Aliens and Framing

Like cinema, news also uses narratives to represent reality. Although many journalists claim that they only report a certain fact impartially, many researches revealed that the news are in fact constructed. By selecting the issue to be covered and deciding the form the story will be constructed, journalist are already framing and not only objectively reporting.

Framing thus can be done in relation to its content and to its form. When choosing what to cover and how to cover a certain issue, journalists are automatically influenced by their own experiences, racial, sexual and gender orientation as well as geographic and generational identities. The form this issue is going to be covered is exemplified by Marguerite Moritz. “The prominence given to that coverage in terms of headline size or minutes of airtime, as well as the choice of words, images, audio and video all plays a role in framing a story and thereby in influencing audience perceptions of content and meaning (Moritz, p.322)”.

Similarly, cinema industry also uses different forms of framing. If we watch the film Good Night, Good Luck, for instance, we will notice that the fact of being filmed in black and white, the portray of journalists as the heroes and the insertion of historical texts and archival images, are all elements of the framing work and hence contributed to the categorization of the film as a docudrama and gave some veracity to it.

Another specificity of news framing is denominating and stereotyping “aliens”, or in other words, foreigner cultures and peoples or unknown minorities and groups. These framings vary according to political and historical changes, as Marguerite Moritz has observed in her studies about the changing in the coverage of gay issues throughout the decades in the US media. In the 1980s, the gays were the “aliens” as they “(...) were typically framed as outside the mainstream, formulated routinely as the discursive other (Moritz, p.322). Initially, the reports portrayed gays as “sick, pervert and criminal” and only after several civil rights movements and the formation of many associations, the US media started to discuss other issues, even though not broadly, such as gay marriage and child adoption.

Other example of aliens is the US media and government framing of their enemies that have gone from the communists during the Cold War to the Arabs of the “War on Terror”. Films have also changed the nationality of their aliens throughout the years. While analysing the stereotyping of Arabs, Debra Merskin points out the role of Hollywood in vilification and uses Basinger (Lyman,2001,p.81) quotation to illustrate this. “We’ve had the IRA as villains, we’ve had the international drug dealers, we’ve had the Arabs, and we’ve had vague Asians who weren’t quite sure what country they were from (Merskin, p.164)”.

Furthermore, if we analyse most of the examples of news framing cited above we will notice that they will be most influential in shaping the audience’s perception of the world when the “alien” or the issue in question is unknown. Debra Merskin exemplifies the case of the Arab “aliens”, which there is a historical combination of (mis)information that has worked to construct an enemy image in the popular imagination. This can be similarly seen in Good Night, Good Luck’s portrayal of the communism paranoid by American society. Framing, thus, help us understand how journalists and films display values and judgments in the products they create.

As consequences of framing, voices may not be heard and some crisis and conflicts may be simply ignored by the media, like Darfur and Congo war, as well as some stories may be reported partially according to economical and political interests. Furthermore, it may cause hatred and xenophobism in a territory and may leave the world more troubled as it already is.