Abstract
The conflict between the defense of civil liberties and the implementation of measures to guarantee national security is not an issue that came to the attention of citizens of democratic countries and became an object of scholarly investigation only in recent years. The cold-war age and other recent war times have kept alive the debate on the extent governments can surveil the lives of private citizens to prevent espionage, leaks, foreign aggressions, and terrorist attacks.
However, the passage of the USA Patriot Act by the Bush administration immediately after 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought the dilemma to the center of the U.S. public debate, involving politicians, public officials, the military, the media, and the citizenry through the Obama administration. Other events, like Wikileaks and Snowden’s leaking of classified documents of the National Security Agency (NSA), have inflamed the debate at times to paroxysmal intensities. The way national media covered the U.S. administration’s policies embodied by the NSA’s strict surveillance of communications (phone calls, e-mails, Web activity, and others) raised concern among many critics. The impression was that the media supported the argument that a sacrifice of individual rights was necessary to thwart new terrorist attacks. This particular issue is perfect stuff for academic research. A group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin, under the direction of two leading political communication scholars, Douglas McLeod and Dhavan Shah, seized the opportunity to investigate into the influence of the media coverage of the tension between civil liberties and national security on public attitudes. Their book is a detailed account of the research effort that rests in the popular (in the academia) domain of frame analysis studies.
The book explores the frames favored by journalists and editors of influential printed media outlets in reporting about government surveillance policies and targeted groups. Through a series of experimental studies, the book eventually offers a number of answers about the impact of those frames. Two newly developed integrated models of communication framing guided the research: the Message Framing Model (MFM) and the Message Processing Model (MPM). The MFM connected framing to the various message systems, like language cues used by the media to label issues and groups, and to the journalistic practices of personalizing news stories. The MPM linked the processing of framed messages to the effects on thoughts, feelings, judgments, and actions, on the assumption that certain cues may modify the perceived meaning.
The book consists of eight chapters. The first provides the conceptual framework of the entire project, which draws on past research on framing effects and is enriched by the two new models, described in detail. It states the hypothesis that “news story effects will be a function of . . . frames, as they interact with the predispositions of the audience” (p. 37).
The second chapter contextualizes the theoretical focus, testing the hypotheses of message framing and processing in the decade of U.S. history identified by the label of “War on Terror” (2001–2009). One finds a useful review of the most salient moments in which national security and civil liberties came into conflict. It highlights how in the early stages tragic events fueled arguments for compressing civil liberties in the interest of national security and the later resurgence of sensitivity about those liberties vis-à-vis the subsiding of war efforts abroad (i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan). In such context, the research focused on the “expectation that certain persistent frames contained in media representation of applications of the PATRIOT Act shape the sophistication, tolerance, and participation of news consumers” (p. 40). Accordingly, the hypothesis reads, “The use of individual exemplars to frame stories about the government’s surveillance of domestic groups might reduce citizens’ complexity of thought, their openness to different social and political groups, and their willingness to engage in debate over civil liberties” (p. 40).
Chapters 3 through 7 collect five different experimental studies, coauthored by researchers of the team at the University of Wisconsin, which provide insights into the effects of framing on political attitudes and behaviors, by isolating how the frames favored by journalists in constructing the debate on civil liberties shaped public responses to the purported danger of domestic terror and government surveillance.
Chapter 8 wraps up the research and discusses the findings of each single study and of the whole project. It carries as title the subtitle of the book “Covering ‘Big Brother’,” an explicit reference to George Orwell’s famed work on the intrusive and deadly control on citizens’ private life. (It appears a bit odd that the popular nickname—a clear depiction of the U.S. government’s illiberal policies—is used only in the last chapter).
Each of the five experimental studies focuses on separate issues, but all are closely connected with the main focus of the research illustrated and commented in the opening and closing chapters. The research design uses traditional content analysis of the news coverage (280 articles of the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and AP from 2001 to 2008) and survey data gathered by independent bodies between 2001 and 2013.
What does come out of such composite array of research methods and questions? What is the contribution of this study to a greater comprehension of framing effects, in general, and in the case in point, in particular?
What the authors expected is fully confirmed by the data analysis: in the particular political climate that accompanied the implementation of measures of the War on Terror, the codes and practices of journalists to frame stories around individual targets of surveillance, like personifying the domestic threat—eventually influence the citizens’ attitudes, raise fear and anxiety, and thus make them more inclined to accept a limitation of their own personal freedom as well as that of suspected groups. “Framing that enhances a sense of danger and threat is a potent tool in the hands of powerholders” (p. 159), is the all but consolatory concluding remark that the authors make, vis-à-vis the consistent evidence of the adherence of the printed media to the old principle of “My Country, Right or Wrong,” the same that during the first Gulf War had kept the media from criticizing the administration and the military engaged with “the boots on the ground” in Iraq. Only during the Obama administration have there been signs of a “resurgence” of attention to the erosion of civil liberties caused by the War on Terror. Unfortunately, the study brings no evidence of the change in the journalistic approach, being limited to the years when the Patriot Act was enforced.
What the Wisconsin researchers have found is certainly a great advancement in the framing effects studies, significantly more on the framed message processing front (the MPM model) than on the message framing one (MFM). We certainly get to know that the U.S. media used a pro-surveillance frame, but we know from well-established scholarship that personalization of stories, sensationalism, and emotion stirring are part of the codes of much contemporary journalism. The experimental studies in the book are a major step forward in the understanding of the subtle processing mechanisms of certain frames in the news, and how this processing turns into cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects.
The book should be read not only by academics but also by bards, intellectuals, politicians, and political activists that hold dear the defense of civil liberties in challenging times: It provides them substantial food for thought!