Monday, February 1, 2010

4th Week (27 Jan 2010)

Media Framing and News Value

Chapter 11 in the “An Introduction to Public Relations: From Theory to Practice” discussed about what news values and framing are about. Remember in the previous trimester of Communication Studies we did an assignment on Media Framing? We discussed about how the media can package the situation into something positive or negative, how this one article the media portray can popularize someone positively or negatively. Just like the Magic Bullet Theory, it injects ideas, attitudes and beliefs into the audience.

For example, the flood on the 19 of November 2009 made headlines and history in Singapore. The newspapers were saying that the government had not anticipated such an event to happen while bloggers thought likewise and questioned the oversight and ability of the government. This was the example I used in my assignment to point out and compare the framing techniques used in a mainstream media source to the framing techniques in an alternative media source.

And about News Value,

Truth: The mainstream media and the alternative media source provides truth but it is how the writer frames the story. Mainstream media wrote the articles in a more politically right manner while the alternative media source wrote it in a more straight forward manner.

Timeliness: At that point (19 November 2009), the mainstream media provided more up to date as they have first hand information and were reporting live.

Those were the two considerations of news values. Others such as Proximity, Conflict, Eminence and prominence, Consequence and impact, Human or animal interest, Unusual or remarkable and finally fit the focus of each medium, also play a part in contributing to news values.

1 comment:

  1. I believe the theory of media framing is widely used by every writer. They have used it to an extent that they can actually diminish the actual truth of the news or only leave a small percentage of truth in an article or advertisement. From this, it is sometimes hard for people to distinguish between the true or false facts.

    Take a look at the magazines published at stores, especially those about celebrities. The whole magazine can be filled with information that isn't true. But why do they do it is because they use it as a form of entertainment.

    Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with media framing. At time, all we want to know is the actual truth.

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