issue. One story model looks like this: the trend story started with an episodic section about our exemplar, went into a thematic section about the issue as a whole, and finished with an ending section that finished the story about the exemplar. These episodic portions of the story would, in theory, capture the audience’s attention and give them a face of an issue that might be difficult to understand through just numbers.
Iyengar also acknowledged his content analysis on television news also found very few stories were only episodic or thematic, but rather a mixture of the two. However, he said a predominant frame emerged a majority of the time. His content analysis found TV news was highly episodic. Research on newspapers, some of which is discussed in this book, has also found that the newspaper medium is highly episodic (see, for example, Carlyle, Slater, & Chakroff, 2008).
Although the content analysis in Iyengar’s book was important to capture the real-world explanation of thematic and episodic frames in political coverage on television news, the book turns to media effects of those frames. Iyengar used an experimental design to test the impact of frames on attribution of responsibility. His argument is throughout public opinion, attribution of responsibility matters for how we allocate resources and hold political figures accountable. He argues when people attribute more responsibility to individuals rather than political actors, it “decreases the public’s control over their elected representatives and the policies they pursue” (Iyengar, 1991, p. 3).
Iyengar focused his research on political issues such as poverty, crime, and unemployment, examining attribution of responsibility based on thematic and episodic frames for these separate issues. He found generally when people encountered episodic frames, they were more likely to attribute responsibility to individuals, while those who encountered thematic frames were more likely to attribute responsibility to society.
It sounds simple.
It’s not.
Throughout his work, Iyengar acknowledges the complexities of the attribution of responsibility paradigm, of testing responses to content while acknowledging the larger culture, of humans in general. We see differences in results based on who or what is in the stories; for example, individual causal attribution in stories about black crime was not affected by framing. Iyengar describes this effect as part of the impact of individual responsibility for black crime being a dominant ←8 | 9→cultural judgment. Ericson (1993), in his review on Iyengar (1991), had a similar cultural critique even for the experiments that statistically supported Iyengar’s thesis: “In essence, Iyengar exposed people with a lifetime of political socialization to a breathtaking hurricane of television news, then documented how their attributions, opinions, and attitudes might have become a little bent in the process” (p. 1461), arguing further that examining what happened to those ideas and attributions once the participants left the experiment was lost.
Iyengar saw differences in framing effects based on political ideology of the participants, the issue studied, issue salience, and agreement to the article’s frames. Furthermore, we have seen other research, such as Stone (1989, 2002) and Nathanson (1999), examine the nuances of different types of blame and causality impacting the ways we think about issues. Focusing on causality here leaves out the multitude of research on other types of frames that interact with thematic and episodic to impact audiences (see, for example, Kahneman & Tversky, 1979, 1981). There are surely more variables impacting attribution of responsibility.
Although we acknowledge, as did Iyengar, these types of distinctions can impact responsibility attribution, the bottom line for the importance of Iyengar’s (1991) work is the frames we see in the media are the frames that not only become the “pictures in our heads” (Lippmann, 1922), but also an influence on our political and social policy, our very way of life itself.
References
Carlyle, K.E., Orr, C., Savage, M.W., & Babin, E.A. (2014). News coverage of intimate partner violence: Impact on prosocial responses. Media Psychology, 17: 451–571. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2007.00379.x
Carlyle, K.E., Slater, M.D., & Chakroff, J.L. (2008). Newspaper Coverage of Intimate Partner Violence: Skewing Representations of Risk. Journal of Communication, 58(1), 168–186. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2007.00379.xEricson, R.V. (1993). [Review of the book Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues by S. Iyengar]. American Journal of Sociology, 98(6), 1459–1462. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2781827
Iyengar, S. (1991). Is Anyone Responsible: How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/Chicago/9780226388533.001.0001
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk. Econometrica, 47: 263–291. doi:10.1017/CBO978051
Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. doi:10.2307/1943740
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Nathanson, C.A. (1999). Social movements as catalysts for policy change: The case of smoking and guns. Journal of Health Politics and Law, 24(3): 421–488. doi:10.1215/03616878-24-3-421
Stone, D. (2002). Policy paradox: The art of political decision-making (rev. ed.). New York: Norton.
Stone, D. (1989). Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas. Political Science Quarterly, 104: 281–300. doi:10.2307/2151585
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211: 453–458. doi:10.1126/science.7455683
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Research on Thematic and Episodic Frames: The Health News Connection
Early in our analysis of the research articles selected for this project, we noticed the high number of studies using thematic and episodic frames to investigate health news. While we were not surprised to see this trend based on our own academic research on health news, we decided it was necessary to discuss why this is the case.
As we explained in the summary of the book, Is Anyone Responsible, Iyengar’s thematic and episodic frames introduced a realistic and useful way to categorize frames in news coverage of political issues. Iyengar content analyzed five contemporary political issues covered by ABC, CBS and NBC between 1981 and 1986, he demonstrated most news coverage was primarily episodic framing or thematic framing, usually a combination of both (Aaroe, 2011). Numerous media effect studies have established these frames can sway audience members’ attributions of responsibility and policy views (Major, 2018; Barry, Brescoll, & Gollust, 2013; Major, 2009; Iyengar, 1991).
Our current investigation shows for the past 25 years, health studies dominate the academic research on episodic and thematic framing in news. It seems appropriate for us to explore why health research has overshadowed other areas in thematic and episodic framing in news. While others may identify different reasons for the preponderance of these frames in academic research on health news, we argue three primary reasons account for this trend.
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First, since the mid-1960s framing research has become increasingly popular in communication research (Ardèvol-Abreu, 2015). Framing is a multidisciplinary paradigm that allows for the holistic study of media and its four elements of the communication process: the sender, the receiver, the message and culture (Berlo, 1960). The relationship between these four elements and thematic and episodic frames is key
