concept of framing
McCombs and Shaw showed that framing is indeed true. Next they asked: "Couldn't the news also have an impact on what people actually think about those topics?" (Sparks, 156). Upon further analysis, they concluded that the media in fact can have influence over what we think of in a news story. They were able to provide "a distinct yes" to this proposition through the theory of framing (Sparks, 156). Framing is, in a sense, how the media presents their story from a certain angle. The angles, or perspectives, "place the events and issues within particular contexts and encourage audiences to understand them in particular ways" (McCullagh, 25). These perspectives, views, or angles the media presents a story from can also be referred to as frames. In other words, the news media supplies "the available means through which audience make sense of events or objects" (Binder, 754). Binder goes into much explanation on the many different sorts of frames the news media uses in their framing of an event. For example, one study found that "episodic framing of the bulk of news casting (the depiction of particular acts by individual, particular events, individual perpetrators or victims), as opposed to a thematic format (putting the episodes in an explanatory context), reduces the public's ability to attribute acts and events to societal factors..." (Rossides, 174). This shows that these frame not only exist, but they actually have substantial effects on how the audience perceives a news story.