Here’s a summary I wrote up of my discussant comments last week at the Triangle Institute for Security Studies conference on Casualties and Warfare. My panel, which was titled “The media and casualties,” featured presentations by Cori Dauber (University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill), Robert Entman (George Washington University) and Sean Aday (George Washington).
In response to the panelists’ presentations, I pointed out that we need to distinguish between media framing as an independent variable and media framing as a dependent variable. In both cases, we face both a normative and an empirical dilemma.
The panelists focused on media framing as a dependent variable. But the empirical dilemma we face is that it is difficult to determine what causes the framing we observe — bias, professional norms, outside political pressure, etc. And the normative dilemma is that we don’t agree on what kind of framing reports should use — strictly neutral fact-based reporting, interpretive reporting that seeks to put facts in context, etc.
When considering media framing as an independent variable, the dilemmas become arguably more profound. Normatively, we’re generally troubled by framing effects, which suggest that citizens are easily manipulated by elites. At the same time, however, we often hope that citizens respond to certain kinds of normatively important factual information, such as casualties, probability of victory or evidence regarding the reasons for war.
The related empirical dilemma is especially difficult. Recent research by Jamie Druckman and others has shown that framing effects are substantially weaker in the presence of counterframes or debate with people of differing viewpoints — precisely the conditions that obtain under the conditions where we care most about public opinion. These effects, moreover, are nearly impossible to document outside an experimental context, and those experimental effects that we can demonstrate may be short-lived or artificial.
Our normative and empirical dilemmas intersect, then, in the context of the war in Iraq and the war on terror. Research on media framing as a dependent and independent variable seems normatively crucial. But in the current context, it’s not clear what causes the framing we observe, nor what effect media framing has on public opinion (if any). In addition, we don’t agree on what effect framing *should* have from a normative perspective.
As a result, drawing clear empirical inferences or normative conclusions about the effect of media framing on public opinion toward America’s dual wars is very difficult. But the panelists are to be commended for pointing the way toward valuable future work in this area.