Media framing effects on issue perceptions and policy attitudes: A quantitative case study about Taiwan's 'Chieh-Chi-Yung-Jen' policy issue (China)

The present research is a test of the current scholarly assumption that media framing has strong effects on readers. Although earlier empirical work, based on surveys, suggested minimal media impact, more recently, experimental work has found that the news media's selective interpretation of policy issues influences readers' relevant perceptions and attitudes.; Although the evidence is profound, the artificiality of the context of prior experimental study poses problems for generalizing the findings—firstly, the effects found in experimental settings are ephemeral, rather than accumulated and enduring, as may be found in real-world settings; and secondly, experiments slight relevant sociopolitical forces which may intervene between media stimuli and the audience members' responses. Besides, experimental researchers use of direct exposure to media stimuli as their key conditional variable and their success in detecting media impact may explain the failure of earlier survey studies which usually appraised exposure by indirect measurements.; To examine media framing effects in a real world setting, I adopted the survey approach and incorporated exposure and relevant sociopolitical variables into a revised theoretical model to guide the research. I conducted content analyses on two major Taiwanese newspapers concerning their framing on the “Chieh-Chi-Yung-Jen” issue. I then tested the frames' effects, through statistical procedures, against opinion data, derived from a survey, conducted by me, of 615 college students in Taiwan.; The results support the revised model of media framing effects. The content analysis reveals that the two newspapers had systematically framed the issue in opposing ways during a twenty-month span of the issue discourse. Using the two sets of opposing frames as a baseline to test the model, I have obtained four general findings. (1) Patterns of newspaper-use predict the variation of accumulated prior exposure to relevant newspaper-frames. (2) Prior frame-exposure, in turn, explains the variation of relevant issue-perceptions and policy-attitudes. (3) There are interactions between media framing effects and relevant sociopolitical forces—media framing effects vary, depending on individuals' sociopolitical background and predisposition. (4) Although relevant sociopolitical forces to some degree condition issue-perceptions and policy-attitudes, the effects of media framing go beyond the limitation of these sociopolitical forces.