CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1Media Studies and CommunicationComputational and Text Analysis MethodsLGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy

Emergence of Master Frame: A Semantic Network Analysis of News Framing of the LGBTQ Rights Movement in the United States (1960s–2010s)

Open access
Yuan, Weijun·2026·Computational Social Sciences
DOI 10.1007/978-3-032-01373-6_8
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Framing is important for political communication, as it shapes how the public perceives political issues. Current studies of political framing rely on scholarly hindsight and interpretation, and typically focus on frames produced by a single actor or a small, homogeneous group. This chapter traces the dynamics of a wide range of frames associated with 59 organizations within the LGBTQ rights movement in the United States. It examines 5942 news headlines about the LGBTQ rights movement in four major U.S. newspapers over six decades. Using semantic networks, this study captures the structure of political frames and accounts for transient news framings of LGBTQ issues. It provides a dynamic analysis of when and how news framings of the LGBTQ rights movement converge to a dominant master frame. The results show that dichotomous master frames emerged during the early stage of the movement. While a master frame of gay “rights” rose to dominance in the 1980s and persisted into the 1990s, “same-sex marriage” emerged as the most dominant frame in the 2000s. These two inclusive and legitimate master frames become prominent as the activists and journalists attempted to address a broad audience. However, the rise of “same-sex marriage” was not driven by the most established groups or those with the most media coverage, but by organizations focused on family and children—whom the media viewed as having strong moral relevance to “marriage.”

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1007/978-3-032-01373-6_8

Cites

33 of 33 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 15

  1. by D. Snow, D.D. Porta, B. Klandermans, D. McAdam (Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2013)
  2. M. Bernstein, Liberalism and social movement success: the case of the United States sodomy laws. Mob. Int. Q.10(2), 145-160 (2005)
  3. S.R. Corman, T. Kuhn, R.D. McPhee, K.J. Dooley, Studying complex discursive systems: centering resonance analysis of communication. Hum. Commun. Res. 28(2), 157-206 (2002)
  4. J. D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (The University of Chicago Press. Library of Congress General Collections, Chicago, 1983)
  5. R. Entman, Framing: towards clarification of a fractured paradigm, in McQuail's Reader in Mass Communication Theory, ed. by D. McQuail, pp. 390-397 (2002)
  6. T. Gitlin, in The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (University of California Press, 2003)
  7. D.C. Hallin, The "Uncensored War:" The Media and Vietnam (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1986)
  8. K. Krippendorff, in Content Analysis An Introduction to Its Methodology (SAGE Publications, New York, 2012(1980))
  9. J. Lewis, in Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like and Why We Seem to Go along with It (Columbia University Press, 2001)
  10. C.A. Rimmerman, in From Identity to Politics: The Lesbian and Gay Movements in the United States (Temple University Press, 2002)
  11. D. Rusu, L. Dali, B. Fortuna, M. Grobelnik, D. Mladenic, Triplet extraction from sentences, in Proceedings of the 10th International Multiconference Information Society-IS (2007), pp. 8-12
  12. C. Ryan, Prime Time Activism: Media Strategies for Grassroots Organizing (South End Press, Boston, MA, 1991)
  13. P. Smith, in Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, The Gulf War, and Suez (University of Chicago Press, 2019)
  14. G. Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (Free Press, New York, 1978)
  15. Z. Tufekci, in Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (Yale University Press, 2017)

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Yuan, W.
Affiliations
University of Chicago (US)
Corresponding author
Yuan, Weijun
Venue
Computational Social Sciences
Publisher
Springer Nature Switzerland
Published
2026
Pages
185-204
ISSN
  • 2509-9574 (ISSN-L)
  • 2509-9582
DOI
10.1007/978-3-032-01373-6_8
OpenAlex
W7128300045
Cited by
0
References
33
FWCI
0.00
Type
book chapter
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
Computational social sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Media Studies and Communication
  • Social Sciences › General Social Sciences › Computational and Text Analysis Methods
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy
Keywords
LGBTQ rights movement, news framing, master frame, semantic networks, same-sex marriage, gay rights, political communication, American newspapers

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review