Critical Social Thinking: Policy and Practice, Vol. 2, 2010 School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Ireland Whose Frame Is It Anyway? A Semiotic Analysis of RTÉ Television News Mark Cullinane, BSocSc Abstract This article serves as an exploration of the extent, if at all, to which RTÉ Television News disproportionately embodies the attitudes, beliefs and assumptions of particular worldviews. Using a multiplicity of theoretical paradigms, the project sought to examine to what extent RTÉ News output could be considered ‘system-maintaining’ or ‘system-challenging’, and to detail the means by which the ‘preferred meaning’ of news- if one exists- is generated. Informed by the framework of framing/agenda- setting theory and semiotics, a combination of analyses were chosen and applied to uncover latent meanings embedded within news texts. A small selection of news texts concerning the nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank in January 2009 comprised the data sample. The textual analyses revealed a strong preponderance of system- maintaining frames; frequent editorialising; an absence of competing discursive positions; and a heavily episodic orientation that focused on personalities and near- term sequences of events rather than broader systems-level analysis. Keywords: mass communications; semiotics; framing; television news. Critical Social Thinking: Policy and Practice, Vol. 2, 2010 Introduction 'Communication is too often taken for granted when it should be taken to pieces' (Fiske, in Hartley, 1982, p.xiii) The idea that the mass media possesses power over its audiences is not a new one, indeed, it has become a cliché. Identifying the precise nature of this power, however, is not an easy process. Given that the mass media has been called the 'consciousness industry' (Enzensberger, 1974), comprehensive research into precisely how this information is produced, disseminated and received by audiences is surely of the utmost importance. In the inquiring spirit of John Fiske's exhortation above, this paper serves as an introduction to and a summary of a project that aimed at bringing to bear the insights of sociological perspectives in deconstructing the role played by the media in shaping public discourse around the pertinent and topical subjects of Ireland's recent and ongoing economic and political crises. That there has been such little examination of the role of the mass media in shaping and interpreting developments in these crises is deeply concerning, and reflects a general dearth of academic research on the practices of the Irish media. This project sought to contribute to the literature on the topic by refocusing the media effects debate through the prism of social constructionism. Scope Bearing in mind the need for a tightly defined focus for the research, the facet of the media that the project was confined to studying was television news broadcasts. This is a selection that can be justified in terms of the size of the audience that such broadcasts attract compared to many other forms of media and the high level of trust that is typically accorded to such broadcasts (BBC/Reuters/Media Centre, 2006). More specifically still, the project was confined to the study of Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ). My justification for selecting RTÉ Television News as the focus of the project is based on a number of factors. Firstly, despite the advent of the multichannel era, Critical Social Thinking | Applied Social Studies | University College Cork| http://cst.ucc.ie 2 Critical Social Thinking: Policy and Practice, Vol. 2, 2010 RTÉ retains both a commanding market share in terms of viewership figures and an enviable record in terms of levels of public trust (TNS-mrbi, 2006). That survey's headline finding was that '77% of the Irish public regards RTÉ Television News as its main source of both Irish and international news.' Furthermore, RTÉ's public service obligations mean that it has to operate 'in the public interest, providing News and Current Affairs that is fair and impartial, accurate and challenging' (RTÉ, 2008). This combination of extensive national audience penetration, aura of authenticity, and specific legal obligations for impartiality made RTÉ News an attractive prospect for study. Theoretical Framework The project is positioned within what McQuail (1994) called the 'social constructivist' tradition of media effects. This research paradigm emphasises the socially constructed nature of news, and attaches great importance to the processes by which it is produced and packaged. My methodology draws heavily from the highly influential work of the Glasgow University Media Group, who, following the social constructivist tradition, emphasised the centrality of the agenda-setting and framing powers of the media as critically important processes. These refer to the deliberate or accidental transmission of norms and ideological formations by emphasising some aspects of a news story and suppressing others. Edelman's observation that 'The social world is...a kaleidoscope of potential realities, any of which can be readily evoked by altering the ways in which observations are framed and categorised' (1993, p.232) highlights the interconnected roles of framing, salience and emphasis in shaping our understanding of events. Underpinning this is the idea that there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ frame: all language is ideologically invested at some level. Thus,as highlighted by the influential contemporary frame theorist Robert Entman (1993, p. 52), a typical news report does not (and cannot) merely lay out the ‘facts’ in an objective fashion, but is framed in a way that typically 'defines problems', 'diagnoses causes', 'makes moral judgements” and 'suggests remedies'. RTÉ's public service obligations entail requirements for impartiality and balance. This necessitates a carefully considered research methodology that focuses on the Critical Social Thinking | Applied Social Studies | University College Cork| http://cst.ucc.ie 3 Critical Social Thinking: Policy and Practice, Vol. 2, 2010 production of meaning at its most elemental level. The perspective adopted here does not reduce media representation and production simply to blatant ideological bias, but rather recognises that the transmission of norms and ideologies can occur whilst remaining within the strictures of formal rules about balance and impartiality. My chosen methods are fundamentally oriented to pinpoint critical loci of meaning- making within television news. Methodology Formulating a Methodology My stated aim is to investigate the extent to which RTÉ news is system maintaining, defined in this project as the implicit or explicit advocacy and/or preservation of taken-for-granted assumptions and prevailing orthodoxies. This will be explored through an investigation of Hall's (1977) assertion that the media frame events using a very limited 'ideological or explanatory repertoire'. A key supposition of this research is that the search for meaning within texts involves studying language use 'beyond the boundaries of a sentence, utterance, or statement' (Stubbs, 1983, p.1). If searching for meaning in texts is about reading between the lines as well as the lines themselves, quantitative analysis is evidently not fit for purpose. Yet, the difficulties with qualitative analysis of understanding how meaning is generated in media texts have been well documented. From the literature I have read on developing methodologies for studying framing, it has become apparent that identifying frames within texts can be a process fraught with guesswork, imprecision and inferential assumptions (Johnston, 1995). In an effort to avoid these pitfalls, my chosen methodology emphasises transparency and methodological diversity which substantially reduces the scope for the researcher's bias to influence and distort the results. However, it is vital to note that this project does not aim to somehow reveal objective truths from the mists of media obfuscation but rather explore, from a social constructionist perspective, the processes that mediate the production and representation of media messages. Based on the recognition that all language is invested with ideology and meaning, I have chosen to augment 'traditional' content and discourse analysis with semiotic Critical Social Thinking | Applied Social Studies | University College Cork| http://cst.ucc.ie 4 Critical Social Thinking: Policy and Practice, Vol. 2, 2010 analysis. Semiotics is based on the premise that like languages, texts of all kinds have codes, conventions, grammar and syntaxes that are the conveyors of meaning. Bignell (2002, p.112) notes that 'the representation of reality offered by TV news is not reality itself, but reality mediated by the signs, codes, myths and ideologies of news'. This project was concerned with identifying these processes of mediation that fundamentally shape the genesis of meaning within news texts. Research Question Reflecting this project's status as an undergraduate dissertation, the need for a tightly- focused research agenda was self-evident. My choice was also influenced by the desire to incorporate framing and agenda-setting theory into the methodology. As already indicated, I wish to examine the output of RTÉ Television News to see what sort of frames, if any, predominate. I wish to study to what extent the 'doxa' (Bourdieu, 1977) or collection of beliefs and attitudes of RTÉ Television News incorporates a plurality of perspectives. My research question therefore seeks to examine to what