Media Framing through the Lens of Event-Centric Narratives

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for analyzing news framing by extracting event-centric narratives, helping to understand how language influences interpretation in topics like immigration and gun control.

Contribution

It proposes a novel framework that extracts and groups events into narratives to explain framing devices in news articles, advancing narrative analysis in media studies.

Findings

Framework successfully analyzes framing in immigration news

Framework applies to gun control news analysis

Provides insights into narrative structures influencing media framing

Abstract

From a communications perspective, a frame defines the packaging of the language used in such a way as to encourage certain interpretations and to discourage others. For example, a news article can frame immigration as either a boost or a drain on the economy, and thus communicate very different interpretations of the same phenomenon. In this work, we argue that to explain framing devices we have to look at the way narratives are constructed. As a first step in this direction, we propose a framework that extracts events and their relations to other events, and groups them into high-level narratives that help explain frames in news articles. We show that our framework can be used to analyze framing in U.S. news for two different domains: immigration and gun control.