Narrative Media Framing in Political Discourse

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new framework for analyzing narrative framing in political discourse, combining narrativity and framing, and demonstrates its effectiveness across climate change and COVID-19 news articles using annotated data and language models.

Contribution

It formalizes and operationalizes narrative framing analysis, provides a new annotated dataset, and tests LLMs for predicting narrative components across domains.

Findings

LLMs can predict narrative frames with high accuracy

The framework generalizes across climate change and COVID-19 domains

Annotated dataset is publicly released for further research

Abstract

Narrative frames are a powerful way of conceptualizing and communicating complex, controversial ideas, however automated frame analysis to date has mostly overlooked this framing device. In this paper, we connect elements of narrativity with fundamental aspects of framing, and present a framework which formalizes and operationalizes such aspects. We annotate and release a data set of news articles in the climate change domain, analyze the dominance of narrative frame components across political leanings, and test LLMs in their ability to predict narrative frames and their components. Finally, we apply our framework in an unsupervised way to elicit components of narrative framing in a second domain, the COVID-19 crisis, where our predictions are congruent with prior theoretical work showing the generalizability of our approach.