Running Head: DYNAMIC FRAMING in TIMES of CRISIS 1
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Running head: DYNAMIC FRAMING IN TIMES OF CRISIS 1 MASTER’S THESIS Dynamic framing in times of crisis Investigating frame building and frame alignment of news media and the public in a violent crime crisis University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Communication Master in Political Communication (MSc.) Supervisor: Dr. Marjolein Moorman Student: Thilo Schröder Student ID: 11190043 Date of completion: 28 June 2017 DYNAMIC FRAMING IN TIMES OF CRISIS 2 Abstract In times of crisis, communications are an important means for news media and the public to forge an understanding of the crisis and to negotiate crisis meaning. However, so far, remarkably little is understood about how these actors (collectively) make sense of crisis situations. This study aims to advance the understanding of these communicative processes by focusing on the concepts of frame building and frame alignment. The 2016 Munich shooting crisis, one of the most severe violent crimes in recent German history, offers a suitable test case. A method innovation of semantic-network analysis is conducted to automatically identify frames present in German public social media manifestations (N = 3256) and news articles (N = 325) over different crisis stages. First, the study documents the dynamic character of crisis framing amongst news media and the public over time. Second, results reveal that the news media and the public align their frames after initially deviating from one another in the frame building process. The actors’ frames eventually de-align again, restoring actor-specific framing patterns. The results imply that the actors involved in collective sensemaking to drive the communicative resolution of the crisis. They do so by coming to a common understanding, thereby potentially signalling the communicative closure of the crisis. The study contributes to the growing body of literature in crisis communication that emphasizes the complex dynamics of crisis-meaning construction and framing between actors. DYNAMIC FRAMING IN TIMES OF CRISIS 3 Introduction Societies are frequently confronted with crisis situations that inflict major disruptions upon public life, increase uncertainty and endanger public safety. Major violent attacks, like mass shootings, belong to such events that hit societies unexpectedly. Violent crimes foremost affect the public, endangering citizens’ safety and emotionally touching them (Liu, Austin & Jin, 2011). At the same time, mass shootings are an attractive item for news media (Lerbinger, 2011), triggering multiple news values like unexpectedness, ambiguity and conflict (Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Harcup & O’Neill, 2001). Facing a rapidly unfolding violent attack, news media and the public may therefore perceive the situation as a crisis and try to socially (co-)construct its meaning in their communications (Schultz & Raupp, 2010; Schultz, Kleinnijenhuis, Oegema, Utz & Attenveld, 2012). In the context of today’s mediatized society, the actors’ communications are thus an important mean of influencing the magnitude, evolution and consequences of a crisis (e.g. Kleinnijenhuis, Schultz, Utz & Oegema, 2015). To understand their roles in times of crisis, it is thus crucial to develop inquiries about how news media and the public make sense of them. To advance our understanding of these sensemaking processes, framing theory offers a powerful body of literature to study the actors’ crisis communication patterns over time (Entman, 1993; Hellsten, Dawson & Leydesdorff, 2010). Frames highlight certain aspects of the actors’ understanding of the crisis in their communications (Entman, 1993), implying that they can thus also direct attention to certain aspects and withhold others (McCombs, 2005). Studying frame building, i.e. which frames the actors construct, can therefore help gain crucial insights into how both actors make sense of a crisis (Schultz et al., 2012). News media play a pivotal role in making information on a crisis visible to the public, not only by selecting what to include in a news story, but also by framing the crises under their professional routines and context (Holland, Sweet, Blood & Fogarty, 2014). On the other side, the public has gained significant power in framing crises online through the advent of social DYNAMIC FRAMING IN TIMES OF CRISIS 4 media in recent years (Neuman, Guggenheim, Mo Jang & Bae, 2014), most notably in close temporal proximity to quickly evolving events (Sung & Hwang, 2014). In this sense, studying public frames is relevant because they may contest media frames by introducing different attributes of the crisis based on people’s personal values (Liu, 2010). Given these different social roles, the relevant question arises how, if at all, news media and the public distinctly make sense of crisis situations. Beyond that, the question gains in relevance considering the dynamic character of a crisis: Since temporal stages of crisis are associated with certain communicative functions (e.g. decreasing uncertainty, settling responsibility; see Reynolds & Seeger, 2005), some frames may resemble these functions more than others and therefore fluctuate or prevail in salience over time. Thus, it is crucial to know how constructed frames of news media and the public evolve per actor over time. To advance the understanding of how news media and the public may collectively make sense of a crisis, the concept of frame alignment is useful (Snow, Rochford, Worden & Benford, 1986; van der Meer, Verhoeven, Beentjes & Vliegenthart, 2014). In the context of crisis research, frame alignment can be understood as the temporary rapprochement in the actors’ framing (van der Meer et al., 2014). The temporary similarity in frame building can denote the actors’ common interpretations about the events (Snow et al., 1986; Hellsten et al., 2010). This can have essential implications for the trajectory of the crisis, as the alignment may provide issue coherence and indicate the communicative end of a crisis (van der Meer et al., 2014), outlining its relevance as a central construct to understand collective sensemaking. However, despite the outlined relevance, extant crisis communication research has deficits when it comes to describing the dynamic framing process of news media and the public. First, although framing analysis has a prominent history in crisis communication research, the field has been dominated by organization-centric studies (Coombs, 2010; Bundy, Pfarrer & Coombs, 2011), widely neglecting the role of news media and the public in crisis framing (Kleinnijenhuis et al., 2015). Despite its gain in framing power, especially the public DYNAMIC FRAMING IN TIMES OF CRISIS 5 has been widely overlooked as a relevant actor (Wigley & Fontenot, 2010). Additionally, news media have predominantly been studied in terms of their unidirectional effects on recipients rather than how they frame a crisis (e.g. Coombs & Holldaday, 2008; Schultz, Utz & Göritz, 2011). Given this lacking knowledge about the frame building process of news media and the public, inductive research is needed to establish present frames of these actors. Second, while crisis literature acknowledges the dynamic nature of crisis evolution and resolution in temporal crisis stages (Fink, 1986; Coombs, 2010), scholars note a lack of research concerning the frame development of actors over time in these aspects (Schultz et al., 2012; Sung & Hwang, 2014). Hence, it remained largely unclear how the news media’s and the public’s frames evolve over different stages of a crisis. Third, scholars have just begun to describe patterns of crisis frame alignment between news media and the public. Studies have thus far linked alignment between news media and the public either solely qualitatively (van der Meer & Verhoeven, 2013) or in organizational crises to each other (van der Meer et al., 2014). Therefore, the quantitative validation of frame alignment in a public crisis case remains absent from the literature. Filling these research gaps, this study aims to provide insight into the dynamic framing process of the news media and the public by addressing their frame building processes and frame alignment patterns during a violent crime crisis. Therefore, the research question guiding this study reads as follows: Which frames are present in the crisis communications of news media and the public, how do they evolve over time and do they align? To appropriately address this research question, a method innovation of semantic- network analysis (Hellsten et al., 2010; Vlieger & Leydesdorff, 2012) was applied on the 2016 Munich shooting to study the dynamic frame building processes of German news media and public social media manifestations. DYNAMIC FRAMING IN TIMES OF CRISIS 6 Theoretical Framework Theoretical context of crisis literature In line with the dominance of organization-centric studies in the field of crisis communication, research has conceptualized crises most commonly as the “perception of an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders and can seriously impact an organization’s performance and generate negative outcomes” (Coombs, 2010, p. 19). Consequently, a significant amount of studies has inquired how affected organizations can manage and respond to crisis situations effectively (Coombs & Holladay, 2008; Claeys & Cauberghe, 2014), how crises affect organizational reputation (Coombs, 2007; Schultz et al., 2012) or financial performance (van der Meer & Vliegenthart, 2017). However, it can be argued that organization-centred approaches fail to adequately