Week of Jan. 21st Class Summary

Entman’s exploration of how events are framed in relation to policymakers, the media, and the public centers around a discussion of how to appropriately grasp the nature of frames themselves. Due to his view that facets of the hegemony and index models, such as the hegemony model’s failure to account for the current lack of consensus among elites, are outdated in a post-Cold War political environment, Entman presents the model of cascading activation as a more accurate lens through which the framing of news, U.S. foreign policy, and public opinion, can be understood. Entman provides the example of how the Bush Administration effectively framed the tragic events surrounding the September 11th attacks in a manner that fit a logical narrative that enabled the administration to pursue its ideological agenda in both the foreign policy and domestic policy realms. Despite the remarkably high level of patriotism, and subsequent deference to the administration, that permeated through the media following the September 11th attacks, Entman notes that the media refused to completely tout the White House line in the buildup to the Iraq war, contrary to the media’s full deference to the White House during the early Cold War. Indeed, this raises the question as to whether there can ever again be such a comparable level of deference on the part of the media to the White House. If the media refrained from such deference during a climate as nationalistic as the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the answer appears to be no. Indeed, the overall level of cynicism in the age of “gotcha journalism” and the overall higher levels of accountability and transparency that exist in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam War era suggest that the level of enthusiastic deference to the government on the part of the media during the height of the Cold War cannot be replicated in contemporary times. Additional questions arise regarding the unique state of the media-government nexus during the post-9/11 environment, and whether the exceptional nature of an event with the kind of emotional impact on the American psyche as September 11th equips any framing model adequately enough, regardless of its overall strength as a model, to place the post-September 11th period within an exact and formulaic framework of understanding. Indeed, the detailed breakdown of Entman’s models in class provides a good grounding for grasping the theoretical facets of the subject matter in the course. The additional time devoted to analyzing President Obama’s inaugural address in class provided an excellent opportunity to critically think about the relationship between foreign policy and audiences in a highly relevant, tangible, and contemporary example. As a result, class was both instructive and interesting, though it may have been more preferable to have spent even more time discussing the inaugural address and its connections to the themes, ideas, and subject matter of the course thus far.