Measuring news media frame building during an Australian industrial dispute

Abstract

News media play a crucial role in supporting liberal democracy by holding the powerful to account and facilitating a diverse, balanced and equal marketplace of ideas. In this marketplace of ideas, groups and interests like unions and employers compete for attention and to have their ideas legitimated by journalists. Although framing theory is used extensively to understand how news media represents different issues, due to its theoretical ambiguity and the methodological challenge of determining how and why frames are built by journalists, it is difficult to quantify how effectively news media delivers equity between competing perspectives. Entman, Matthes and Pellicano’s diachronic process model of political framing helps to overcome these challenges by providing a theoretical model, which is used in this article to investigate a case study of Australian media representation of competing industrial dispute narratives. The article identifies and compares two of the model’s framing junctures: industrial spokespeople’s narratives during the contemporary Australian case of the Victorian Country Fire Authority (CFA) in dispute with firefighter members of the Victorian United Firefighters Union; and their alignment with news media reports about the CFA dispute. The findings reveal inequity between the representation of workers and their union as compared to the employer, and thus present a case of imbalanced or biased frame building in the marketplace of ideas. These findings are applied to discussions of conscious and unconscious bias to theorize why this inequity occurred.