Article by Miruna Tit
2nd-year student at Creative Business
The Creative Business programme gives you the chance to explore courses from different areas, from marketing, communications to business, media, or research. And what’s even nicer, it’s that from the second half of year 2, you can choose to follow the electives you’re most interested in! So, you will follow one mandatory course, plus two of your choice.
Today we’ll explore the elective course called “Framing in the media”. Curious? Let’s dive into it.
But first…
Why are we not able to do that? I’m sure you also thought of an elephant. Well, because the word ‘elephant’ itself evoked a frame in your mind. A frame can be an image, it can be knowledge (e.g. prior knowledge you had on elephants). So, this is the best first example of how frames work. The word ‘elephant’, like every other word, is defined in relation to the frames in our minds and every time you hear a word, a frame is activated in your brain. So interesting, right? And connecting it to our ‘don’t think of an elephant’ example, even if we negate a frame, we evoke the frame.
In this course, you’ll learn how news media and organizations, both private and public, interact through public relations in the public sphere. You can think of audiences and how they learn about the events and developments that are happening through the eyes of different media outlets, the technology involved, and of course the journalistic language. By doing this, they ‘frame’ issues, actors, or stakeholders from different perspectives, may it be political, social, or cultural.
Breaking news, soft news, hard news, language, public discourses, news agendas, are all concepts you will learn in this course. Next time you will see a news article, you will not think of it the same way. And you will learn to identify fake news!
And if you learn all about these new concepts, then you also need to apply them! That’s how Creative Business is, making vague concepts practical. What better way to learn than doing? So with all the information you learned in the first weeks of the course, you will have to find an event that happened and that made the news, but from 3 different newspapers. We are interested to see how the same events are ‘framed’ in a different way by different media outlets. But besides the ‘how’, you will also look into the ‘why’. If the news is framed in a negative way by this newspaper from the US, why is it framed positively in the UK? Who is the person behind, the background of the newspaper?
So, learning how framing in the media works and how to analyze news stories it’s a first step in the learning process of this course. This is connected with the second part of this course, where students use insights from the previous assignment to apply professional communication (written and spoken) for designing and distributing their own framing of a relevant story on behalf of a client (public or private organization). Students need to prepare a press pack and press conference here, with the help of different media. If you are interested in Public Relations, this course is surely for you!
If you would like to know more about framing in the video below you can see George Lakoff explaining what framing actually is. He is the author of the book: “Don’t think of an elephant”.
So what do you think of the CB elective “Framing in the media”? Are you excited to choose this elective in your 2nd year of Creative Business?
Photo credit: Drost, J. (2018). Media [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/oC66vXsqnc8