School of Public Policy 391FP - S-Framing Pub Pol & the News

In this course, we examine how policy issues and current events get framed and reframed by public official political commentators, reporters, and interest groups. Framing is a process by which certain aspects of an issue or event are emphasized, while other aspects are de-emphasized or ignored. These choices are often strategic, aimed at persuading a particular audience or influencing public opinion at large. In other cases, framing may be purely reflexive, as when a communicator has come to view a given issue through a prism shared with other members of a community and regards competing frames as disingenuous "spin." The bottom line is that framing is inevitable in communicating and understanding the meaning of events in broader context. After reviewing some social scientific theories about how framing occurs, and reading framing analyses conducted by a number of scholars, students will have an opportunity to do their own original research. They will choose a public policy or set of events, identify various ways that it has been framed, and analyze differences in the relative prominence of these distinct frames across sources or over time.