Breaking frames: Notes on a Research Methodology

by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni

Our project situates “big tech” in the turmoil of a “crisis of hegemony” (Fraser 2017) in twenty-first century US capitalism. To do so, we use a variety of tools: economic and labour market data; analysis of corporate statements and documents, of the policies, programs and promises of political parties, and of the manifestos and slogans of protest; and the insights of other scholars and social commentators. There is, therefore very much a “mixed methods” effort. However, one specific research technique, important to our academic discipline of Media Studies, seems at once preeminently suited for our study, and profoundly problematized by it: “framing analysis” of news media’s coverage of high technology issues.

Media frames are “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual”; they are “principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters” (Gitlin 1980, pp. 7-6). This definition comes from what is arguably the ur-text of “framing analysis”, Todd Gitlin’s The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media and the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Gitlin analyzed the news industry’s role in another crisis of US hegemony (Gitlin, 1980, p. 254), that of the early 1960s, the moment of the anti-Vietnam war movements, campus uprising, civil rights marches and burning cities. The Whole World is Watching portrayed how US newspapers and television networks covered a key organization of the New Left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In Gitlin’s view, news framing entrapped and marginalized SDS, even as the movement’s leaders felt increasingly compelled to seek out such publicity. Media frames were, Gitlin argues, crucial in containing a massive social upheaval within the bounds of capitalist hegemony “uniting persuasion from above with consent from below” (Gitlin 1980, p. 10). Informed both by Gitlin’s insider knowledge of the SDS, of which he was for a time President, and by hours upon hours of research in media archives, The Whole World is Watching is a monumental work that established “framing analysis” as a mainstay methodology in the new discipline of “media studies” and informs all of its subsequent applications on news coverage topics ranging from street crime to ecological crisis or political scandal.

Any contemporary use of framing theory must, however, recognize deep differences between the US mediascape Gitlin studied, and that which exists today, changes that have altered news “framing”. Gitlin examined media frames drawing on precisely two sources: the CBS television news, and the New York Times. He could do so confident that this was a credible sampling of “the news”. The Times was the unchallenged paper of record, an institution that for scores of other newspapers defined what was “newsworthy”; CBS was one of three major television networks that commanded the general attention of the US public. These two institutions typified the power of consolidated, centralized corporate news industry whose powers made the development of any “infrastructure of self-generated cultural institutions” almost “unimaginable” (Gitlin 1980, p. 3). The New Left, Gitlin wrote, might have a “scattering” of “underground” papers, but audiences for these were puny compared with the tens of millions who turned on television to watch Walter Cronkite, anchorman for the CBS Evening News, or bought newspapers who followed the lead of the New York Times (Gitlin 1980, p. 2). Diving into the records of CBS and the New York Times, Gitlin encountered many practical difficulties, but did not doubt that he knew what the news was, and where to find it. This certainty can longer be assumed, for the following three reasons.

Transforming News Screens: From the TV to the Meme

First, the world of professional news production today is more complex than Gitlin had faced. Beginning in the 1970s, US media were reshaped by successive technological innovations: FM radio, satellites and cable television. The commercial deployment of these technologies was shaped by political economic changes ­– deregulations, privatizations, mergers and acquisitions,  and corporate globalizations – that deepened the corporate power Gitlin describes, but created new empires, fresh technical terrains and lucrative market niches to constitute a neoliberal media-scape more variegated than that of the thirty preceding years. These changes were occurring even while personal computers and dial modems were toys for spooks and hobbyists. The commercial development of digital platforms would, however, further upheave the media system. In the past twenty years, we have seen a major transition from “traditional” news media to a complex web of real-time, cross-platform uploading and sharing of information.  

Search engines, social media, algorithmic advertising and digital production tools have transformed the institutional landscape of journalism. Facebook and Google eviscerated the advertising revenues of established newspapers, accelerating the decimation of print newsrooms, and the rise of digital news enterprises. These two giant companies have, alongside Yahoo, themselves become major aggregators, selectors and circulators of news stories. According to a Pew Research Center report, “television is still the most popular platform for news consumption even though its use has declined since 2016” but “news websites are the next most common source, followed by radio, and finally social media sites and print newspapers”; if one combines the percentage of Americans who get news often from either news websites or social media – “the web has closed in on television” as a source for news, with 43% of adults often receiving news from news websites or social media, compared with 49% for television”[1] (Shearer 2018).

Second, even more dramatically, as it disrupts the established ordering of news framing, Big Tech has also created an environment in which anyone can become a news messenger. The combination of mass Internet use from the 1990s on with the tools of digital production, discovery and distribution made available by digital platforms in the 2000s have opened an entire world of popular, amateur-produced news. This is the sphere of what was once politely termed “citizen-journalism”. This realm does include some bona fide investigative reporting but is heavily shot through with mercantile entrepreneurialism and propagandist manipulation. It contains far more secondary commentary, elaboration and spin than original reportage – though there is that too. But it constitutes a realm that now challenges and even surpasses the world of professional journalism in the circulation of opinion about public affairs that has always been associated with news and its frames. How far a sphere of communication so heavily beholden to large corporate-owned platforms can be seen as the “infrastructure” of “self-generated content” Gitlin declared “unimaginable” is debatable. What is indubitable, however, is there has emerged  a new world of news, at once parallel to and intersecting with the professional apparatus, operating with cadences, speeds and logics utterly alien to the news institutions Gitlin analyzed,  a world that indeed often challenges the very legitimacy of “mainstream” –  or “lamestream” – news.

Third, news production and reception has polarized. Media “echo chambers” and social media’s self-confirming “filter bubbles” of information and opinion have become notorious (Jamieson & Capella 2010; Pariser 2011). This effect, however, builds on and aggravates segregations and separations generated by changes in the composition of capital, and of class that are fundamental to the current crisis of hegemony. It is widely accepted that from the time of the Wall Street crash of 2007-8 there has been an intensifying bifurcation of US media audiences. Writing from a left liberal perspective, Yochai Benkler et al. (2019, p. 383) speak of an two “media ecosystems”: one still oriented around “professional media” and “norm constrained journalism”,  the other, accounting for “roughly a third of the American media system” fundamentally propagandistic and devoted to right-wing “radicalization” (Benkler 2019, p. 14). Johnathan Albright (2016a; 2016b), in a series of studies based on the patterns of digital linking between news sites, paints an even more alarming portrait of a system in which a liberal-left Main Stream Media (MSM) is effectively surrounded and besieged by a right wing Macro-Propaganda Machine (MPM) supported by hundreds of micro-sites feeding content into major platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, with Trump’s Twitter feed alone rivalling The New York Times in its power to “drive” news.

The conventions of news framing differ across this divide, with evidentiary standards lower, and outright falsification and fantasy higher, on the right branch of the bifurcation. But on both sides, the other is seen as “propaganda”; it is this that makes the crisis of hegemony into what Benkler et al. aptly term “an epistemic crisis” (2018, p. 3). The fate of the phrase “fake news” is symptomatic. This term is generally held to have been coined by BuzzFeed journalist Craig Silverman (2016) in an article examining the influence of political clickbait sites – largely of the right – on Facebook news feeds and began to be applied widely to tendentious pro-Trump online content. It was then, however, skillfully re-captured by Trump, whose bold inversion characterized the left-liberal press as “the fake news”, eventually instituting “The Fake News Awards” to pillory professional media he perceived as hostile towards him (Siddiqui 2018). “Fake news” has in a way itself become a news “frame”, but one whose borders and content are savagely contested.

These changes have consequences for understanding media “frames”. Gitlin’s point about such “frames” was, of course, that they are always ideologically charged, predominantly in favour of a hegemonic order upheld by a consolidated, centralized corporate media system, even if this framing occasionally falters or fails. What is clear today is that the growing complexity of the media system, and even its partial decentralization via social media and other digital applications, has not diminished this ideological aspect of news framing. On the contrary, it has intensified it: frames increasingly appear compressed, accelerated and hyper-weaponized as “memes” – slogans or aphorisms that condense a mass of antecedent information and interpretation into digital bullets. This high-speed framing is however, no longer followed by a coherent, unified dominant ideology, but is rather deployed by contenders an increasingly partisan conflict over hegemonic authority. Moreover, this fracturing process is splintering one of Gitlin’s assumptions about “the news”, for the polarization of the US media system means that in fact the whole world is not watching; rather, what is being watched often depends on where one is positioned in a war of the news worlds.

Framing Analysis in the Age of Big Tech

This situation that bears specifically on news coverage of Big Tech. As our account of changes to US news media suggests, the alterations this system has undergone since Gitlin wrote are in large part a result of digital technologies rolled out by behemoth corporations. The issue of “techlash” is, we can say, not just in the news, but also about the news. It is about what is news and what propaganda, about who is a reliable source and who a partisan mouthpiece, what should or should not be censored or labelled, and by whom. It is about whether the transformations of the US information system enabled by corporations such as Facebook, Google and Twitter are the liberatory overthrow of a sclerotic, legacy news industry or a dangerous explosion of toxic propaganda propelling national decomposition to the edge of civil war. Conflict about what is “news” and what is “fake news”, and what should be done, and by whom, about this undecidable dispute, is an issue that is central to controversies over Big Tech, and lies at the core of “techlash”, in all its contradictory inflections.

To study this situation, we use tools very different from those Gitlin had available. He faced a simpler media world, but the forces that make news today more complex and contested also make it easier to search and analyze. Gitlin pored over microfiches and endless problems with incomplete and incompatible television recordings. We used a database, Factiva, a business information and research tool owned by Dow Jones & Company, and accessible to us through our university library.[2] Factiva covers a wide range of sources. Limiting our search region to United States publications, our results include major centrist news sources such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, centre-left and centre-right organs such as The Nation, The Wall Street Journal , Business Insider, and The New York Post; wire services such as Reuters; numerous local papers; specialist legal, financial and “techie” websites (CNET, Techcrunch, Slashdot, Ars Technica; the web pages of television enterprises such as CBS and Fox News; a scattering of articles from the international press (which we imagine must have reappeared on US web sites); and outliers such as Prison Planet, Zero Hedge and Sputnik News. Despite Factiva’s scope, however, we suspect it does not adequately capture the full strength of the new right-wing media “ecosystem”. We therefore supplemented its results with special searches of Fox News’ web site and Breitbart News Network.

Our searches cover over a six-month period, period: December 1, 2019 – May 30, 2020. This includes two events especially significant for our study. First, it was the period of the Democrat’s primaries for the selection of a presidential candidate for the 2020 election. Three of the candidates – Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang – proposed reforms related to the power of Big Tech, and can all be seen as, to some degree, populist tribunes of “techlash”. None of their campaigns were successful (Yang dropped out of the race on Feb 12, Warren on March 5, Sanders on April 16) but while they were in the running, we could reasonably expect to see media discussion – pro and con – of Big Tech issues. Second, between March and May the coronavirus pandemic became a breaking news topic in the US.  This period allows us to see if and how coverage of Big Tech changed in relation to the pandemic.[3]

To identify relevant news stories, we started with broad searches such as “big tech”, “antitrust”, “censorship”, “net neutrality”, “free internet”, “gig economy”, “net neutrality”, “public utility”. Unsurprisingly, these yielded thousands of results, most outside our political scope of interests. We narrowed the field by constructing search strings that combined terms (e.g. “antirust” plus “big tech”), or joined them with secondary items, such as the names Trump, Sanders, and Warren. By this process we derived a data base with some 940 articles, organized to identify their primary and secondary topics. We coded each article to indicate its stance on these topics, neutral, positive or negative, or neutral leaning positive, neutral leaning negative; for example, an article dealing with digital surveillance and opposing it would be coded negative, one attempting a balanced coverage would be neutral and one emphasizing supposedly benign aspects of surveillance – such as national security priorities or advertising targeted to customer interest – would be positive.

We then moved to more qualitative interpretive assessment of the stories in which we identify the conventional codes – the familiar narrative arcs, the stereotypical cast of characters, the recurrent mythic tropes – that structure news frames. Drawing not only on Gitlin, but also more recent scholarship (Entman 1993; Altheide & Schneider 2017; Kuehn 2018; Cohen & de Peuter 2018) we identify major frames by applying a five-point grid:

1. Sources: Taking as our point of departure Kuehn’s proposition that “Sources are messengers used to support frames” and “are symbolic of a particular standpoint” we ask what voices are selected as authoritative on the topic at hand.

2. Subjects: We ask who are the protagonists, actors or agents identified in the story? In particular we identify “conflict frames” counterposing adversarial actors. This is particularly relevant to left and tight populisms, pitting “the people” against an alien other, in right populism liberal elites and foreign migrants and in left populism oligarchic capitalism (Mouffe 2018). But adversarial subjects can involve other dyads, such as US v. China in “tech wars”, or the surveillance state versus citizens etc.

3. Stories: Following on from 2), we ask, what is the basic narrative structures, the story arc, that is being developed. Is it a tale of Technological Progress, enhanced or inhibited? Of The Market, whose melodramatic oscillations in fortune are indexed by share prices? Of Freedom versus Totalitarianism, Liberty against Tyranny? Of Family Values versus Moral Turpitude? Of a New Cold (and potentially Hot) War? Under this heading we also consider the important distinction Kuehn makes between “episodic” (dramatic, focused on individual rather than social responsibility) vs. “thematic” frames (contextual, interrelated factors instead of isolated instances).

4. Signs: Here we consider the characteristic metaphors, historical references, keywords, stock phrases and jargon that condense the narratives and subject positions discussed above. Many of our search terms – such as Big Tech, Techlash and Fake News – are themselves “stock phrases” whose underlying assumptions need to be unpacked.

5. Solutions: Drawing on Gitlin, and also Ettinger, we identify what each story offers as the solution to the perceived problem it posits, the moral compass it explicitly or implicitly proposes, and the policy or political recommendations it implies or asserts.

This fivefold division between sources, subject, stories, signs and solutions is admittedly artificial, in so far as each of these categories is very much embedded in all the others; they are often in practice hard to tell apart, but abstracting them seems nevertheless useful methodologically in order to define a structured set of considerations we consistently bring to bear on each set of news items.

Having outlined these methodological issues, we now present summary reports on our framing analysis of news stories on three major topics – “techlash”, “surveillance” and “censorship” – within the period we researched. We anticipate both expanding these reports, and adding others, as our analysis continues.

TECHLASH (25 hits)

The emergence of the term “techlash”, a “backlash” against Big Tech, can be traced a 2013 Economist article by Adrian Wooldridge. That article describes a growing popular discontent with tech plutocrats, citing their cooperation with the National Security Agency’s PRISM Internet surveillance program and a general concern that their growing wealth and political involvement. Seven years later, such worries remain at the forefront of techno-political discourse, and “techlash” has become part of the vocabulary of US news stories.

Coding news stories on “techlash” falling within our research period showed predominantly neutral and positive reporting. In other words, there were more instances endorsing criticism of Big Tech and fewer instances of articles sympathizing with Big Tech or espousing virtues of techno-solutionism to social problems. As demonstrated in the “censorship” and “surveillance” searches below, “techlash” invites the narrativization of several key conflicts in subjects and stories. Domestic discontent is consistently illustrated by the opposition between congressional representatives and the major digital corporations over concerns such as the oligopolistic distortion of markets, digital election manipulation, sex trafficking and other forms of “toxic” content. These critical narratives are sometimes countered or balanced by issues around a “fight for technological supremacy” pits the United States against China, with Big Tech as a national champion.

From this interaction, we extract stories of family values vs. moral turpitude, freedom vs. totalitarianism, and the question of technological progress. In and among these stories are sources that cultivate them, including corporate watchdog groups and political activists, university officials, and the U.S. federal government. These stories are motivated by signs that mark the issues of Big Tech, including “privacy” and “trust”, “disinformation” and “fake news”, “digital labor”. Attempts to resolve these issues, categorized as solutions, focus on antitrust legislation and the prospect of digital taxes, as well as algorithmic transparency and decentralized alternatives. However, it is important note that though many stories articulate criticisms of big tech, and common trope is to contain or even nullify these problems by a trope of resignation – declaring that Big Tech is too big, or too important to stock values and national prosperity, or just too deeply embedded in consumer “convenience” to actually take any countermeasures against: in this sense, although ostensibly naming the defects of digital oligopolies, such stories also effect what Roland Barthes (1972)  termed an “innoculation” against taking these issues too seriously.

Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, four out of five of the articles supporting Big Tech and dismissing “techlash” appear with the US advent of the pandemic in early March. Following a period focused on issues of privacy, disinformation, and market dominance, Big Tech is recast as a potential solution to mass contact tracing. One such article from March recognizes that Big Tech critics are likely to maintain their positions, but companies have a chance to redeem their reputations (Fried, Axios, 2020) as most of the world makes a wholesale shift to online communication. Even more sympathetic to Big Tech’s potential in fighting the coronavirus is Ashkhen Kazaryan, who focuses on the tech companies “[mitigating] the crisis and its impact on the economy” (March 2020). Similarly, Aarti Shah notes that major tech companies have contributed to the production of personal protection equipment (PPE) and are working to aid in the recruitment process for plasma donors (May 2020). Emphasizing the role that tech might play in public health, one article notes that “robots are very good at social distancing” (Baker, March 2020).

CENSORSHIP (~46 hits)

Despite Big Tech’s arguable culpability in the spread of hate speech, coverage of “censorship” casts the issue of network moderation in a predominantly negative light. This search returned a wealth of conservative and far-right sources, including Fox News, Breitbart, Accuracy in Media, Russia Today, and Alex Jones’s Prison Planet. We again see the recurrence of major conflict frames in the subject and story category, including the U.S. vs. China and freedom vs. totalitarianism, but more specific actors and narratives emerge within the context of censorship. The spectrum of conservative thinking includes the position that some Big Tech companies have suppressed conservative content through “shadowbanning,” while those further on the Right believe they are the arbiters of a buried “truth” (e.g. QAnon). These alarms resonate with wider conservative anxieties about the power of Big Tech: For instance, some feel that Big Tech pushed the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and that the industry is bestowed “special privileges” in the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.

By and large, the articles in this search highlight issues over the definitions of free speech in the digital age. Some conservative media outlets like the Cato Institute affirm Big Tech’s operations under the conditions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects Internet service providers from prosecution hosted content, but allows them to moderate such content. Others insist the Internet be recognized as a public forum that allows any and all content to be published on major websites, resulting in an entirely unmoderated environment. Such a juncture invites the question, “should we accept the possibility of encountering obscene or violent material in exchange for unbridled freedom?” The signs of censorship bring this problematic to the forefront, as we are confronted with the material effects of entangled political and conspiracy theories, including “neoliberalism”, “globalism”, “techno-facism”, Big Tech thought control”, “Orwellian surveillance state”, and “PLANdemic”. Few reactionaries offer solutions to these bleak interpretations, though one article goes as far as to suggest the possibility of a civil war.

Far-right libertarians and digital activists are teaming up to fight against the prospect of a surveillance state. In a Medium article republished by the conspiracy news outlet Zero Hedge, Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer remarks, “[e]mpowering for-profit companies to become the referees of speech and determine what we are and are not allowed to debate solidifies the status quo, and largely benefits the powerful while silencing the oppressed” (Durden 2020). But While the Right is preoccupied with what they claim to be an anti-conservative “bias” in Big Tech, the Left focuses on the tech industry’s involvement in the spread of misinformation (Brewster 2020). Similar to ideas proposed in the “techlash” search above, we see an emphasis on antitrust legislation, breaking up Big Tech, and building decentralized alternatives.

SURVEILLANCE (~35 hits)

The subject of surveillance further fragments allegiances in constituent/government and consumer/industry relations. In news stories we categorized under this heading, the issues most frequently examined is law enforcement’s increasing reliance on facial recognition technology and the encroachment of major tech companies on personal privacy. The story of technological progress is fueled by the prospect of “next generation battle management command and surveillance systems” (United States Air Force) as well as the large-scale implementation of artificial intelligence for the purpose of COVID-19 contact tracing. Digital rights groups, such as Fight for the Future offers, solutions to what appears to be the sign of authoritarianism and surveillance capitalism. Similar to the solutions outlined in “censorship”, we see calls for transparency on advertising and content moderation decisions, data privacy legislation, and decentralized alternatives to the Internet as we know it. Some stories feature the U.S. government’s contracting with Palantir for COVID-19 contact tracing, and activists are also urging lawmakers to limit the amount of data collected and name the parties with whom it is shared. A vehement critic of Big Tech, Sen. Hawley emphasizes the right to privacy over the promise of a technological utopia.

Once again, the U.S. vs. China conflict frame appears, but this time we see an interesting bifurcation in the narrative. Sources that focus on American innovation, including networked weapons systems, promote the idea that surveillance and national security are one and the same. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos repeatedly serve as messengers of techno-solutionism, particularly in relation to American military and defense programs. These sources illustrate the intertwined politics of the federal government and major tech companies. However, we see a complete reorientation as soon as China enters the frame. Mike Pompeo reinforces the idea that the surveillance technology produced in China is part and parcel of the Chinese military and Communist Party, advancing the image of an “Orwellian” surveillance state. This framing maintains the narrative that surveillance technology in the United States serves American liberalism while surveillance in China furthers a totalitarian regime.

Conclusion

In as much as these three distinct search queries overlap, together they suggest the overarching story that positions Big Tech against numerous assailants from across the political spectrum. As the “censorship” search demonstrates, ideas originating on the left are being coopted by far-right propaganda news media outlets. Along similarly contentious lines, the emphasis on Big Tech’s role in the market further complicates the belief that Internet owners support left-wing ideology, and prominent liberals are quick to point out the problems with an economic model based on data harvesting and the continued spread of disinformation. As we have seen from the “surveillance” search, Jeff Bezos has urged tech companies to work with the Department of Defense, reinforcing the tech industry’s involvement with the military industrial complex.

For these reasons, the narrative that places liberals and conservatives in diametric opposition is no longer sufficient with regard to issues relating to Big Tech. While there remains a polarity, we see major contention within political groupings about increasingly pervasive technology. The politics of techlash are increasingly modular; positions that were once designated as either “liberal” or “conservative” have segmented from a totalizing set political convictions. Questions surrounding free speech and antitrust regulation in particular animate the detachment from conventional alignment, as figures on both the Right and Left draw attention to Big Tech’s hold of the media-information market.

This methodological analysis will continue to develop as we investigate other topics related to contemporary techno-politics, including net neutrality, antitrust law, basic income, the gig economy, free broadband and fake news.

Many thanks to Greig de Peuter for suggesting the relevance of framing theory to our project, and to James Compton for conversations about the changing landscape of U.S. news media.

Notes 

[1] It is, however, important to understand that the news stories circulated by Facebooks, Googles and Yahoo are not produced by them. They are generally from established, professional news organizations: this is, of course at the core of arguments that news aggregators services should be charged tax for parasitizing the news industry.

[2] Such databases are the digital incarnation of what was previously termed “media monitoring services’, or “press clipping services”, and are now part of a commercial sector known as information logistics. Online databases, such as Factiva, utilize automated software called spiders or robots (bots) to automatically monitor the content of free online sources including newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV station and news syndication services. Other  players in the sector include Nexis.com, Meltwater, Avention, NewsBank, News Cycle etc.

[3] There are other, recent events, that lie outside the parameters of our study, most notably the BLM uprising following the death of Georg Floyd (which raised important questions about surveillance, police technologies and surveillance) we anticipate extending our analysis to cover these events.

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