find in a study of research applications that only a small portion of humanities applicants explicitly identified social or economic benefits of their research. When prospected benefits were included, they were primarily identified as cultural (in the form of knowing more about a cultural phenomenon). So neither public nor policymakers may in fact have very little access to what social benefits exactly humanities research has to offer.

Since the majority of the general public does not have extended personal experience with humanities themselves beyond secondary education, they are increasingly dependent on the mass media in understanding what humanities research actually might be and what kind of value humanities knowledge might contribute to society in general and everyday lives in particular. The same probably goes for many policymakers as well. Weiss and Singer (1988) argue, “Although they [policy-makers] may have their own research- and analysis staff, and sit at the nodes of specialized communication networks, often it is not until the media carry a story about social science that become aware of it” (p. 1).

The remainder of this article sets out to discuss what kind of understanding of the humanities the general reader may be able to form from mass media coverage by presenting a study of how the concept and term of the humanities are framed in Danish—and can be said to be left out of the frame.

2. The representation of humanities in print news media

Empirical studies on the humanities in mass media are far and few between. This gap has not gone unnoticed, though. Schafer (2012) explicitly points out the scarcity of studies of the social sciences and humanities in the media and is only able to identify two (Brewer and Sigelman, 2002; Weiss and Singer, 1988). Schafer calls for more studies arguing a social relevance of the topics of the non-natural science disciplines as well as a need to be able to hold these sciences publicly accountable too.

One of the few and more recent studies of science journalism in print news media actually including the humanities finds that the amount of social and humanities research in German newspapers differs according to how science journalism is defined (Summ and Volpers, 2016). In their study of the distribution of the sciences in print news media, they compare the results of two analyses of the same data set. They find that when science journalism is defined simply as journalism within newspaper science sections, the humanities and social sciences are represented by about one-third of the material. In comparison, when science journalism is defined more broadly as journalism on science and expertise anywhere in the newspaper, humanities and social sciences are represented in 57% of the material. These results match the results of studies of social sciences in Dutch print media, where social sciences dominate science media coverage by being represented in 56% of the material (Hijmans et al., 2003).

According to these studies, the humanities and social sciences are quite well-represented in the media. However, this conclusion may be skewed. Other studies have found that the social sciences in particular have increased in print media representation (Albæk et al., 2003; Cassidy, 2014). This increase is generally linked to a change in journalistic science coverage from primarily communicating science results (science-as-popularization) to providing expert comments in general news production (science-as-news) triggered by general news events than by scientific news (Summ and Volpers, 2016; Vestergaard and Nielsen, 2015). These days, scientists are more often than not positioned as commentators explaining social events rather than popularizing or informing on research and results. Also, social scientists are primarily used to comment on social phenomena in general rather than on aspects of their own specific field of expertise (Arnoldi, 2005; Vestergaard and Nielsen, 2015; Wien, 2014). As a result, social scientists may be well-represented in the news sections, but their own research is not represented along with them—a situation leading Angela Cassidy (2014) to conclude that “The social sciences and humanities research appears to be everywhere and nowhere in public communication” (p. 193).

However, the humanities are probably not part of this trend as much as the social sciences are. When Schafer (2012) argues the underrepresentation of humanities in science journalism studies, the two studies he refers to as the exception to the rule involve the social sciences. Similarly, Summ and Volpers refer to Cassidy (2014) as an example of a study of humanities and humanities in the media, while Cassidy’s article almost exclusively focuses on the social sciences. It seems as though the humanities and social sciences are categorized as one simply by virtue of them being not natural science. The humanities and social sciences may share the characteristic of being distinct from the natural sciences, but they are generally radically different in preferred methods, objects of interest, and epistemology. The fact that social sciences share as much overlap with the natural and technical sciences as with the humanities is ignored. Studies actually differentiating between the two disciplines demonstrate significant differences in media representation. Hijmans et al. (2003) defined the social sciences as sociology, psychology, policy sciences, economy, and communication sciences and the humanities as literature, history, philosophy, theology, and law. They found the social sciences dominating news coverage by 56%, while the humanities were represented in 14% of the material. A Danish study (Arnoldi, 2005) found that while the social scientists were represented as experts in 10% of the print media and 15% of televised news, humanities researchers were represented in less than 3% in both media forms. However, direct comparison of quantitative data is often problematic (Hijmans et al., for instance, count law as a humanistic discipline, while Arnoldi probably would not), and my point in highlighting them here is simply to illustrate significant variation in news coverage of the two disciplines. It seems as though social science expertise appear to be more useful to journalists in the current science-as-news paradigm, while humanities appear to be less so. Perhaps this is due to a lack of journalistic need for detailed and critical humanist analysis—or perhaps journalists simply do not know what humanist scholars may be good for.

3. Humanities? What humanities?

While the general public might not always understand the concept of science correctly, most people are able to conjure up some kind of mental image of what it may be and what scientists may do. This may not be the case for the humanities at all. The philosopher Barry C. Smith argues, for instance, in an introduction to a British festival of the humanities, that the term “humanities” itself was seen as a barrier in promoting the festival because the audience would not be able to make adequate sense of it. “Why not a humanities festival,” he asks himself in the festival blog, and answers, “Well, there is the issue of that word, humanities. So for that reason, we have come up with the title Being Human […]” (Smith, 2014). A similar concern about the term itself is illustrated in a not-quite-recent though probably still applicable Danish study on comprehension of the language of public administration. The study found that only 9% of the respondents were able to explain what the term “humanities” might mean. The remaining respondents either refrained from answering or gave a wrong answer—in particular confusing the term with the term “humanitarism” as something to do with presenting opinions, doing good or—more specifically—on being soft on social and political issues (Eriksen and Møller, 1990). In Danish, the term ’humanist’ can be used in two senses. The more widespread use of the term represents a person with general secular ethical world view. However, the term can also be used to represent a scholar or researcher of the discipline of the humanities. In this paper, the term is applied in the latter sense unless otherwise stated.

Perhaps somewhat related to the common association of the humanities with the formation and communication of opinions and sentiments, the humanities face the problem of not necessarily being associated with producing research at all. The general public is not disregarding the value of humanistic research as such, but they may not know exactly what it may be and how it contributes. To give an example, The American Psychology Association did, in 2012, a public opinion study on public perception of psychology and found that most people associated psychology with the profession of treating mental illness but rarely mentioned research on the mind, brain, and behavior as something psychologists might do. Respondents did not consider the study of human behavior as socially irrelevant, but they simply did not associate this type of research and knowledge production with something produced by psychologists (Breckler, 2012). Psychology is one of the better-established academic brands, so less profession-oriented humanistic disciplines face this problem even stronger.

As mentioned in the “Introduction” section, academic humanities also face political and financial disregard. The financial devaluation of the humanities is accompanied by the increasing implementation of a market-oriented or contractual-oriented rationale in research funding. Within this rationale, the dynamics of the market is idealized, forcing universities and other knowledge-producing and cultural institutions to function in the manner of private sector businesses evaluated through cost–benefit criteria and the production of economic profit. As a result, academics are to an increasing degree expected to produce economic impact as well. Since the humanities in general do not produce this kind of impact, they are politically positioned as an expendable luxury (Belfiore, 2013; Olmos-Penuela et al., 2014; Olmos-Penuela et al., 2015). Interestingly, although the natural sciences often fail to produce such short-term impact as well, they are generally not subject to the same political siege (Benneworth, 2015). As a result, the humanities find themselves in the midst of a public and political image crisis facing a need to actively demonstrate social outcome. This is a challenge for many humanist scholars. In contrast, humanist scholars argue that humanities knowledge and value need to be weighed on a different scale (Benneworth, 2015; O’Brien, 2015).

Although explanations of the current status of the humanities are manifold, the above-mentioned articles debating the situation of the humanities agree on one thing. The way out is for humanist researchers to publish or be damned, and for the humanities to produce coherent and compelling narratives telling the public what exactly the humanities do, why they do what they do, and how society is better because of that (Bate, 2011; Belfiore, 2015; Benneworth, 2015; Hazelkorn, 2015; Nussbaum, 2010; O’Brien, 2015; Olmos-Penuela et al., 2014; Small, 2013). However, clear and compelling analytical narratives reframing the humanities and documenting social outcome seem to be scarce and difficult to actually produce. For one thing, the economic discourse has proven difficult to escape. The neoliberalist discourse has, Holborow (2012) argues, colonialized all public discourse to a degree that makes any considerations of alternative rationale unthinkable and unspeakable. It is a “rhetoric of no alternatives” (Belfiore, 2015), displacing and blurring any articulation of essentially non-market perspectives. Other logics and words are needed, it is argued, but they are difficult to find room for (Butler, 2014). Humanist scholars are generally not known for poor language control and creativity, but they may need empirical research and analysis to back up the rhetoric—perhaps because this is not the type of research humanists generally do or are trained to do. However, social impact on society can in fact be studied empirically—such as the study of Rudd (2015) empirically demonstrating a connection between knowledge of the humanities and community engagement in Canada. While most scholars advocate the publish-or-be-damned-strategy, other scholars do find this strategy naïve, since policymakers tend not to listen anyway (Collini, 2012).

The debates on humanities tend to rely more on anecdotal evidence and theory than on empirical studies. The general public is dependent on media representation in understanding the content, scope, and social relevance of the humanities, but we have no empirical studies of how the humanities are conceptualized in the media at all. Thus, the remainder of this article sets out to present a study of how the notion of humanities is represented in Danish print media by studying the framing of the concept and the term “humanities.”

4. Material

The term “humanities” refers to academic inquiry into the knowledge fields of language, arts, aesthetics, history, and philosophy. This particular term has always been used in organizational classification of university faculties and departments, and in Denmark no university is without a humanities faculty. Furthermore, the term is used to allocate as well as to deprive funding and political support to research and education. In recent years, political support for the humanities seems to have dwindled in favor of the STEM sciences without significant public debate or outcry. Reasons for such a lack of debate are complex and manifold, but something at least might hinge on the fact that it is generally not all that clear, what the concept of humanities actually stands for. Consequently, the study of this article analyzes how the humanities are framed in print news media: Which frames are actually available to the general public, and which elements are ignored? Or, in other words, if the general public only had print media news as source in understanding what the humanities might be and do, what would they in fact be able to know?

Contemporary research in media texts has relied heavily on framing analysis (Bryant and Miron, 2004; Van Zoonen and Vliegenthart, 2011). The concept of framing was originally used by Goffman (1986 [1974]) to conceptualize everyday processes of categorizing experiences, ideas, and beliefs into loosely structured social frameworks. As such, these frameworks equally mirror and mold shared understandings of the world by a process of selection, de-selection, and emphasis of relevant and irrelevant traits to form coherent worldviews.

Framing theory has been criticized as being somewhat vaguely defined. Frames can be defined as cultural categories, cognitive processes, textual and discursive structures, and/or readers’ reception and sense-making—and the general principle of selection and emphasis is shared by all. Through processes of selection and emphasis, certain aspects or words associated with the phenomenon are highlighted as central and salient, while others are suppressed or ignored. In other worlds, frames can be said to mold “the kaleidoscope of the many realities of the social world” into culturally comprehensible forms. Thus, frames represent an organized and coherent understanding of a given phenomena which readers may use to make sense of the phenomenon in question in a certain way. As a consequence, the theory of framing posits framing not just as a representation of a certain perspective of the world but also as actively influencing perceptions of world. In media studies, framing is more specifically used to identify discursive representations of traits into so-called interpretive packages (Benford and Snow, 2000; D’Angelo, 2002; De Vreese, 2005; Entman, 1993; Entman and Rojecki, 1993; Gamson and Modigliani, 1989; Nelson et al., 1997; Scheufele, 1999). This study primarily takes departure in the conceptualization of framing put forward by Entman for two reasons: His method of inquiry fits media texts and has become a stepping stone toward a more valid technique of analysis (more detail in the section “Analysis and results”).

To uncover the frames of the concept humanities explicitly linked to the term “humanities,” the data material was constructed around this term. The data material was constructed via a search of the Danish database Infomedia (an almost complete database of Danish national and regional news production) for articles explicitly applying the term “humanities” or synonyms and derivatives thereof during the final quarter of 2012. The criteria for articles of the data material were the explicit reference to the term humanities (in Danish: humaniora), the synonym human sciences (in Danish: humanvidenskab), of something being humanistic (in Danish: humanistisk), and of someone being a humanist (in Danish: at være en humanist). Varieties in the meaning and usage of the term ‘humanities’.

This is why a few words on this method of data construction may be in order here since this particular method excludes certain kinds of data as well. For one thing, this method does not produce a complete representation of humanities scholarship in print news media. Not all humanities content is published in the name of the humanities, in fact most humanities research probably is not. The term “humanities” is a macro-concept, and most researchers identify themselves primarily as linguists, historians, or literature professors—just as scholars of the natural sciences primarily identify themselves as biologists, physicists, or geologists. These hyponyms of the term “humanities” would be necessary in a study of the representation of actual research, while this study is dependent on the interpretation of the scholarly activities explicitly linked to the actual category and term of “humanities.” Apart from the term “humanities” itself, the term “human science” is used as a synonym for the knowledge production in and study of language, arts, aesthetics, history, and philosophy. The term “human science” is not used in any formal organizational nor administrative capacity, but otherwise the two terms are synonyms in the sense that they share etymology and both represent an academic knowledge-producing practice. It can be argued, however, that the term “human science” explicitly highlights an affiliation with research and science. It has been argued that “human sciences” historically cover slightly more interdisciplinary cluster of sub-disciplines than the humanities apparently does (Smith, 1997). In this data set, however, the term “human science” (“humanvidenskab”) surfaced three times and it appeared somewhat nondescriptly as a synonym for the humanities and not as a special hybrid.

In contrast, the adjective form—“humanist”—appeared in two different homonymic senses, meaning that the same expression can take on two different meanings. Here, the adjective “humanistic” or “humanist” might refer to the word “humanities” as much as “humanism.” Whether and how modern humanities are actually related to humanism has been widely debated, so for present purposes suffice to say that while “humanism” denotes a general worldview emphasizing respect for human beings and favoring reason over religion, “the humanities” refer more specifically to the academic and systematic knowledge production of certain disciplines. Nevertheless, the risk of confusion is high, and in this data set, the majority applications of the adjective form referred to humanism as a worldview and had to be manually removed (see Table 1). The initial search produced a total of 263 newspaper articles of various genres, of which 176 were deselected because their application of the adjective humanistic/humanist referred to humanism and not the humanities. Overall, 67% of the articles referred to humanism as a worldview, and they were consequently eliminated from the data material.

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Table 1.

Representation of ‘the humanities’ in the data material.

Humanities as an individual and personal worldview (67%)	Humanities as academic knowledge production(33%)
Humanities = worldview	Humanities = education	Humanities = academic research	The rest (Unspecified activities taking place in universities in general)
176 articles (ca. 67%)	50 articles (ca. 19%)	28 articles (ca. 11%)	9 articles (ca. 3%)

Overall, the data material consisted of 87 articles (see Table 1). Whereas the phrase “the human sciences” appeared three times in the material, “the humanities” appeared in this form 52 times which on average amounts to 18.6 times per month. The average count for the entire year is 26.7, so this count is somewhat below average (a total of 310 counts for the humanities and 11 for the human sciences). Looking back on the preceding decade, the number of articles referring explicitly to the humanities by this name almost doubled from 172 articles in 2002 (compared to 86 in 1992) to 310 in 2012. In comparison, the concept of “the natural sciences” is significantly more popular in the print media as it appeared in 512 articles. Also, while “the humanities” hit the headlines of 137 articles during the decade, the term “natural sciences” was applied in the headlines more than twice as many times (283 times). The concept “humanities” generally takes a background-position in the print news stream. Of the 87 articles, 10 articles position the humanities as the main story. Consequently, the majority of humanities references appear in articles in which humanities is treated as a comment regarding another theme and story.

5. Analysis and results

A frame can be defined as a cultural, a sociological, a cognitive, a communicative, or a linguistic phenomenon. All these different materializations of a frame, however, perform similar framing processes of selection and salience. In this article, the phenomenon of framing is best described as a totality of all these forms, but for present purposes only communicative aspects are studied. Framing analysis has also been criticized for elusiveness when it comes to operationalization of analytical coding practices (Davies et al., 2011; Kohring and Matthes, 2002; Matthes and Kohring, 2008).

Matthes and Kohring (2008) argue that coding for entire frames may result in biased analyses. The analyst might inadvertently be more prone to recognizing and acknowledging frames consistent with his or her presuppositions, thus potentially confirming rather than analyzing the theoretical assumptions and even blinding her to alternative frames. Matthes and Kohring draw on Entman’s (1993) definition of a frame as consisting of several predefined frame elements. They use the term “cluster analysis” to describe a technique in which the analyst studies the texts for specific systematic patterns of frame elements within and across texts. The frame itself is defined as the specific patterns or clusters of frame elements. Matthes and Kohring suggest a two-stage framing analysis in which the material initially is coded for predefined frame elements and then analyzed for co-occurrences of frame elements. In this way, they argue, complete frames do not simply emerge from the texts but are systematically investigated and probed by the analyst. Some frame elements are clustered together, and the patterns of these clustered frame elements may be said to form a frame (Kohring and Matthes, 2002, 2009; Matthes and Kohring, 2008).

These predefined frame elements are determined by function rather than content. In this respect, Matthes and Kohring again rely on Entman (1993) in which a frame is defined as the promotion of a particular perspective on a given phenomenon or concept by emphasizing a specific definition of the problem in relation to the phenomenon, a causal interpretation, a moral evaluation, and a preferred resolution of the problem. Matthes and Kohring further elaborate on those frame elements by further identifying a number of categories within each frame: (1) the problem includes the identification of an issue as well as of relevant actors involved, (2) causal interpretations are generally centered around responsibility connected to the problem and can thus be analyzed according to who may have succeeded or failed in something leading to the problem, (3) moral evaluation of the author of the frame might be positive, neutral, or negative in relation to the given situation, and (4) a recommended outcome may involve action or refraining of certain activities. Having identified the frame elements, the following cluster analysis code frames according to the combinations in which these frame elements co-occur in texts.

The framing analysis of this article draws on the analytical framework of Entman (1993) and Matthes and Kohring (2008). As a result, the material was first coded according to what kind of problem was recognized in relation to “the humanities” and whether “the humanities” was linked to the problem or treatment of the problem. Second, the material was coded for causal attributions: who or what is considered responsible for the problem and who stands to benefit, if the problem was resolved. The moral judgments were coded focusing on evaluation and in particular what criteria for evaluation were expressed. And finally, the material was coded for solutions to the problem. The results of the coding of frame elements are shown in Table 2.

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Table 2.

Analysis of frame elements.

Frame element	Coding	Description
Problem definition: What is the problem and who is the central actor in the problem?	Topic: Humanities education and graduates Topic: Humanities education quality Topic: Progress in humanities research Topic: Deformation of humanities research Actor: Humanities students and graduates Actor: Universities Actor: Humanities researchers Actor: Research funds	Humanities education and graduates are irrelevant to the private sector (PS). Government spending on education should be redirected toward producing graduates relevant to the PS. Humanities graduates’ unemployment is high. When employed, it is in the public sector. Humanities do not enable the PS in producing financial growth. Humanities students are lazy and slow (a social expenditure). Humanities education has been politically and financially neglected and under-prioritized resulting in declining quality of humanities education. Universities provide too few lectures in the humanities because of financial starvation. Universities don’t foster a critical or curious environment. Students are left to themselves. University buildings are not maintained properly. Humanities research is a stagnant, stubbornly self-sufficient and misinformed. Humanities research has been outmaneuvered by other disciplines. Humanities research is deformed by external pressure. Academia experiences gaps in knowledge. Society/social actors experiences gaps in knowledge.
Causal attribution: Who are responsible for the problems and who would benefit from the problems being solved?	Responsible actor: Policymakers Responsible actor: Policymakers Responsible actor: Humanities researchers Responsible actor: University management. Responsible actor: Research funds Benefit: Private sector Benefit: Educational quality/public sector Benefit: Scientific progress and knowledge production in general. Benefit: Humanities research/the humanities academic community Benefit: Specific social groups/industries	Policymakers are responsible for designing the educational landscape to support the PS and for directing student behavior. Policymakers and government are responsible for providing reasonable funding to support humanities educational quality. Humanities researchers are responsible for aligning their research with the natural and technical sciences. Humanities researchers are responsible for filling academic and social gaps in knowledge. University managers are responsible for too narrowly defining research criteria and publication forms. Research funds provide funding to humanities projects. The financial growth and competitiveness of the PS—and by association society at large—would benefit from this problem being solved. Educational quality and humanities graduates—and by association society at large—would benefit from this problem being solved. Scientific progress would benefit from humanities opening up and aligning their research to that of the natural and technical sciences. Humanities research would benefit from deciding its own norms, goals, and communicative forms. Humanities research would benefit from more knowledge. Specific social groups/organizations would benefit from more knowledge.
Moral judgments: How is humanities evaluated and in relation to which values	Negative: economic Negative: educational quality Negative: social quality Negative: research quality Positive/neutral: potential answering of research questions	The humanities contribute negatively to the economy and do not produce financial growth and compatibility. The humanities have lacked proper investment. The humanities are not able to maintain the best possible educational quality. Consequences to the common good, the welfare state, and democracy. The humanities do not produce adequate research. Central aspects of humanities research have been silenced. The humanities may be a social asset by filling knowledge gaps.
Treatment recommendation: Which activities would solve the problem?	Reform humanities education/remove funding Prioritize humanities education/add funding Refocus humanities research methods, goals, and partnerships Remove external pressures Use humanities research to produce social and academic knowledge	Reform the educational system, reduce the number of humanities graduates, re-allocate funds to other disciplines, control student behavior, and force students to study harder. Prioritize funding to the humanities, allow humanities to provide more lectures, restore the humanities, and convince the PS of their qualities. Refocus humanities research, encourage interdisciplinary research. Allow the humanities power to decide on their own modes of organization, communication, and research orientation. Humanities are productive in solving social and academic problems—use it.

Matthes and Kohring (2008) recommend a statistical cluster analysis, which seems more appropriate on a large set of data as theirs than on a smaller sample such as this one. Thus, the cluster analysis was performed manually. Each frame element was analyzed according to co-occurrence with other frame elements, resulting in six stable clusters of frame elements. In this case, a cluster is considered stable if the comprising frame elements generally occur together and never or rarely occur in other frames in a similar form. See Table 3 for the results.

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Table 3.

Framings of the humanities.

Framing the humanities
Category	Humanities education		Humanities research				Humanities as a name
Stance	Deficit (75%)				Asset/neutral (17%)		Neutral (8%)
Frame	1. The frame of the irrelevant discipline (42%)	2. The frame of the neglected discipline (11%)	3. The frame of the outmaneuvered discipline (17%)	4. The frame of the deformed discipline (5%)	5. The frame of academically relevant knowledge production (5%)	6. The frame of socially relevant knowledge production (12%)	The term humanities name a part of the academic institution.
Problem	Humanities education and graduates are irrelevant to the private sector. Humanities education is a liability and a bad investment.	Humanities have been neglected resulting in declining educational quality. Humanities ought to be a socially profitable investment.	Humanities research is stagnant.	External pressures have deformed humanities research.	Humanities research produce knowledge for academia.	Humanities research produce value for society.
Causal attribution	Responsible: Policymakers Benefit: Private sector and social wealth	Responsible: Policymakers Benefit: Educational quality and social quality	Responsible: Humanities tradition/researchers Benefit: Scientific progress and innovation	Responsible: University management Benefit: Humanities disciplines	Responsible: Humanities researchers Benefit: Humanities disciplines	Responsible: Research funds/humanities researchers Benefit: Certain parts of society/industry + humanities researches
Moral judgment	Negative: economic	Negative: educational quality, social quality, economic	Negative: Research quality	Negative: Research quality	Neutral: Specific projects have been funded	Neutral: Certain gaps in knowledge has been articulated
Treatment	Reform humanities education/remove funding.	Prioritize humanities education/add funding.	Refocus humanities research methods, goals, and partnerships.	Remove external pressures.	Use humanities research to produce academically relevant knowledge.	Use humanities research to produce socially relevant knowledge.

The immediately most striking result of this analysis is the degree to which the humanities are engulfed in a deficit discourse. Candlin and Crichton (2011) define the deficit discourse as a discourse in which a given phenomenon primarily is characterized by insufficiency and shortfall in comparison with some contextual norm and framed as in need of repair. In every instantiation, at least 75% of the material frames the humanities as a problem in need of solving—as flawed, insufficient, or defective. Even the articles positioning the humanities as an asset do so more neutrally than markedly positively. The articles representing an asset discourse mainly announce upcoming humanities research projects, rather than celebrating them.

6. Conclusion and discussion

The general public without much personal experience with or knowledge of the humanities would not get that knowledge gap filled by reading the print news. One thing would be crystal clear, though: Whatever it may be, the humanities, it is deficit. Belfiore (2013) characterizes the humanities as generally represented by a “rhetoric of gloom,” and this study lends empirical evidence to that statement. This deficit framing of the humanities takes two forms: The absolute majority of the articles identifies the humanities as nothing but a liability, while the other essentially acknowledges the humanities as a potentially valuable investment, though somewhat bruised and malfunctioning at the present. Both frames mainly articulate their concern using a discourse of economics in which it is assumed that humanities primarily need to be measured according to economic variables. However, the definition of what counts as economically sound varies: The dominating frame takes a non-metaphorical perspective on economy in which the purpose of research and education solely is articulated as enabling the private sector producing financial growth. The less dominating frame recognizes the non-metaphorical economic growth as relevant, but it is not the main issue on the agenda. Instead, humanities itself is represented as a necessary investment in developing democratic societies through educated citizens and independent research.

The two deficit frames are related in the sense that the dominating deficit frame questions the social and economic relevance of the humanities, while the other one defends the value of the humanities partly by attempting to re-frame criteria for evaluation as social rather than purely private sector-relevant. The frame promoting economic growth as top priority succeeds in positioning their argument as uncontested stating of the obvious, while the other one is pushed into a corner and in need of defense. As a result, the majority of the articles representing this frame appear as apologia written by university staff of variant institutional ranking. The American writer Louis Menard is quoted for saying, “It is possible to feel that one of the things ailing the humanities today is the amount of time humanists spend talking about what ails the humanists” (Menard in Belfiore, 2013: 18). The problem about apologia is threefold: For one thing, it is difficult for such apologia to appear untainted by self-interest or institutional motives. Second, in this case, they also tend to be abstract rather than argumentative and demonstrative as if the audience given is knowledgeable about and positive toward the humanities and need no information about what humanities actually is and does. Third, the deficit framing is maintained, although the blame for the situation has been shifted. It is striking, however, that the market-discourse is not refuted as a valid frame of reference in understanding the purpose of humanities. There are no counter-stories of the humanities. Content and value of humanistic research and inquiry are silenced. Even when the humanities are framed as part of the solution rather than part of the problem, the representation is neutral and informative rather than positive or popularized.

But how to explain this apparent hostility of the news print media—in particular since hardly any articles refer to specific research projects or humanistic areas. Whenever humanities are explicitly associated with anything specific, it seems to be vaguely associated with the mere reading of fiction and poetry. In fact, part of the problem may be due to what Engel (2013), in another context, identifies as a frame spillover. The concept expresses the phenomenon in which the framing and attitudes toward a given well-known phenomenon spill over, taint, or simply mix with another related but lesser known or anonymous phenomenon. In this case, such a spillover of frames is from humanities education to humanities research. Consequently, negative framing of humanities education as a social liability, in the sense of producing graduates as not being in demand in the private sector and in producing economic growth, might spill over to frame humanities research as equally useless. If print media maintain such a framing of humanities, chances are it will affect funding opportunities as well as political and public image—despite no one really knowing what humanities might in fact offer society.

In general, expertise and academic knowledge production is represented in print media in either a mediatization/science-as-news context or an explanatory/science-as-popularization context (Schafer, 2012; Summ and Volpers, 2016). The results of this analysis points to the fact that the humanities—when explicitly linked to the term “humanities”—are represented almost exclusively in mediatization contexts and rarely ever in a popularization contexts. Although 17% of the material frame the humanities as an academic or social problem-solving activity, only 5% of the material explain or even report on actual research or academic studies above mentioning the title. Thus, research or academic inquiry explicitly associated with the term “humanities” elicits opinion and evaluation rather than explanation. Obviously, newspapers may print humanities research somewhere in the newspapers without linking it to the term “humanities.” In order to present readers with the possibility to think outside the frames, more explicit argument and less abstract legitimation may be called for.

Nevertheless, whenever the public and decision-makers meet the term “humanities” in print news media, they meet deficit-narratives and defense-stories—but no humanities research or knowledge production. And if those same readers should accidentally stumble on a piece of interesting humanistic knowledge production, they may even not be able to recognize it as humanistic or as research at all. By reading newspapers, readers will not be able to gain much insight into what the humanities may be or do, but they will definitely know whatever it is—something indeed is rotten in the state of humanities. In order to challenge that, the media as well as those practicing humanities research need to think outside of the deficit frame. The question remains, however, whether print media mirror or mold political discourses, but less than a year after the articles analyzed here were published, the Danish government launched a radically restrictive reform on humanities education, applying the deficit frame of the humanities presented here almost word for word.