They don't know that we know they know we know.
I am a die hard Friends fan. I have watched that series over and over again, to an extent that I can mouth the dialogues without flinching. In one of the episodes, Monica, makes fun of Ross’s pink shirt or like Ross would rightly say, his ‘faded salmon’ colored shirt. I watched this episode a few days ago, and this made me question myself. Why is it that we still associate pink to be feminine? Who instilled this notion in our heads?
Since childhood I was always told that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. My parents told me this through the color scheme of my room, my school told me this through the different water bottles they gave us in kindergarten and more over the cartoons I watched told me this through repeatedly showing Minnie Mouse wearing a pink polka dot bow.
Last week I told you how the media tells us ‘what to think about’ but here the media was literally telling me ‘what to think’.
Moving to bigger issues other than Minnie Mouse’s bow, have you ever come across a piece of news which was presented differently on different news channels? Just last week, a hike in fuel prices led to a national strike in India. News channels mainly blamed it on political disputes. While one news channel blamed it on the leading political party, another blamed it on the opposition. As a viewer what am I supposed to gain out of this? The different news channels were telecasting the same news, but channeling it in two very different ways. So viewers that watched the channel where the leading party was being blamed believed that this was the cause, whereas the consumers who watched the channel where the opposition party was at fault, blamed them. However, the actual cause for the hike in fuel prices was nothing to do with political disputes. It was because of the depreciating value of the Indian Rupee against the US Dollar. To simply state, the media, more often than you would like, ‘frames’ us.
Media framing can simply be described as the angle or perspective from which a news story is told. The theory is often used to generate a negative impact on the audience. The word ‘frame’ itself suggests that the media is deliberately using a piece of information to draw objectionable attention to an issue. While news is often thought to be objective and value free this is rarely if ever the case. In fact most news stories are value laden in both their production and content. News is not an exact representation of reality but rather a reconstruction from various angles of a small section of reality. This is not to say journalists necessarily lie or consciously distort the truth, but that journalists by covering particular stories, using particular sources from a particular news angle are constructing reality through a selective process. Moreover they are constrained both by the work practices, constraints of resources and their relationship to shareholders and/or managers.
Consumers of news are impacted in two primary ways by mass media—what is referred to as agenda-setting and framing effects. Agenda-setting, like mentioned in the last post, is fairly straightforward—there has to be a basic consensus regarding what constitutes newsworthy items so elite media become the gatekeepers for what information we have access to. The agenda that is put forth by the media impacts consumers’ perceptions regarding issue importance and also how salient or on a person’s mind a given topic is. Although, Borah. P (2011) states that framing research has often been grouped with agenda setting and priming. All three approaches have been examined under the broad category of cognitive media effects. Framing effects have to do with the way that a given story is packaged and presented to consumers of news. It is strongly impacted by the language that is used to describe given events or ascribed to actors who are identified as critical features of a given story. Language is critical in these presentations because it serves as the cognitive framework in which we understand the world around us and in the case of exposure to news make sense of a given event or story. Thus in this regard, media plays a very significant role in how we perceive events based on their reporting. In the case of public acts of mass violence, there is a growing debate regarding when it is appropriate to use the term “terrorism” or “terrorist”. This is not merely an academic debate, what actors or actions we refer to as terrorist or terrorism versus using other terminology (e.g. “lone wolf,” “hate crime,” “public shooter,” etc.) has huge implications in shaping public perceptions of other groups, inciting stereotypes, and in validating or marginalizing the victims of such attacks.
A common critique of the corporate media today is that who or what is identified as terrorism is not based on an objective framework regarding the definition of terrorist acts, but rather, the specific demographics of the perpetrators of mass violence. For example, if the perpetrator is foreign born or Muslim, the act is far more likely to be labeled terrorism than other similarly waged acts of violence when the perpetrator is white or a citizen of the country in question. In line with this apparent disparity, the demographics of who is victimized in acts of mass violence also appears to impact how the violence is labeled.
We have all been a victim of this theory. Be it by the news media or by simply listening to the society telling us what they think is right. If you took notice, you would realize that all I have been doing in this post is framing the theory framing in a negative light. So it’s up to you to decide if you want to frame somebody’s opinion or continue to be framed. Don’t be afraid to ask the question, “Does this frame fit right?” Wear the frame that suits you! And I am not only talking about your eyeglasses. Because who am I to tell you if Ross’s shirt was pink or a faded salmon color.
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