Framing Of Crisis Research Articles

Increasing Support for Climate Action Among Older People:An Experiment on the Use of Generational Frames by the Youth Climate Movement

ABSTRACT The need for urgent and decisive climate action means that environmental communication cannot be divorced from strategic communication. As such, the literature has examined how the youth social movement’s strategic framing of the climate crisis rallied millions into demanding climate action. However, these studies have not investigated the factors driving these framing strategies’ success or compared their effectiveness to those of other environmental movements. In turn, this paper investigated if generational frames – predominantly used by the youth climate movement to highlight the generational injustices of climate change – are more effective than humankind frames – those emphasising that climate change affects humankind as a whole – in increasing support for climate action, and the role of age and generational identification strength in these effects. Results from a survey experiment (N = 767) supported that both frames increase support for climate action. However, generational frames are most effective among young people who strongly identify with their generational ingroup. Conversely, humankind frames were most influential among older low identifiers. Findings highlight the limits of the youth climate movement’s strategic use of generational frames, as their message resonates primarily with other young people. Implications for strategic framing and how to achieve widespread support for climate action are discussed.

The Humanitarian Crisis in the Media: Framing Analysis of Rohingya-Related International News Using BERTopic

ABSTRACT The Rohingya crisis is one of the most severe humanitarian tragedies of our time, yet its portrayal in international media often lacks justification. Utilizing BERTopic, a transformer-based semi-supervised topic modeling technique, we analyzed 8,074 news articles about the Rohingya crisis, spanning newspapers from ten countries between 2009 and 2023. We aimed to observe the framing of the Rohingya crisis across countries and track frames’ evolution over time. We identified eleven frames: Politics, Departure, Repatriation, Human Rights, Resettlement, Refuge, Relief, Crisis, Retribution, Condolence, and Press Freedom, with the Political frame as the most frequent. Notably, host and non-host countries differed in framing the crisis, with Retribution and Crisis frames exclusive to host countries’ media, while Resettlement and Press Freedom frames were exclusive to non-host countries’ media. Host countries focused on Repatriation, Human Rights, and Relief news, whereas non-host countries prioritized Politics, Departure, and Refuge frames. Additionally, neighboring host countries were less likely to publish news on Resettlement. Changes in frames displayed significant variability across countries, indicating a lack of consistently identifiable patterns and suggesting that news media's framing habits may prioritize national interests over the chronological progression of the crisis.

Media Framing of COVID-19 Crisis in Print Media

Since the coronavirus outbreak, the Media houses have focused on the health crisis fittingly. The news of the pandemic spread faster than the virus itself. The impact of media does not only originate with what information is being disseminated but also how it is framed. It gives Mass Media the credit for forming Public Opinion. This study aims to determine and compare the dominant frames in coverage of COVID-19 news. Based on readership and popularity, two English and two Hindi newspapers are selected. The study, descriptive in nature, uses Content Analysis as a tool of analysis. With the deductive approach, the researcher considered pre-determined frames (extracted from the previous literature) analyzed and compared the stories according to them. The time frame of this study was two months, starting from April 1, when the second wave in India intensified, to May 31, 2021. The unit of analysis included all articles, features, and columns published within the time frame. It was discovered that the Hope frame (18.4%) and Fear frame (16.8%) dominated the overall study. It was also found that there were similarities and differences in framing used by both English and Hindi newspapers.

Inflation of crisis coverage? Tracking and explaining the changes in crisis labeling and crisis news wave salience 1785–2020

Abstract Has there been an inflation in crisis coverage in newspapers over the last centuries, and if so, what structural factors drive this change? We utilize computational text analyses along with our own signal detection algorithm to measure the presence of crisis keywords and the emergence of crisis news waves. An analysis of crisis coverage in The Times (U.K., 1785–2020, 183,239 news stories) shows that the share of coverage that uses crisis keywords has increased, though not steadily. The number and salience of crisis news waves tied to discernible events has increased at a slower pace. The hypothesized driving forces—government expansion, mediatization of politics, and the activity of crisis frame sponsors—explain the development well and allow accurate predictions even when ignoring time in the forecasting model. Crisis coverage seems to reflect not so much the problems society faces, but society’s identity, priorities, and outlook on the world.

The Try Guys Try Cheating: Social Media Influencers in Crisis

The Try Guys are social media influencers who were in crisis when member Ned Fulmer cheated on his wife and affected their brand. The Try Guys’ followers took to social media to express their thoughts and give advice about the Try Guys brand. This study explored the relationship between social media influencers and their followers, how those influencers talk about their personal brand during a crisis, and how followers aid in reputational repair. The theories were parasocial interaction and Situational Crisis Communication Theory. A content analysis of posts and comments on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube was conducted. The findings showed crisis frames in the Try Guys’ posts were different from their followers’ comments. The Try Guys focused on justification, ingratiation and victimage, whereas the followers scapegoated the woman involved in the affair instead of her married boss. Implications for public relations, social media, and parasocial interaction are offered.

Understanding the Political Frames of the Opioid Crisis: A Content Analysis of U.S. Senators’ Tweets

ABSTRACT The opioid epidemic in the United States is a public health emergency that has triggered calls to action for policy reforms. However, variations exist between political parties and policymakers on how this issue is communicated to the public. With the substantial growth in the use of social media by policymakers as a tool for disseminating policy-related information affecting their constituents, examining their communication strategies on public health emergency issues is imperative. To better understand how U.S. Senate members use Twitter (now known as X) to communicate opioid-related issues, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of their opioid-related tweets (N = 697) from January 1 to August 25 2022. Findings reveal a significant political divide regarding how senators characterize the opioid crisis, influencing user engagement on Twitter. Guided by the moral foundation theory, the results suggest that Democratic senators were more likely to employ care/harm or fairness/cheating moral foundations, relative to Republican senators, who used more loyalty/betrayal or authority/subversion. Additionally, Democratic senators framed the opioid crisis as a health or policy issue, relative to Republican senators’ immigration/border frame. For inclusion of information sources, Democratic senators included significantly more health sources compared to Republican senators’ use of media or law enforcement sources. Issue frame and source type significantly influenced user engagement in the form of likes and retweets. These findings provide both practical and theoretical implications.

“Fighting demons”: Stigma and shifting norms in explicit mention of overdose in obituaries, 2010–2019

Obituaries are often the only published record of an individual's life and elicit community reactions, including stigmatization. Because obituaries are typically written by the bereaved, their content reflects the writer's perceptions of mores governing the social context of the next-of-kin and decedent. When a cause of death is stigmatized, it can influence the way the bereaved write the obituary. However, what constitutes a stigmatized cause of death may change as larger societal discourses of morality shift and conditions or events become framed differently. Using a sample of obituaries (N = 210) from obituary aggregator Legacy.com of “off-time,” or premature, deaths in West Virginia from 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019, this article explores whether the presentation of overdose deaths in obituaries changes alongside the shift in the public framing of the opioid crisis as medical rather than criminal. I find obituaries including terms associated with drug use and overdose become both more common and explicit over the course of the study period. This suggests that the shift in public framing of the opioid crisis from criminalization to medicalization corresponds with a decrease in drug stigmatization in obituaries. Obituary analysis can be a useful means of exploring the stigmatization of other controversial causes of death, such as suicide, cirrhosis, and lung cancer.

Framing the housing crisis: politicization and depoliticization of the Dutch housing debate

How does a housing crisis become a crisis? In answering this question, this paper turns to framing in public and political debate. The case is the Netherlands where in the decade following the Global Financial Crisis the debate on housing quickly developed. Drawing on a discursive analysis of parliamentary documents, newspaper items, and interviews, the paper reveals how a housing crisis frame became central in debate, through a sequence of incubation, development and escalation. These debates shown signs of politicization as they increasingly emphasize the structural causes and political roots of the current situation, while also framing housing as primarily a fundamental right rather than a market commodity. This politicization, however, is matched by depoliticizing tendencies as relatively much attention is directed to the housing issues of the middle classes and young adults. Findings help us understand how housing struggles are understood, and which policies are deemed acceptable and necessary.

The Evolution of Crisis Frames in the European Commission’s Institutional Communication (2003–2022)

Historical accounts of the EU recurrently turn to crisis as a periodizing or structuring concept, reflecting the observation made by scholars that crisis has become a permanent feature of the social construction of our social and political reality. The concept of crisis can also be exploited for strategic purposes by political actors pursuing various policy agendas. Our article analyzes the discursive uses of crises by one of the central institutions of the EU, the European Commission, based on a corpus of press releases that referred to crisis (<em>N = </em>4,414) going back two decades (2003–2022). Thus, our article examines crisis as a political language and its discursive uses. We ask: (a) how salient is the topic of “crisis” in the European Commission’s communication; (b) what are the main domains in which the crisis frame has been activated, from geographical scope to policy areas; (c) how did the deployment of crisis frames change in time along major policy areas like economy, migration, or climate change; and (d) in what terms has the crisis-frame been activated, and how does crisis word use vary by region and policy area. Methodologically, we pursue these research questions using text-as-data methods, combining natural language processing tools for identifying geographical scopes, actors, and policy areas with corpus methods for identifying keywords and collocates and manually coding the latter, relying on qualitative and quantitative reasoning. Our research contributes to understanding the dynamics of EU policy framing in times of crisis.

Media-induced emotions and message sidedness in corporate crises

PurposeThis study examines the interplay between media-induced emotional crisis framing (anger vs sadness) and message sidedness of crisis response on publics’ attribution of crisis responsibility as well as subsequent company evaluation and supportive behavioral intention.Design/methodology/approachA 2 (emotion: anger vs sadness) x 2 (crisis response: one-sided vs two-sided) online experiment was conducted among 161 participants in the USA.FindingsResults showed that anger-inducing media framing of the crisis elicited higher levels of crisis responsibility attribution and more negative company evaluation, compared with sadness-inducing media framing. One-sided message response was more effective than two-sided message response in lowering attribution of crisis responsibility when sadness was induced, but no difference was found under the anger-induced condition. Attribution of crisis responsibility fully mediated the effects of emotional crisis framing on company evaluation and supportive behavioral intention toward the company.Originality/valueThis study is among the first to examine the interaction effect between emotional media framing and response message sidedness in an ambiguous crisis. Drawing on the interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, this study integrates the situational crisis communication theory, appraisal-tendency framework and message sidedness in persuasion literature. As such, it contributes to theoretical development in crisis communication and offers communication managers guidance on how to effectively address emotionally framed crises.

U.S. administration’s press communications on Tunisia after the July 25, 2021 ‘state of exception’: The shaping of urgency discourse

July 25, 2021 was an exceptional day in Tunisia, ushering in a new chapter in its contemporary political history and triggering a wave of global responses to the declared ‘state of exception’. This research examines the U.S. administration’s press communications on Tunisia following this event. Specifically, it explores (i) the dominant crisis frames permeating these communications and their underlying political agenda and (ii) the extent to which the discourse they imparted signals a change in U.S. foreign policy towards Tunisia in crisis situations. To meet these research objectives, a corpus-based investigation was undertaken using an integrative framework combining qualitative (frames) and quantitative (keyness and collocations) approaches. Results revealed changing discourses around the theme of crisis, moving from a sense of togetherness to urgency. This may echo the cautious attitude of the American government and its heightened concern about Kais Saied’s transitional measures. In broad terms, the exploration offered a glimpse of how the dynamics of global politics unfold discursively. Importantly, the Biden administration’s construction of Tunisia’s political-democratic crisis in terms of urgency can have real-life consequences for international perceptions of the country’s future. Theoretically, the study’s implications touch primarily upon Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS, henceforth), particularly the evolving corpus linguistics concepts of keyness and collocation networks.

Crisis and Collectives Shaping Art Events

Art events like biennials and large-scale exhibitions typically strive to address urgent, timely issues; curatorial approaches respond to various crises from the environment and war to Indigenous rights – notwithstanding the way existing exhibition structures often reproduce exploitative relations or other forms of everyday precarity. In our analysis of crisis, we eschew the concept of crisis as a disruptive event with a clear end for a framing of crisis as a condition. Especially for art events on the ‘periphery’, working under conditions of crisis is hardly new. We investigate the collective practices of three artist collectives, ruangrupa (Indonesia), Womanifesto (Thailand), and Atis Rezistans/Ghetto Biennale (Haiti). In practices like sharing resources, centring non-productivity and giving attention to nourishment and health, these collectives are reshaping art events from events that matter in terms of their pursuits of relevance towards events that care.

California Civil Asset Forfeiture and the Policing of Minority Residents

In Who Are the Criminals?, John Hagan argues that legislators use “crisis framing” to influence how the general public thinks about crime. President Ronald Reagan used reports of a drug use epidemic fueled by organized crime as part of his crisis framing. In 1984, he signed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act (CCCA) as part of his “war on drugs.” The CCCA allowed law enforcement to use civil asset forfeiture (CAF) to keep or sell property that it suspected was connected to illegal activity. State legislators followed suit and passed their own CAF laws. Some critics argue that law enforcements’ use of CAF has disproportionately targeted minority populations. We draw on racial threat theory to examine connections between the size of minority populations and the use of CAF in California. Our analysis uses nineteen years of CAF cases filed with the California Attorney General’s Office. Consistent with racial threat theory, we find a positive association between the number of forfeitures in a jurisdiction and a logged measure of the percentage of Black residents, net of crime, and other jurisdiction attributes. Our results support concerns that law enforcement has incorporated CAF as a technique used disproportionately against some minority communities.

Framing Asylum at the Local Level: Experts’ Narratives of Conflictual Dynamics in the Post-Reception Period in Italy

AbstractStudies on the framing of the refugee crisis have focused on media and political discourses, revealing contrasting views and an increasing politicization of immigration. However, the framing-of-asylum discourse in relation to the reception and settlement of asylum seekers in local communities has so far received less attention, especially when conflictual dynamics emerge. This article investigates the ways in which experts at different levels make sense of how the refugee crisis has unfolded in local communities in Italy. Insofar as asylum governance has become a contentious issue, it looks at conflictual situations. The research challenges the binary between humanitarian and fear frames by suggesting the prevalence of a managerialist frame focusing on a problematic implementation of asylum policies. Taking into consideration the opinions of local experts, it also reveals a shift from a fear frame to an inconvenience frame, which denies xenophobic discourses on invasion or social/public disorder in local communities, but finds other reasons to deny acceptance. The article also adds to the study of the horizontal dynamics between public and private actors, which are central, especially at the local level, and introduces refugees as subjects who actively participate in the “battleground” of asylum governance. Therefore, claims about a negotiated order between different tiers of governance within the multilevel governance approach are challenged.

Blurring Context and One-Sided: Kompas.com in Framing the West Papua Crisis

In September 2021, the conflict between West Papuan separatist groups and the Indonesian National Army (TNI) heated up. Kompas.com, one of Indonesia's media with the most extensive readership, contributes significantly to public understanding and perception of the West Papua crisis. This study aims to examine how Kompas.com frames the West Papua crisis on 7-30 September 2021. Framing analysis examines three important aspects of news framing: crisis frames, thematic and episodic frames, and news sources. The news regarding the West Papua crisis on 7-30 September 2020 was only filled with three frames: conflict, attribution of responsibility, and human interest. Kompas.com has tried to provide space for parties with a moderate position in the conflict, such as the Indonesian Medical Association (IDI), Komnas HAM (National Commission on Human Rights), and Kontras (The Commission for Disappeared and Victims of Violence). However, in general, the news is still very much dominated by news sources from the Indonesian government and the military and not using enough thematic frames. Kompas.com needs to be more comprehensive to report on the crisis in West Papua during the reporting period of 7-30 September 2020. Kompas.com also does not elaborate that the Free Papua movement is plural and fragmentary, with a spectrum of violent movements to peace movements. The conclusion of this study, Kompas.com tends to blur the context of the West Papua crisis, which risks limiting and directing public understanding of the West Papua crisis to exist within the government's frame.

Media Framing of the Refugee Crisis at the Periphery of Europe

The recent European refugee crisis, which began in 2015, has generated academic interest in how media portray and frame migrations and refugees, specifically in their influence on how “We” perceive and accept “Them” in “Our” societies. However, research primarily focuses on EU member states and destination/receiving countries. Therefore, our study examines media framing of the refugee crisis in Serbia between 2015 and 2016. Building on frames previously identified in the Western context, we pre-defined three frames: viewing the refugee crisis as a problem for the political system, society, or refugees. These frames were coded as external/internal based on whether the media text discussed the crisis outside/inside Serbia. Our deductive análisis shows that framing differs from destination countries, with a minimal emphasis on social problems in Serbia. Political issues and challenges faced by refugees were dominant but externalized, showing a slight decline over time compared to the social problem frame, which followed real events. Furthermore, our inductive thematic analysis reveals a new way of framing refugees as a problema for the free movement of our citizens. It also reveals a meta-frame of “Us” (in Serbia) as acting in a humanitarian manner amid hard circumstances created by “Them” (Western politicians) who are not handling the crisis in line with the EU values.

Pandemic preparedness with 20/20 vision: Applying an intersectional equity lens to health workforce planning.

Human resource for health (HRH) is considered critical for achieving Universal Health Coverage, and the crisis surrounding HRH is now established as a global emergency. Their vital role has been central in the pandemic response. Yet, the discussions and deliberations on the recent pandemic treaty circumscribe HRH discussions to their capacities and protection, and address discrimination mainly in relation to gender. While this paper endorses the case for prioritisation of HRH in global pandemic preparedness planning, it re-frames the HRH crisis in relation to the institutional and structural factors driving HRH shortage, maldistribution and skills-needs misalignment. We critique the supply-and-demand framing of HRH crisis as one that obliviates the systematic inequalities within health systems that underpin health workforce motivations, distribution, satisfaction and performance. We propose an intersectional equity lens to redefine the HRH challenges, understand their underlying drivers and accordingly integrate in the global pandemic preparedness plans.

Crisis Response Strategy of PT. Angkasa Pura II on the News of Health Protocol Violations at Soekarno-Hatta Airport

Thursday, May 14th, 2020, the public was shocked by the occurrences of violations of health protocol during the pandemic Covid-19 at Soekarno-Hatta Airport. At that time, the government was relaxing the Large-Scale Social Restrictions (PSBB) by re-activating public transportation modes. Reports in the mass media and social media cornered PT. Angkasa Pura II, the airport administrator, is a party that is negligent in managing flight schedules and rules for maintaining distance at the airport. This research objective was to identify the crisis response strategy carried out by PT Angkasa Pura II to overcome the negative news resulting from the incident of health protocol violations at Soekarno-Hatta Airport. The study discusses crisis response strategies derived from Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). This research method is qualitative. Research data was obtained through interviews, observation, and literature study. The results of this research, AP II crisis response strategies were, (1) rebuilding, the rebuilding response strategy AP II was conducted with an apology. (2) Take corrective actions, AP II made some physical improvements, increasing field staff and warning signs for applicating health protocols in public spaces. And (3) diminishment, the diminishment response strategy AP II was conducted by submitting excuses and justifications. AP II attempts crisis framing by disseminating information about the company's efforts and commitments that are disseminated through the company's website and social media. This step aims to make the public aware of the company's positive efforts to deal with the crisis and the public also understands that AP II has no intention of committing violations.

Constructing the global sand crisis: Four reasons to interrogate crisis and scarcity in narrating extraction

Geographers and political ecologists have shown how environmental crises present opportunities for critique and action. In this Viewpoint, I outline the sand crisis as it has been presented and raise four concerns about what the current sand crisis framing accomplishes. I argue that what critical attention to ‘crisis’ in the case of the global sand crisis reveals is a reinforcement of particular values and the power held by held by certain actors. I suggest that ‘sand scholars’ attend to the construction of crisis, who is included and how, because this has the potential to advance the more generative elements of crisis to reveal inequality and critique power. This analysis contributes to critical geographies of crisis by highlighting not only the gaps in global sand governance, but the myriad scales of and responses to sand extraction, and the increasing role of non-state international bodies like NGOs in the construction and governance of environmental crisis.

Visual themes and frames of the Rohingya crisis: newspaper content from three countries neighboring Myanmar

The ongoing Rohingya refugee crisis that originated in Myanmar has displaced over a million people since the 1990s (UNHCR, nd, ‘Rohingya refugee emergency at a glance’). This article examines visuals of Rohingya refugees from the latest round of violence beginning August 2017 that has led to the exodus of nearly 750,000 refugees to countries in South and Southeast Asia. Images are from reliable newspapers of three countries in that region. The study identifies prominent visual themes, examines image sources and investigates whether visualizations changed over time. By analyzing media images through a content analysis and textual analysis, the author’s goal is to contribute to the complex area of visual framing in which journalists, news outlets, audiences and dominant cultural assumptions play various roles. Results show coverage tended towards the negative and that Western news agencies could play a part in this. Although geographical proximity had an effect, shared religion between the refugees and host populations seems to have minimal impact on coverage. Study of theme change over time was complicated by Covid-19 as newspapers recycled older images possibly due to travel restrictions.