框架: 澄清一种破裂的范式（恩特曼）

Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm by Robert M. Entman, Northwestern University In response to the proposition that communication lacks disciplinary sta- tus because of deficient core knowledge, I propose that we turn an osten- sible weakness into a strength. We should identify our mission as bring- ing together insights and theories that would otherwise remain scattered in other disciplines. Because of the lack of interchange among the disci- plines, hypotheses thoroughly discredited in one field may receive wide acceptance in another. Potential research paradigms remain fractured, with pieces here and there but no comprehensive statement to guide re- search. By bringing ideas together in one location, communication can aspire to become a master discipline that synthesizes related theories and concepts and exposes them to the most rigorous, comprehensive state- ment and exploration. Reaching this goal would require a more self-con- scious determination by communication scholars to plumb other fields and feed back their studies to outside researchers. At the same time, such an enterprise would enhance the theoretical rigor of communication scholarship proper. The idea of “framing” offers a case study of just the kind of scattered conceptualization I have identified. Despite its omnipresence across the social sciences and humanities, nowhere is there a general statement of framing theory that shows exactly how frames become embedded within and make themselves manifest in a text, or how framing influences think- ing. Analysis o f this concept suggests how the discipline of communica- tion might contribute something unique: synthesizing a key concept’s dis- parate uses, showing how they invariably involve communication, and constructing a coherent theory from them. Whatever its specific use, the concept of framing consistently offers a way to describe the power of a communicating text. Analysis of frames il- luminates the precise way in which influence over a human conscious- ness is exerted by the transfer (or communication) of information from Robert M. Entman is an associate professor of communication studies, journalism, and po- litical science and chair of the program in Communications, Media, and Public Policy at the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. He gratefully acknowledges the comments of students in his “Mass Communication and Demo- cratic Theory” seminar, especially Andrew Rojecki. Copyright 0 1993 Journal of Communication 43(4), Autumn. 0021-9916/93/$5.00 Journal of Communzcatzon, Antumn 199.3 one location-such as a speech, utterance, news report, or novel-to that consciousness. (A representative list of classic and recent citations would include: Edelman, 1993; Entman & Rojecki, 1993; Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Gamson, 1992; Goffman, 1974; Graber, 1988; Iyengar, 1991; Kahneman & Tversky, 1984; Pan & Kosicki, 1993; Riker, 1986; Snow & Benford, 1988; Tuchman, 1978; White, 1987; Zaller, 1992.) A literature review suggests that framing is often defined casually, with much left to an assumed tacit understanding of reader and researcher. After all, the words frame, fram- ing, and .framework are common outside of formal scholarly discourse, and their connotation there is roughly the same. The goal here is to iden- tify and make explicit common tendencies among the various uses of the terms and to suggest a more precise and universal understanding of them. Of Frames and Framing Framing essentially involves selection and salience. To frame is to select some aspects of aperceived reality and make them more salient in a com- municating text, in such a way as to promote aparticularproblem defini- tion, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recom- mendation for the item described. Typically frames diagnose, evaluate, and prescribe, a point explored most thoroughly by Gamson (1992). An example is the “cold war” frame that dominated U.S. news of foreign af- fairs until recently. The cold war frame highlighted certain foreign events-say, civil wars-as problems, identified their source (communist rebels), offered moral judgments (atheistic aggression), and commended particular solutions (U.S. support for the other side). Frames, then, dejineproblems-determine what a causal agent is doing with what costs and benefits, usually measured in terms of common cul- tural values; diagnose causes-identify the forces creating the problem; make moraljudgments-evaluate causal agents and their effects; and suggest remedies-offer and justify treatments for the problems and pre- dict their likely effects. A single sentence may perform more than one of these four framing functions, although many sentences in a text may per- form none of them. And a frame in any particular text may not necessarily include all four functions. The cold war example also suggests that frames have at least four loca- tions in the communication process: the communicator, the text, the re- ceiver, and the culture. Communicators make conscious or unconscious framing judgments in deciding what to say, guided by frames (often called schemata) that organize their belief systems. The text contains frames, which are manifested by the presence o r absence of certain key- words, stock phrases, stereotyped images, sources of information, and sentences that provide thematically reinforcing clusters of facts o r judg- ments. The frames that guide the receiver’s thinking and conclusion may or may not reflect the frames in the text and the framing intention of the 52 communicator. The culture is the stock of commonly invoked frames; in fact, culture might be defined as the empirically demonstrable set of com- mon frames exhibited in the discourse and thinking of most people in a social grouping. Framing in a11 four locations includes similar functions: selection and highlighting, and use of the highlighted elements to con- struct an argument about problems and their causation, evaluation, and/or solution. How Frames Work Frames highlight some bits of information about an item that is the sub- ject of a communication, thereby elevating them in salience. The word salience itself needs to be defined: It means making :i piece of informa- tion more noticeable, meaningful, or memorable to audiences. An in- crease in salience enhances the probability that receivers will perceive the information, discern meaning and thus process it, and store it in meni- ory (see Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Texts can make bits of information more salient by placement o r repeti- tion, or by associating them with culturally familiar symbols. However, even a single nnillustrated appearance of a notion in an obscure part of the text can be highly salient, if it comports with the existing schemata in a receiver’s belief systems. By the same token, an idea emphasized in a text can be difficult for receivers to notice, interpret, o r remember be- cause of their existing schemata. For our purposes, schemata and closely related concepts such as categories, scripts, or stereotypes connote men- tally stored clusters of ideas that guide individuals’ processing of informa- tion (see, e.g., Graber, 19881. Because salience is a product of the interac- tion of texts and receivers, the presence of frames in the text, as detected by researchers, does not guarantee their influence in audience thinking (Entman, 1989; Graber, 1988). Kahneman and Tversky (1984) offer perhaps the most widely cited re- cent example o f the power of framing and the way it operates by select- ing and highlighting some features of reality while omitting others. The authors asked experimental subjects the following: Imagine thal the 1J.S. is preparing f o r the outbreak of a n unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have beenproposed. Assume that the exact scien- tz$c estimates of the consequences qftheprograms are as,follows: I f Pro- gram A is adopted, 200people will be saved. Ifprogram B is adopted, there is a one-thirdprobability that GOOpeople will be saved and a two- thirdsprohahility that no people will he saved. Which of the twopro- grams wouldyou favor?(1984, p. 243) In this experiment, 72 percent of subjects chose Program A; 28 percent 53 Toward ClarzJicatzon o fa Fractured Paradigm ,/ournal of Communication, Autumn 199.3 chose Program B. In the next experiment, identical options to treating the same described situation were offered, but framed in terms of likely deaths rather than likely lives saved: “If Program C is adopted, 400 people will die. If Program D is adopted, there is a one-third probability that no- body will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die” (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984, p. 343). The percentages choosing the op- tions were reversed by the framing. Program C was chosen by 22 percent, though its twin Program A was selected by 72 percent; and Program D garnered 7 8 percent, while the identical Program B received only 28 per- cent. As this example vividly illustrates, the frame determines whether most people notice and how they understand and remember a problem, as well as how they evaluate and choose to act upon it. The notion of fram- ing thus implies that the frame has a common effect on large portions of the receiving audience, though it is not likely to have a universal effect on all. Kahneman and Tversky’s experiments demonstrate that frames select and call attention to particular aspects of the reality described, which log- ically means that frames simultaneously direct attention away from other aspects. Most frames are defined by what they omit as well as include, and the omissions of potential problem definitions, explanations, evalua- tions, and recommendations may be as critical as the inclusions in guid- ing the audience. tive description and omission of the features of a situation: Edelman highlights the way frames exert their power through the selec- The character, causes, and consequences of any phenomenon become radically different as changes are made in what is prominently dis- played, what is repressed and especially in how observations are classi- jied. . . . (Uhe social world is . . . a kaleidoscope ofpotential realities, any of which can be readily evoked by altering the ways in which obser- vations are framed and categorized. (1993, p. 232) Receivers’ responses are clearly affected if they perceive and process in- formation about one interpretation and possess little or incommensurable data about alternatives. This is why exclusion of interpretations by frames is as significant to outcomes as inclusion. Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock (1991) provide a clear instance of the power of presence and absence in framing: The effect of framing is toprime values differentially, establishing the salience of the one or the other. (Thus]. . . a majority of thepublic sup- ports the rights ofpersons with AIDS when the issue is framed (in a sur- vey question] to accentuate civil liberties considerations-and supports . . . mandatory testing when the issue is framed to accentuatepublic health considerations. (p. 52) 54 Toumrd Clanlfication of u Fractured Puradigm The text of the survey question supplies most people with the considera- tions they use when they respond to the issue of AIDS testing (Zaller, 1992). Often a potential counterframing of the subject is mostly or wholly absent from a text, although, to use this instance, an audience member with a strong civil liberties philosophy might reject mandatory testing even if the poll framed AIDS strictly in public health terms. Frames in Political News This portrait o f framing has important implications for political communi- cation. Frames call attention to some aspects of reality while obscuring other elements, which might lead audiences to have different reactions. Politicians seeking support are thus compelled to compete with each other and with journalists over news frames (Entman, 1989; Riker, 1986). Framing in this light 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. many news texts exhibit homogeneous framing at one level of analysis, yet competing frames at another. Thus, in the pre-war debate over U.S. policy toward Iraq, there was a tacit consensus among U.S. elites not to argue for such options as negotiation between Iraq and Kuwait. The news frame included only two remedies, war now or sanctions now with war (likely) later, while problem definitions, causal analyses, and moral evalu- ations were homogeneous. Between the selected remedies, however, framing was contested by elites, and news coverage offered different sets of facts and evaluations. The Iraq example reveals that the power of news frames can be self-reinforcing. During the pre-war debate, any critique transcending the remedies inside the frame (war soon versus more time for sanctions) breached the bounds of acceptable discourse, hence was unlikely to influence policy. By conventional journalistic standards, such views were not newsworthy (Entman & Page, in press). Unpublicized, the views could gain few adherents and generate little perceived or actual ef- fect on public opinion, which meant elites felt no pressure to expand the frame so it included other treatments for Iraqi aggression, such as negoti- ation. Relatedly, Gamson (1992) observes that a frame can exert great so- cial power when encoded in a term like ajfirmatiue action. Once a term is widely accepted, to use another is to risk that target audiences will per- ceive the communicator as lacking credibility-or will even fail to under- stand what the communicator is talking about. Thus the power of a frame can be as great as that of language itself. Reflecting the play of power and boundaries of discourse over an issue, Benefits of a Consistent Concept of Framing An understanding of frames helps illuminate many empirical and norma- tive controversies, most importantly because the concept of framing di- 55 Journal of Communication, Autumn 1993 rects our attention to the details of just how a communicated text exerts its power. The example o f mass communication explored here suggests how a common understanding might help constitute framing as a re- search paradigm. A research paradigm is defined here as a general theory that informs most scholarship on the operation and outcomes of any par- ticular system of thought and action. The framing paradigm could be ap- plied with similar benefits to the study of public opinion and voting be- havior in political science; to cognitive studies in social psychology; or to class, gender, and race research in cultural studies and sociology, to name a few. Here are some illustrations of theoretical debates in the study of mass communication that would benefit from an explicit and common understanding of the concept of frames. definition for the notion of dominant meaning that is so central to de- bates about polysemy and audience independence in decoding media texts (Fiske, 1987). From a framing perspective, dominant meaning con- sists of the problem, causal, evaluative, and treatment interpretations with the highest probability of being noticed, processed, and accepted by the most people. To identify a meaning as dominant or preferred is to suggest a particular framing of the situation that is most heavily supported by the text and is congruent with the most common audience schemata. A framing paradigm cautions researchers not to take fugitive compo- nents of the message and show how they might be interpreted in ways that oppose the dominant meaning. If the text frame emphasizes in a vari- ety of mutually reinforcing ways that the glass is half full, the evidence of social science suggests that relatively few in the audience will conclude it is half empty. To argue that the polysemic properties of the message con- duce to such counterframing, researchers must show that real-world audi- ences reframe the message, and that this reframing is not a by-product of the research conditions-for example, a focus group discussion in which one participant can lead the rest, or a highly suggestive interview proto- col (Budd, Entman, & Steinman, 1990). plicitly in the text, or retrieve from memory a causal explanation or cure that is completely absent from the text. In essence, this is just what pro- fessors encourage their students to do habitually. But Zaller (19921, Kah- neman and Tversky (19841, and Iyengar (19911, among others, suggest that on most matters of social or political interest, people are not general- ly so well-informed and cognitively active, and that framing therefore heavily influences their responses to communications, although Gamson (1992) describes conditions that can mitigate this influence. 2 . Journalistic objectivity. Journalists may follow the rules for “objec- tive” reporting and yet convey a dominant framing of the news text that prevents most audience members from making a balanced assessment of a situation. Now, because they lack a common understanding of framing, journalists frequently allow the most skillful media manipulators to im- 1. Audience autonomy. The concept of framing provides an operational Certainly people can recall their own facts, forge linkages not made ex- 56 Toward ClariJication of a Fractured Paradigm pose their dominant frames on the news (Entman, 1989; Entman & Page, in press; Entman & Rojecki, 1993). If educated to understand the differ- ence between including scattered oppositional facts and challenging a dominant frame, journalists might be better equipped to construct news that makes equally salient-equally accessible to the average, inattentive, and marginally informed audience-two or more interpretations of prob- lems. This task would require a far more active and sophisticated role for reporters than they now take, resulting in more balanced reporting than what the formulaic norm of objectivity produces (Tuchman, 1978). 3. Content analysis. The major task o f determining textual meaning should be to identify and describe frames; content analysis informed by a theory of framing would avoid treating all negative or positive terms or utterances as equally salient and influential. Often, coders simply tote up all messages they judge as positive and negative and draw conclusions about the dominant meanings. They neglect to measure the salience of el- ements in the text, and fail to gauge the relationships of the most salient clusters of messages-the frames-to the audience’s schemata. Unguided by a framing paradigm, content analysis may often yield data that misrep- resent the media messages that most audience members are actually pick- ing up. 4. Public opinion and normative democratic theory. In Zaller’s (1992) account, framing appears to be a central power in the democratic process, for political elites control the framing of issues. These frames can determine just what “public opinion” is-a different frame, according to Zaller, and survey evidence and even voting can indicate a different pub- lic opinion. His theory, along with that of Kahneman and Tversky, seems to raise radical doubts about democracy itself. If by shaping frames elites can determine the major manifestations of “true” public opinion that are available to government (via polls or voting), what can true public opin- ion be? How can even sincere democratic representatives respond cor- rectly t