Beyond Trending: What is media framing?

Media framing

Media framing draws our attention to the ways in which information about events or issues is organised and structured by including, emphasising, and excluding different aspects of the information to endorse a specific way of looking at them. This is usually done through frames, which are manifested in news text via word choice, metaphors, catch-phrases, visual images, etc. 

The sociologist Erving Goffman is credited with elucidating the term frame in his book Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974), where he presents frame analysis as an examination of many ways in which people construct, organise, and interpret the meaning in a given situation.   

Media scholar Robert F. Entman offers one of the most cited definitions of framing by saying, “To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.” 

For instance, whether a news media presents an anti-government protest by focussing on citizens’ grievances, governance issues, need for external interventions, or labelling protesters as “rioters” and “terrorists” will offer a different understanding of it. 

Framing Iran’s protests

The protests in Iran began in late December last year with shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar demonstrating against the sliding value of the Iranian currency, rial, and the cost of living. It soon snowballed into a widespread anti-government movement, resulting in the death of over 3,000 people. 

Media coverage of the protests largely revolved around economic conditions, the nature of the Iranian regime, and US President Donald Trump’s repeated threats of military intervention. Media framing helps us understand how presenting the protests as a response to steep inflation, soaring food prices, and corruption offers an episodic frame of interpretation. In contrast, presenting these issues alongside factors like years of international sanctions and economic fallout from the 12-day war with Israel in June 2025 offers a thematic or broader frame of interpretation. 

Similarly, the US’s threat of military intervention or some calls for the restoration of monarchy – presented as an episodic issue or anchored in the 1953 coup that brought down Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to reinstate the royal rule – offer contrastingly different frames of interpretation. 

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