The Framing Project: A Bridging Model for Media Research Revisited

Abstract

Framing, unlike many more esoteric research concepts, has gained remarkable popularity in both the scholarly literature and the public imagination. As with its often-associated idea of media agenda setting, people intuitively grasp what it conveys, although framing suggests more intentionality on the part of the framer and relates more explicitly to political strategy. As a result, academics such as George Lakoff and Geoffrey Nunberg have found recent visibility as political groups, particularly liberal, try to figure out how they lost the “framing wars.” Lakoff says that conservatives bend ideas to fit a coherent narrative; Nunberg says that narrative is only rhetorical, providing only the illusion of coherence (Drum, 2006). Thus, even between linguists differences arise as to what to make of framing as a theoretical idea—differences that become wider when played out across other disciplines. The interdisciplinary quality of the communication field has meant a natural diversity of approaches, leading some to urge more effort toward cleaning up the framing paradigm, making it more theoretically respectable and coherent (e.g., Scheufele, 2004).