Framing War and Conflict: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue of Media, War & Conflict marks 25 years since Robert Entman’s seminal 1993 essay, ‘Framing: Towards clarification of a fractured paradigm’, sought to ‘constitute framing as a research paradigm’ for the field of communication. In the intervening quarter century, framing analysis has been widely taken up as a key method for investigating news coverage of war and conflict, and this special issue aims to initiate a fresh discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of framing as a method for analysing contemporary war coverage, of how and why the method has been refined and modified over the years, and of how it might be developed further.

The development and increasing use of framing analysis has been neither straightforward nor unquestioned. One legitimate concern is that, as Kevin Carragee and Wim Roefs (2004: 214) argue, researchers have sometimes ‘neglected the relationship between media frames and broader issues of political and social power’. This is – or should be – an important focus of framing analysis, since as Entman (1993: 55) argued, ‘Framing … plays a major role in the exertion of political power, and the frame in a news text is really the imprint of power – it registers the identity of actors or interests that competed to dominate the text.’ Indeed, it is difficult to see how work on news coverage of war and conflict can justifiably avoid engaging with wider contextual questions of political power. Another concern is that – notwithstanding efforts to unify it – framing remains a ‘fractured paradigm’ to the extent that there are still no settled and standardized rules for operationalizing the method. In practice, individual framing analyses sometimes differ sharply in their procedures, emphases and assumptions. Some have pointed to ‘significant inconsistency’ in the application of framing analysis (De Vreese, 2002: 51), highlighting the risk of idiosyncratic subjective judgements and unreliable results (Gorp, 2005; Hertog and McLeod, 2001; Tankard, 2001).

Other critics have argued that, on the contrary, framing analysis is too standardized, applying a one-size-fits-all model to different problems and contexts. In a 2013 editorial for this journal, for instance, Andrew Hoskins objected to the way that often ‘the same modes of analysis and claims are merely transposed from one dataset to the next, from one war to the next’, while in the process ‘strip[ping] away all of the dynamics of the media ecology in which … coverage is inextricably embedded’ (p. 4). Hoskins also raised the broader question of whether innovations in news and journalism – a ‘new media ecology’ – might have rendered ‘claims … as to the “construction of meaning” or the “framing” of a particular event or discourse’ untenable and unconvincing. The contemporary environment, of transnational news-feeds and social media, is indeed very different from that of the past, and throws up new challenges for researchers.

The articles collected here, analysing political events and news frames from varied international political and cultural contexts, go some way, we believe, to tackling these challenges and concerns. In their article for this special issue, Ilan Manor and Rhys Crilley consider the role of visuals in mediating the 2014 Gaza War, by studying the ‘digital diplomacy’ conducted by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Twitter. In assessing how government agencies use carefully crafted social media messages and visuals to pursue foreign policy objectives, Manor and Crilley implicitly contradict assertions that framing is a method that not only copes poorly with visual communication (Matthes, 2009) but also neglects the political forces that shape media messages.

Like Manor and Crilley, Mercy Ette and Sarah Joe also use framing analysis to study social media content – in this case, analysing coverage of Boko Haram in Nigerian newspapers and on Twitter, and uncovering the ‘rival visions of reality’ that were presented. As Ette and Joe acknowledge, making these sorts of cross-platform comparisons is ‘not empirically straightforward’, and calls for a degree of methodological innovation and experimentation. As they also observe, though, such comparisons are nevertheless important to attempt, given the ‘hybrid nature of the media environment’.

Sumaya Al Nahed also seeks to push the adaptability and flexibility of framing analysis in her comparison of English and Arabic TV news across Al Jazeera and the BBC. Her article highlights some of the issues that can arise when comparing media texts in different languages, considering in particular the impact of emotive language on the construction of frames. Through reflection on the influences that affected Al Jazeera’s and the BBC’s coverage of the 2011 Libyan uprising and subsequent NATO intervention, Al Nahed also addresses some of the questions about the capacity of framing analysis to illuminate the impact of political power on news frames.

A complementary consideration of organizational and cultural factors informs Ola Ogunyemi’s analysis of the African diasporic press in the UK. While the region is consistently represented by the Western media as volatile, violent and starving, he discusses the role that African journalists in the diaspora might play in forwarding different and more balanced frames. Ogunyemi also stresses the impact of organizational newsroom factors, such as deadlines and budgets, on how far African journalists are able to construct alternative narratives that seek to redefine Africa’s image in the West.

Stereotypical or pre-scripted narratives of conflict are also examined in Philip Hammond’s article, which discusses how constructions of ‘ethnic war’ and ‘genocide’ have featured prominently as competing news frames in coverage of the 1992–1995 Bosnian War and subsequent conflicts. Arguing for the importance of combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis, Hammond also stresses the necessity of being sensitive to contextual meanings and to the frame-sponsorship of influential news sources, when trying to make sense of competing and contradictory explanations of events.

A somewhat similar concern for the causes and consequences of framing choices also animates the article by Joan Blauwkamp, Charles Rowling and William Pettit. Investigating how the framing of opinion survey questions primes respondents to answer in a manner that may embolden government officials to ‘craft policies in accordance with misleading indications of public sentiment’, Blauwkamp, Rowling and Pettit show how effective framing can be in developing people’s perceptions of an issue – in this case, the attitude of Americans to the CIA’s use of torture in its detention and interrogation programme. Elicited public ‘support’ is also mirrored in press coverage of these surveys, ultimately producing an illusory consensus that people support the use of torture.

We are delighted that Curd Knüpfer and Robert Entman have agreed to act as respondents for this special issue. Their concluding piece not only provides an overview of the articles collected here and a reflection on the issues they raise, but it also offers a powerful original thesis on how to approach the analysis of competing frames in a situation where, as they put it, ‘increasingly global flows of digital data via networked media plus the decline of established journalism have upended some political communication processes and disrupted the public sphere’. Clashes over ‘problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation’, as identified in Entman’s (1993: 52) classic article, have hardly abated in the framing of war and conflict. Indeed, they can be expected to become more important than ever as the ‘age of digital and transnational mediated communication’ continues to unfold; and the ‘conceptual pathways’ that Knüpfer and Entman propose for understanding these new dynamics are likely to be of lasting significance.