News Framing as a Multiparadigmatic Research Program: a Response to Entman

Abstract

A large and growing body of mass media research centers on the concept of “framing.” This article responds to Entman's (1993) call for the establishment of a paradigm of news framing research, drawing on work in the sociology of knowledge to argue that news framing research operates according to principles of a Lakatosian research program (Lakatos, 1974) in which researchers employ and refine specific theories to generate findings in particular studies about a common core of irrefutable conjectures. In the metatheory developed here, the research program is inclusive of 3 paradigmatic outlooks, called cognitive, constructionist, and critical, that provide researchers with specific images with which to examine the interaction of media frames and individual- or social-level reality. Thus, contra Entman (1993), I argue that there is not, nor should there be, a single “mended” paradigm of framing research. The research program has benefited the communication discipline by encouraging researchers to use specific theories to progressively explicate a complex process.