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| Photo by Brian Buckey |
| Assistant professor Lesa Hatley Major led a workshop on "The Framing of News Coverage" at last week’s Mini University. |
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The lecture drew close to 100 attendees, mostly IU alumni. The focus of the lecture as Hatley Major said during the introduction of the class was to “raise awareness of the issues of news coverage and examine the idea of responsibility.”
“With this current election, things like race and gender and how these stories are covered becomes very important,” Hatley Major said. “I think there is heightened attention to the political process right now and issues like media responsibility are becoming very important.”
The weeklong Mini University at Indiana University offers adults a chance to revisit classrooms to learn about topics from current events to music to science. IU professors such as Hatley Major lead the discussions.
Her talk focused on different types of framing, like episodic framing, which features reporting in terms of concrete instances, and thematic framing, which features reporting on broader trends and outcomes.
“I was really interested in why the news media chooses certain stories that they report on,” said Les Tweedle an attendee and graduate of the IU School of Dentistry. “I didn’t think about framing too much before the lecture.”
Hatley Major also showed several videos to illustrate how a topic can be framed in entirely different ways. The first video showed President Bush’s visit to Israel and how different media outlets in America and the Middle East had reported on the story. The second video was a news profile of a wealthy CEO who chose to photograph homeless people in his spare time.
While some in attendance agreed with how the CEO was portrayed, others took exception to his financial gains from the photography.
“I was a little bit turned off by the way it was covered,” said Joann Kimbrugh, a graduate of the IU nursing school. “It bothered me that this form of journalism was based off exploiting others for profit.”
After the lecture, Hatley Major took time to answer questions from the audience. A common theme was the changing nature of journalism and the decreased readership of traditional print journalism.
“I think one of the reasons that newspaper readership is in decline is because every time I open up a newspaper every article is the same word-for-word as I read on the Web the same day,” Marjorie Smith said.
Hatley Major, who worked as a television news anchor in Louisiana, stressed the importance of familiarizing journalism students with the changes that are taking place within the field.
“We still stress the basic foundational skills,” she said. “But we also want our students to be able to connect with the community and have a finger on the pulse of professional journalism.”
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