What This KKK Rally Teaches Us About Media Framing

And why people react to stories so differently.

Photo by Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash

If you don’t know exactly what I mean by “media framing” — check out my other article that describes what this is & why it’s effective.

This piece will help us understand how 2 people can form such drastically different opinions about 1 story.

And I’ll also drop some key vocabulary to help you call out irresponsible frames you might see in the news, movies, TV shows, social & just-about-any-kind-of media.

Media frames are generally categorized by two key attributes. We describe them in terms of being:

· Precise vs. Realistic

and

· Context-Specific vs. Context-Transcendent

Photo by pine watt on Unsplash

Precise-framing research typically studies how participants react to made-up stories. With made-up stories, the information can be held constant while the frame used to present that information is manipulated.

These studies are designed to discover, precisely, how the frames used to present a choice…