PROFESSIONAL FRAMING IN THE NEWS MEDIA

Below are some of  the professional frames that structure what journalists can see and how they can present what they see.

1. Commercial Framing: The news media are money-making businesses. As such, they must deliver a good product to their customers to make a profit. The customers of the news media are advertisers. The most important product the news media delivers to its customers are readers or viewers. Good is defined in numbers and quality of readers or viewers. The news media are framed toward conflict because conflict draws readers and viewers. Harmony is boring.
2. Temporal Framing: The news media are framed toward the immediate. News is what's new and fresh. To be immediate and fresh, the news must be ever-changing even when there is little news to cover.
3. Visual Framing: Television (and, increasingly, newspapers) is framed  toward  visual depictions of news. Television is nothing without pictures. Legitimate news that has no visual angle is likely to get little attention. Much of what is important in politics--policy--cannot be photographed.
4. Bad news Framing: Good news is boring (and probably does not photograph well, either). This frame makes the world look like a more dangerous place than it really is. Plus, this frame makes politicians look far more crooked than they really are.
5. Narrative Framing: The news media cover the news in terms of "stories" that must have a beginning, middle, and end--in other words, a plot with antagonists and protagonists. Much of what happens in our world, however, is ambiguous. The news media apply a narrative structure to ambiguous events suggesting that these events are easily understood and have clear cause-and-effect relationships. Good storytelling requires drama, and so this frame often leads journalists to add, or seek out, drama for the sake of drama. Controversy creates drama. Journalists often seek out the opinions of competing experts or officials in order to present conflict between two sides of an issue . Lastly, narrative frames leads many journalists to create, and then hang on to, master narratives--set story lines with set characters who act in set ways. Once a master narrative has been set, it is very difficult to get journalists to see that their narrative is simply one way, and not necessarily the correct or best way, of viewing people and events.
6. Status Quo Framing : The news media believe the system works. The mainstream news media never question the structure of the political system.  This frame ensures that alternate points of view about how government might run and what government might do are effectively ignored.
7. Fairness Framing: Ethical journalistic practice demands that reporters and editors be fair. In the news product this frame manifests as a contention between/among political actors . Whenever one faction or politician does something or says something newsworthy, the press is compelled by this frame to get a reaction from an opposing camp. This creates the illusion that the game of politics is always contentious and never cooperative. This frame can also create situations in which one faction appears to be attacked by the press. For example, politician A announces some positive accomplishment followed by the press seeking a negative comment from politician B. The point is not to disparage politician A but to be fair to politician B.
8. Expediency Framing: Journalism is a competitive, deadline-driven profession. Reporters compete among themselves for prime space or air time. News organizations compete for market share and reader/viewer attention. And the 24-hour news cycle--driven by the immediacy of television and the internet--creates a situation in which the job of competing never comes to a rest. Add financial pressures to this mix--the general desire of media groups for profit margins that exceed what's "normal" in many other industries--and you create a frame toward information that can be obtained quickly, easily, and inexpensively. Need an expert/official quote (status quo framing) to balance (fairness framing) a story (narrative framing)? Who can you get on the phone fast? Who is always ready with a quote and always willing to speak (i.e. say what you need them to say to balance the story)? Who sent a press release recently? Much of deadline decision making comes down to gathering information that is readily available from sources that are well known.
9. Glory Framing: Journalists, especially television reporters, often assert themselves into the stories they cover. This happens most often in terms of proximity, i.e. to the locus of unfolding events or within the orbit of powerful political and civic actors. This frame helps journalists establish and maintain a cultural identity as knowledgeable insiders (although many journalists reject the notion that follows from this--that they are players in the game and not merely observers). The glory framing shows itself in particularly obnoxious ways in television journalism. News promos with stirring music and heroic pictures of individual reporters create the aura of omnipresence and omnipotence.