The Application of a Master Frame: Tracing the War on Terror in the Irish Times 2001-8

Abstract

 This research was made possible by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS). Introduction THE ‘WAR ON TERROR’ has surely been one of the most analysed phenomenona in political communication during the first decades of the st century. That this might be so is perhaps unsurprising given its prominence and its impact on domestic and international politics during this period. It has increasingly been regarded as the new ordering principle of international relations (Archetti, ).The phenomenon has been identified as a ‘master frame’ akin to the ‘cold war’ (Hackett, ; Kuypers, Cooper and Althouse, ) which dominated political discourse in the latter half of the th century. Snow and Benford () originally used the term ‘master frame’ in their analysis of social movements to signify ‘political and cultural shorthand, used to unify a broad movement and instil political agency’. Meyer () later sought to expand its significance beyond social movement politics, using the term to describe a more comprehensive worldview where a master frame will have resonance both within mainstream political discourse and movement politics (Meyer, ). In this regard Norris et al. () note that the fall of the Berlin wall and the replacement of the Cold War frame with the newer ‘war on terror’ frame offered ‘a way for American politicians and journalists to construct a narrative to make sense of a range of diverse stories about international security, civil wars and global conflict’ (Norris, Kern and Just, ). This paper proposes to address a lacuna in the framing literature by studying how and in what context the master frame of the ‘war on terror’ was used in newspaper coverage. To date the literature on framing has been predominantly focused on either content (e.g., frames in news), framing effects, or the interplay between the two – what Scheufele () called frame setting. However, little research has been conducted on the context in which a frame is used or invoked and for what purposes. In seeking to address this objective in the press, utilising a newspaper with an agendasetting role is preferable. This choice to focus on an elite newspaper reflects what other communications scholars have observed: that stories tend to spread vertically within the news industry, with editors at regional media outlets often deferring to elite newspapers and newswires to set the national news agenda (Gitlin, ). In this paper it is proposed to use the Irish Times as the object of study for a couple of reasons. Firstly, international news research has typically been dominated by large ‘elite’ nations such as the US and the UK (Lazarsfeld, ; Tsang, Tsai and Liu, ) and thus the perspectives of smaller and more peripheral countries THE APPLICATION OF A MASTER FRAME: Tracing the ‘War on Terror’ in the Irish Times 2001–81