Framing is important for political communication, as it shapes how the public perceives political issues. Current studies of political framing rely on scholarly hindsight and interpretation, and typically focus on frames produced by a single actor or a small, homogeneous group. This chapter traces the dynamics of a wide range of frames associated with 59 organizations within the LGBTQ rights movement in the United States. It examines 5942 news headlines about the LGBTQ rights movement in four major U.S. newspapers over six decades. Using semantic networks, this study captures the structure of political frames and accounts for transient news framings of LGBTQ issues. It provides a dynamic analysis of when and how news framings of the LGBTQ rights movement converge to a dominant master frame. The results show that dichotomous master frames emerged during the early stage of the movement. While a master frame of gay “rights” rose to dominance in the 1980s and persisted into the 1990s, “same-sex marriage” emerged as the most dominant frame in the 2000s. These two inclusive and legitimate master frames become prominent as the activists and journalists attempted to address a broad audience. However, the rise of “same-sex marriage” was not driven by the most established groups or those with the most media coverage, but by organizations focused on family and children—whom the media viewed as having strong moral relevance to “marriage.”

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Emergence of Master Frame: A Semantic Network Analysis of News Framing of the LGBTQ Rights Movement in the United States (1960s–2010s)

  • Weijun Yuan

摘要

Framing is important for political communication, as it shapes how the public perceives political issues. Current studies of political framing rely on scholarly hindsight and interpretation, and typically focus on frames produced by a single actor or a small, homogeneous group. This chapter traces the dynamics of a wide range of frames associated with 59 organizations within the LGBTQ rights movement in the United States. It examines 5942 news headlines about the LGBTQ rights movement in four major U.S. newspapers over six decades. Using semantic networks, this study captures the structure of political frames and accounts for transient news framings of LGBTQ issues. It provides a dynamic analysis of when and how news framings of the LGBTQ rights movement converge to a dominant master frame. The results show that dichotomous master frames emerged during the early stage of the movement. While a master frame of gay “rights” rose to dominance in the 1980s and persisted into the 1990s, “same-sex marriage” emerged as the most dominant frame in the 2000s. These two inclusive and legitimate master frames become prominent as the activists and journalists attempted to address a broad audience. However, the rise of “same-sex marriage” was not driven by the most established groups or those with the most media coverage, but by organizations focused on family and children—whom the media viewed as having strong moral relevance to “marriage.”