Academic Scientific JournalsOn infosuasion, news framing and proximization: Integrating a cognitive perspective and corpus analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26881/bp.2024.1.01Keywords:
Africa, framing, infosuasion, news, proximization, terrorismAbstract
Given the well-established fact that news is not “facts” but an opinionated representation of events, individuals, and issues, and thus the subjective and infosuasive nature of news reporting, we need a deeper exploration of how media frame and construct narratives to shape public perception. In the present paper we depart from the assumption that journalists create context for the audience by proximizing (bringing cognitively and affectively closer) selected aspects of reality. In this process, which consists among others in providing frames of reference – highly stereotyped representations of specific situations – media influence the frames used by the audience when interpreting information about events and problems. Adopting a cognitive linguistic perspective and drawing on the insights from the Media Proximization Approach, the article investigates the way in which frames are cognitively and discursively “to define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies” (Entman 1993: 52) when reporting on terrorism in Africa. The main questions addressed in the paper are as follows: (1) How is terrorism in East Africa brought closer to Western audiences? (2) How is the representation of terrorism manifested in keywords and word co-occurrence patterns? (3) How do the media frames potentially impact on the frames gene-rated by the audience? The study combines quantitative and qualitative methods, demonstrating that keyword analysis, conducted with the tools provided by corpus linguistics, constitutes an important initial step in the investigation of the frame-building and frame-setting process, shedding light on the infosuasion dynamics and strategies. The analyzed corpus includes U.S. television (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN) news transcripts on Garissa University College attack in Kenya in 2015.
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