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Is Anyone Responsible?: How Television Frames Political Issues (American Politics and Political Economy Series)

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In his book Is Anyone Responsible? (1991), Shanto Iyengar evaluates the framing effects of television news on political issues. The book explores the agenda-setting role of television news. When he refers to the term framing the concept given refers to "subtle alterations in the statement or presentation of judgement and choice problems, and the term "framing effect" refer to changes in decision outcomes resulting from these alternations." Shanto Iyengar, professor of political science and communication studies at UCLA, has pioneered the research in the framing effects of news coverage on public opinion and political choice. He explains that viewers are "sensitive to contextual cues when they reason about national affairs. Their explanations of issues like terrorism or poverty are critically dependent upon the particular reference points furnished in media presentations." The frames for a given story are seldom conscientiously chosen but represent instead the effort of the journalist or sponsor to convey a story in a direct and meaningful way. As such, news frames are frequently drawn from, and reflective of, shared cultural narratives and myths and resonate with the larger social themes to which journalists tend to be acutely sensitive.

Through a series of laboratory experiments (reports of which constitute the core of the book), he finds that the framing of issues by television news shapes the way the public understands the causes of and the solutions to central political problems. The research reported in Is Anyone Responsible? examines two ways in which television news frames issues, these issues being episodic and thematic. Episodic framing depicts concrete events that illustrate issues, while thematic framing present's collective advice or general advice. Television news is routinely reported in the form of specific events or particular cases - Iyengar calls this "episodic" news framing - which is counterpoised to "thematic" coverage which places political issues and events in some general context. "Episodic framing depicts concrete events that illustrate issues, while thematic framing presents collective or general evidence."Iyengar found that subjects shown episodic reports were less likely to consider society responsible for the event, and subjects shown thematic reports were less likely to consider individuals responsible. In one of the clearest demonstrations of this phenomenon, subjects who viewed stories about poverty that featured homeless or unemployed people (episodic framing) were much more likely to blame poverty on individual failings, such as laziness or low education, than were those who instead watched stories about high national rates of unemployment or poverty (thematic framing). Viewers of the thematic frames were more likely to attribute the causes and solutions to governmental policies and other factors beyond the victim's control. The episodic frame is the more prevalent one. It ordinarily takes the form of a report based on an event. An example of this would be the depiction of the terrorism issue in the context of an Irish Republican Army bombing in Northern Ireland. On the other hand, the thematic frame provides a broader perspective; it reports the issue in the context of "collective outcomes, public policy debates, or historical trends" . An example would be a news story that discusses the terrorism issue against the backdrop of the historical bitterness between Northern Ireland's Protestants and Catholics. Yet the news media systematically filter the issues and defect blame from the establishment by framing the news as "only a passing parade of specific events, a `context of no context.' Iyengar found that subjects shown episodic reports were less likely to consider individuals responsible. Viewers of thematic frames on the otherhand were more likely to attribute the causes and solutions to governmental policies and other factors beyond the victim's control. On the basis of experimental research, Iyengar concludes that the episodic framing on television encourages viewers to assign the blame for society's problems to individuals, rather than to social and political institutions, such as political parties. Because television news emphasises episodic framing, says Iyengar, it deflects the blame for problems from government, resulting in a weakening of political accountability- hence the title of the book.

Iyengar says that television focuses "on concrete acts and breaking events" , this form of reporting did not originate from television. This model of journalism, which dates back to the 1830s, is the dominant form of newspaper reporting and has been taught in schools of Journalism since the early 1900s. in fact, newspaper journalists depend even more heavily on episodic reports than do television journalists. Compared with the newspapers' inverted pyramids, television emphasises the interpretative news report due to its need for tightly structured stories. If stories are to be readily understood by a listening audience, they cannot be allowed to trail off as a newspaper story may. Accordingly, television news stories tend to be built around inferential sentences, often an unattributed nature. Iyengar's experimental methods offer a precision of measurement that the media effects research seldom attains. I believe, moreover, that Iyengar's notion of framing effects is one of the truly important theoretical concepts to appear in recent years. Iyengar's challenge is to balance his noteworthy methods and concepts with an equally measures accounting of the substance of American politics and journalism. According to the arguments set forth by Iyengar, the breakdown of public confidence in media reportage is a result of the way campaigns are framed. "Nowhere is the debilitating influence of episodic framing on political accountability more apparent than in presidential election campaigns . . . [which] guarantee that coverage of the issues and the candidates' policy proposals will receive minimal attention." The significance of media sources becomes immediately apparent in the context of media framing. As Iyengar writes in the American Political Science Review (September 1987), "the invoking of different reference points triggers completely different strategies of choice or judgement." Merely altering the description of the alternatives can profoundly alter choices between risky prospects. Framing the prospects in terms of possible losses, for example, induces risk-seeking behaviour while describing the identical prospects in terms of potential gains makes people risk averse.