The Devil is in the Framing: Analyzing Framing Strategies and Frame-Differences During the Pillar of Defense

Abstract

In this study the differences in framing between the news media and the political public relations during a political conflict – the “Pillar of Defense” – were analyzed by applying the diagnostic, prognostic and mobilization framing tasks of Snow and Benford (1988). Also the use of moralization and justification, and their fit within this framework was examined. A deductive coding scheme was designed in order to perform a content analysis, drawing from newspapers from the United States, the Netherlands and Israel. In addition, the press releases and speeches by the main political leaders of Israel were analyzed. Besides the content analysis, statistical tests were conducted in SPSS to examine the correlations between the framework, justification and moralization. None of the correlations were statistically significant. The conclusion of the research is that the political Public Relations (PR) use the diagnostic and the mobilization frames more often than the news media do, however the news media use more prognostic frames than the political PR. Furthermore, the diagnostic frame uses the most justifications and the mobilization frames the most moralizations, compared to the total three framing tasks.