Agenda-Setting and Framing around Charlottesville Essay

Introduction

As people embrace the fruits of the digital revolution and the ever-present Internet, it has become increasingly more convenient to immerse oneself in the media narratives. It can be argued that when the media are one tap on the screen away, it is easier to be influenced by what they say. At the same time, it has become common knowledge that the media outlets do not only report, but also create the news. Through well-established practices of framing, building and setting the agenda, and cultivation, the media have become adept at manipulating the people’s cognitive heuristics. They often decide what the public sees and how the public sees it.

An August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was planned as a protest against the removal of historical artifacts from public places, namely a statue of General Robert E. Lee. It was seen as a way for right-wing political activists to band together against what they perceived to be the constant violation of their constitutional rights by the social-justice-oriented left. What actually happened was a march of tiki-torch wielding white supremacists that resulted in murder by car. The counter-protestors emerged as the primary victims of the debacle, as did the painful American heritage of the Civil Rights Movement. The media outlets that covered the event did not miss a chance to frame the event as an act of terrorism and heap the blame onto an eclectic set of culprits.

This case study will examine the publications in popular media that are explicitly about or mention Charlottesville, tying it to other racism-adjacent topics. It will be rooted in the existing literature on framing, agenda-setting, cultivation, and media salience. Charlottesville’s coverage in the popular media is an excellent example of how the media create narratives and themes to influence the readers using these tactics, which is why the study is based on them.

The sources will be examined using qualitative content analysis to extract abstract themes and their connections. The justification of the study’s theoretical importance is the implications that the media agenda has for the public and political agenda. This particular case involves whetting some irrational and false beliefs in the public with the increased salience of racist violence, which may result in the creation of misguided and overzealous policy.

Literature Review

The theoretical base for this study is comprised of academic works on agenda-setting, framing, and cultivation. Hallahan (1999) is an essential resource that provides an extensive overview of different types of framing. It helps analyze Charlottesville coverage as a combination of several types, as it was a complex issue that had many actors of varying valence. The author describes several key sources per each of the seven types of framing, and divides each type into subtypes, effectively summarizing extant research at the time of writing.

Dearing and Rogers (1996) explain the way the agenda is created from real-world issues, how media shape public perception, and how it all feeds into policy agenda. The authors present numerous existent studies in detail, giving the reader a comprehensive source of all agenda-related information available at the time. The source will allow the reader to track Charlottesville through the issue-attention cycle, and examine how the media shapes the public perception of everything related to it. This particular source explains that real-world information or scientific research is much less critical to the agenda-setting than media attention, and that media agenda often instigates institutional change.

Morgan and Shanahan (2010) describe how mass media shapes the views and attitudes of its consumers. They tie the representation of certain archetypes and ideas in television to the expressed attitudes of the viewers. While the TV-centric approach may be dated, it is not difficult to extrapolate onto other non-fictional types of media, especially considering the higher real-life connection. From the standpoint of the cultivation paradigm, if people are often told something about someone in the mass media, they begin to believe it, provided they have little real contact with it. That may justify the critical examination of the media, as harmful opinions may be translated to consumers through the carefree labeling of everything as racist.

Schildkraut and Gruenewald (2019) provide a very detailed account of how media handles extreme cases such as mass shootings. Their paper ties into the literature on agenda-setting, issue-attention cycle, and framing, supplementing the previous three sources. The authors’ focus on extreme violence that becomes associated with terrorism makes this a particularly good fit for this study. The source describes the way the media reacts to these extreme events and determines their salience in the public perception.

Finally, the article penned by Erlingsson and Brysiewicz (2017) provides easily-understandable and hands-on information on qualitative content analysis. The paper discusses degrees of abstraction, the formation of codes, and other practical aspects of performing this particular type of analysis. The authors instruct the readers on how to approach extracting a theme from the text, and even performing qualitative analysis in general. While it is a resource primarily for nurses and other medical practitioners, the methodology is easily extrapolated to media studies as well.

Media Analyzation

This study will focus on the articles in popular media outlets, such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Independent, The Guardian, Vox, and others. The articles will be grouped according to the issue-attention cycle, and what adjacent phenomena are mentioned. The main focus is examining how the undesirable and toxic context of Unite the Right rally is applied to tangentially-related actors and platforms, and how it serves to create a public agenda that is influenced by this process.

Several articles are already identified as good examples of the materials this study aims to examine. Romano (2020) manages to tie Charlottesville to Gamergate and Donald Trump in the same proverbial breath, charging American institutions with racism and misogyny three years after Charlottesville has commenced. She also presents her suggestions for policy changes that touch upon the perceived increased prevalence of racist groups in America and the Internet.

These suggestions are mirrored in policy suggestions by Fernandez (2018) that also want businesses to impose more rules on Internet users for fear of white supremacist violence. Allin (2017) takes a wholly different approach, publishing an article in a peer-reviewed journal that ties Charlottesville directly to Donald Trump. Whether deservedly so or not, it is apparent that there is a frame that most popular media prefer to repeat, trying to keep the racism of every social class perpetually salient.

Some articles in popular media outlets mention Charlottesville to this day, and they rarely mention it alone. As undesirable as an unchecked spree of hate crimes can be, it presented an excellent opportunity for the Democratic-leaning figures to pin Donald Trump to it, reinjecting his bigoted views into the agenda. Gamers, confusingly, have received their share of the blame too, perhaps in a drive to impose restrictions on online platforms.

While the wrongness and toxicity of Unite the Right are beyond debate, how the media continues to handle it raises some questions. It appears that the media (and other platforms) are not going to stop bringing Charlottesville back into the current agenda. It could be beneficial to find out why, and how their continual framing of the topic affects public perception and, more importantly, policymakers.

References

Allin, D. H. (2017). Charlottesville. Survival, 59(5), 201–212.

Dearing, J. W. & Rogers, E. M. (1996). Agenda-setting. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Erlingsson, C., & Brysiewicz, P. (2017). A hands-on guide to doing content analysis. African Journal of Emergency Medicine, 7(3), 93–99.

Fernandez, H. (2018). Curbing hate online: What companies should do now. Web.

Hallahan, K. (1999). Seven models of framing: Implications for public relations. Journal of Public Relations Research, 11(3), 205–242.

Morgan, M., & Shanahan, J. (2010). The state of cultivation. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 54(2), 337–355.

Romano, A. (2020). What we still haven’t learned from Gamergate. Web.

Schildkraut, J., & Gruenewald, J. (2019). Media salience and frame changes in the coverage of mass shootings: A comparison of ideological and non-ideological attacks. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 19(1), 62-89.