Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Media representation
Product and Process
Natural
A key in the study of representation
concern is with the way in which
representations are made to seem
natural.
Representations which become
familiar through constant re-use
come to feel 'natural' and
unmediated.
Constructed
Reality is always represented what we treat as 'direct'
experience is 'mediated' by
perceptual codes. Representation
always involves 'the construction
of reality'.
Realistic
All texts, however 'realistic' they
may seem to be, are constructed
representations rather than simply
transparent 'reflections',
recordings, transcriptions or
reproductions of a pre-existing
reality.
Selective
Representation is
unavoidably selective,
foregrounding some things
and backgrounding others.
Approaches
CLASS, AGE, GENDER, ETHNICITY
IDENTITY, STEREOTYPING,
PREJUDICE (typically racial) or BIAS
(typically political)
Frames
News accounts may be deconstructed in ideological
terms so as to elucidate how these news values
help to rule in certain types of events as
newsworthy while, at the same time, ruling out
alternative types.
At the heart of these processes of inclusion and
exclusion are certain principles of organization or
frames which work to impose order on the
multiple happenings of the social world so as to
render them into a series of meaningful events.
Frames
News frames make the world beyond direct
experience look natural; they are principles of
selection, emphasis, and presentation
composed of little tacit theories about what
exists, what happens, and what matters
Frames
largely unspoken and unacknowledged, [frames]
organise the world both for journalists who report it and,
in some important degree, for us who rely on their
reports.
Frames enable journalists to process large amounts of
information quickly and routinely: to recognise it as
information, to assign it to cognitive categories, and to
package it for efcient relay to their audiences.
Thus, for organisational reasons alone, frames are
unavoidable, and journalism is organised to regulate their
production. Gitlin