Last week’s post examined administering sacraments to single mothers. Today’s post focuses on the Church and the media. Two concepts are essential in examining the media and the Church: media framing and media bias.
R.M. Entman states: “Framing essentially involves selection and salience. 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.”[1]
Media framing focuses on how journalists or media organisations create a particular perception or action on the audience by drawing attention to specific issues within a reality/topic at the expense of others. The purpose is to change the reader or hearer’s perception without altering the actual facts. It is done by choosing certain keywords, phrases, and images that strengthen a particular depiction of reality or a specific emotion towards it. Various types of frames are employed in covering news.
The human interest frame brings a human face or an emotional angle to presenting an event, issue, or problem. In crises, the frame stimulates the psychological pulse of people, which ultimately leads them to a more negative attitude toward the crisis. This frame is a significant predictor of blame and responsibility in crises.
The conflict frame reflects conflict and disagreement among individuals, groups, or organisations. The morality frame puts the event, problem or issue in the context of morals, social prescriptions and religious tenets. The economic frame reports an event, problem, or issue in terms of the economic consequences it will have on an individual, group, organisation, or country. The attribution responsibility frame seeks to assign responsibility for a cause or solution to individuals, the government or other group or institution. Others include the powerlessness frame, labelling frame, conspiracy frame, ethnic frame, response frame, political frame and religious frame.
The frame used is determined by multiple factors, such as the journalist’s personal belief system, working conditions, the editorial position and journalistic practices of the media organisation. Other factors include the economic environment, the political climate and the ideological and cultural values prevalent in the society. Thus, the frame adopted could change from time to time.
On the other hand, media bias is another challenge towards neutrality and objectivity in rapportage.
Media bias is the bias or perceived bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media in selecting events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. It implies a prejudice that contravenes the standards of journalism, which comprises the principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability. The inevitable question is: Irrespective of the frame used in reporting news content, can we trust the media to give us accurate and informative reports? Can the media be neutral?
There are practical limitations to media bias and neutrality. These include:
(a) Media moguls: This is a group of few but very powerful individuals whose corporations own primary media outlets. These outlets strongly influence which stories get covered, how they are covered and how prominently they are covered. Since most corporations are designed for profit, decisions made by media outlets can be motivated by economic interests. Stories that hamper the profits of the owners of a news organisation may go unreported.
(b) Governments: Governments want to convince the public to support their policies and officials. Therefore, they influence media reportage through overt and covert censorship.
(c) Advertising: Most media outlets depend on advertising to stay in business, and advertisers do not want to sponsor programmes that cast an unfavourable light on their products or management style. Thus, editors sometimes suppress news stories that tend to cast a negative light on sponsors.
(d) Spin: This involves presenting facts, which depends on the journalist’s judgment. It entails what facts should be included in a story and which should be omitted.
(e) Dishonesty: This involves the fabrication of stories and manipulation of pictures to deceive the public.
(f) Omission: This entails the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts. In a bid to create a compelling story, journalists often exclude details due to the limited time and space needed.
(g) Competition: With the growing increase in media outlets, competition for an optimum audience increases. Thus, some media houses adopt various strategies, including biased presentations, to keep viewers interested.
(h) Mistakes: Journalists are humans. Thus, they are capable of making inadvertent mistakes. A misspelt word, a misplaced comma, an error in grammar, and an added or omitted digit can change the meaning of a sentence, distorting the facts intended to be presented.
(i) False assumptions: Accurate reporting is not always easy. The world is in flux, and what seems to be a fact today may be proved wrong tomorrow.
Why is media framing and bias important for the Church? The Catholic Church is a very popular institution. News about the Church, particularly about Catholic priests and religious, sells fast and trends for a while because of the high standards of the Catholic Church and the Catholic priesthood and religious life. How authentic and neutral are news and social media reports about the Church?
While we cannot control how news is reported and the bias involved, we can always consider media bias and framing when examining news about the Church, especially the negative ones.
The sensational headlines such as: “The Pope has now approved blessing gay unions” and “The Pope is now fallible” reported in secular media are framed to suit an interest in diminishing the Church’s reputation and to generate media traffic. As oft-said in journalism, “If it bleeds, it leads.” This means the more gruesome a story is, the more coverage it gets. In the context of the Church, a piece of news draws massive interest when it concerns something below Catholic standards. In many cases, the details contradict the sensational headlines.
In like manner, we should seek authentic information about the Church from Catholic sources only. The reason is that non-Catholic sources are sometimes biased in their report and often frame the news to suit their liberal, political, or economic agenda.
May God continue to help us🙏🏾
K’ọdị🙋🏾♂️
[1] Entman, R. M. (1993) ‘Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm’, Journal of Communication, 43(4), p.52.
