Frame analysis as one of the effective methods of newspaper discourse studying

Introduction

Nowadays mass media is not only the method for providing the information but a powerful tool to influence on people masses as well. That’s why the interest to the concept of newspaper discourse is grabbing the attention of lots of scholars. Identification and analysis of certain patterns, regularities and dependencies of leading American media are vitally important. This will reveal the hidden purpose, true intentions and the main idea of the information provided, which is in its turn will allow us to get point of better understanding the peculiarities of the United States attitude via the given issue. The subject matter of the study is the USA newspaper discourse.

The topicality of our research is viewed via psycholinguistic approach of the study of the newspaper discourse. Known as a hybrid science, psycholinguistics aims to combine different methods and techniques to capture the attention of different population layers. Touching upon psychological aspects of person’s comprehension and perceiving the information psycholinguistic method, frame analysis in particular, works on spreading the information among people of different background. Frame analysis helps to indicate true intentions of the media professionals in terms of seeking profit or desire to promote certain ideas. Frames guide the consumers’ perception of each piece of information. Admittedly, the frame of each article is not always easy to detect and misinterpretations are a common risk, thus, it is extremely important to conduct further studies to the framing of news.

Technological progress leads to new challenges for human rights, since legal regulation applies to existing relationships and is not designed for the emergence of new forms. A striking example of this is the rapid introduction of integrated video surveillance systems, which can be used to monitor public order, crime detection, etc.

China is known to be a world leader in face recognition technology and regularly reminds its citizens that it is almost impossible to hide from the authorities with such equipment.

The country is building what is called "the world's largest camera surveillance network." About 170 million CCTV cameras have already been installed and about another 400 million new ones are planned to be installed over the next three years. Many cameras use artificial intelligence, including face recognition technology which has already become the influential technology marvel created by a human.

Theoretical Framework or Literature Review

As the media coverage is found to be extremely broad, different approaches, views, aspects have become the subjects for careful investigations by academicians and scientists. Nowadays a lot of papers and articles are devoted to the nature of media scope of important social issues in particular. For deeper understanding some speech facts it is appropriate and necessary to go beyond the linguistic study itself and interpenetrate the sphere of such psychological processes of the individual by which speech material is organized in the human brain and comes out at one moment.

Nowadays one of the most relevant areas of cognitive linguistics is frame analysis of the text. Frame analysis is directly related to the picture of the world. An individual’s picture of the world is related to the pictures of the world in the minds of other people in many ways: scientific, religious, artistic. They include the concept of personality about society, freedom, good and evil, the system of values, etc. The artistic picture of the world is “the system of semantic, aesthetic, and emotional mixtures” in the human consciousness at the linguistic and phonetic levels and that is inherently artistic concepts (Diachuk, 2016).

Perception and understanding of any text are considered as two sides of the same phenomenon: procedural and productive. The process of text perception and text understanding is very complex touching upon at the lowest sensory level and ending at the highest semantic one. Reading the text the recipient does not have the task of understanding individual words or expressions. The comprehension process begins with the general content of the message, the hypothesis and only then moves to the lower levels, such as sensory (sound recognition), lexical (reproduction of individual words) and syntactic (perception of the content of individual sentences).

The comprehension process can be roughly divided into two logical stages: superficial comprehension – extraction of explicit information from messages provided by a language structure, and deep understanding – extraction of implicit information that is expressed only when speech information is imposed on other information structures – psychological, social, normative, moral and aesthetic (Dijk, 2008).

The reason of the difference in the perception of the same text lies in the emotional state at the moment of perception of the information and the individual’s scheme of knowledge. The content is most adequately interpreted by the individual whose psychological structure of consciousness is as close as possible to the psychological features of the author’s personality (Berger, 2019; Dijk, 2011). 

The most obvious reaction whilst reading a text is the appearance of certain ideas, images or phenomena of the world in the reader’s mind. These ideas are definitely related to the model of the world of the native speaker. A set of ideas that the addressee creates in the process of reading the text affects the way of designing and expanding the text, motivates the use of certain techniques of presentation. In this case, the linguistic mechanisms of the transmission of pragmatic information come to the fore. They aim not only to focus attention on any details, but affect the thoughts and emotional state of the addressee by the type of text, its content and the author’s attitude (Fillmore & Baker, 2012). 

Language perception includes three aspects: the perception of speech signals itself, intellectual perception, that means the perception of expressed thought, and social understanding, that is, the perception of directly and indirectly expressed information about the social relations between the language user and the addressee, as well as between them and other social objects.

In order the addressee can perform the action programmed by the language user successfully, he must have information about the initial state of the world in which he is operating. It can be information about the current state of affairs, personal desires and opportunities, the wishes of others, as well as the rules and regulations managing his actions at the moment. Being involved in the communicative and pragmatic context of the text, communicators turn not only to knowledge of the language, norms and rules of its functioning. They also refer to their experience, information about the content of the text, strategies and procedures for obtaining the experience and knowledge representation (Ziem, 2014).

In the process of studying the mechanisms of text perception in applied linguistics it was pointed out that to recognize and record the content of text, it was necessary to build special linguistic frames, focused not so much on specific situations or objects, but on the texts which describe them (Leeper & Slothuus, 2019).

A considerable amount of research has been carried out in the last few decades aiming to study and explain the concept “frame” (Baker & Fillmore, 2012; Dijk, 2008; Nikonova, 2008; Schiffrin, Tannen & Hamilton, 2015; Sonnet, 2019). Among other researchers who were keen on to investigate and make it clear how frame analysis works are M. Allen (2017), D. Kahneman (2013), J. A. Kuypers (2010), J. Stoughton (2017), L. Zasiekina (2007) and others. The newspaper texts from The Washington Post and The New York Times have brought the principal ideas for the analysis. Hence, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistic, comparative linguistics etc. are deeply rooted in the newspaper nature (Cacciatore & Iyengar, 2016; Dobrosklonskaja, 2008; Hansen & Machin, 2019; Knusden, 2014; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007). Newspaper discourse has become a paramount issue not only for linguistics but for some hybrid branches of it. This is explained by the lexical changes in its structure and its influence upon the addressee. Newspaper articles are known as one of the most beneficial sources of obtaining and acquiring world’s information. They serve a purpose to notify the audience of current news and issues of different significance. Due to widespread quick and easy open Internet access, almost all press reports and coverage are available in the online version. It enables to combine the effectiveness and visuality of television, as well as the ability to read the article over time. Newspaper discourse is seen as an independent kind of discourse that has specific features and performs certain functions. Modern American newspaper discourse is characterized by a tendency to express the author’s point of view and self-expression, on the one hand, and by an attempt to describe events objectively, on the other. Frame analysis made it possible to study the principal features of media coverage of tracking people in China.

Methodology

Frame analysis has always been beneficial for studying the communication studies, social movements, politics and news. This research method is regarded as one of the dominant techniques for investigating newspaper discourse as it mainly is used to analyse how people understand, perceive, comprehend situations and communication. (Zasiekina & Zasiekin, 2008). Frame is known as a set of standard real or potential knowledge devoted to the complex phenomena, entire idea of complex concept. In other words, framing is an active system of knowledge statistics to speak for stereotyped sets of pictures. A frame is also viewed as a chain of representative knots and relations. The top levels of a frame are arranged to mean real and true things concerning the hypothesized situations. The lower levels contain many boundaries, called slots that must store definite details about the objects or data about them (Diachuk, 2017,         pp. 40-46). A frame specifies the relationship between several connected elements in the text. Specifying this relationship can lead to full understanding of the problem nature highlighted in the text (Gorp, 2007, pp. 60-78).

Results and Discussion

To organize the empirical research all the matching words of all newspaper articles were grouped into specific categories. The first article “Beijing Bets on Facial Recognition in a Big Drive for Total Surveillance” that was subjected to the study is taken from the daily American newspaper “The Washington Post” (Denyer, 2018). Data analysis shows that the discourse of the article is mostly focused on categories such as vigilance, technological advances, and protection. According to the data analysis the most accurate filled categories (slots) in the article mentioned above contain the following prototype agents (see Figure 1).

Vigilance is the category that includes the following lexical units: people (0,87%), surveillance (0,62%), government (0,43%), video (0,38%), camera (0,24).

Technological advances is the second important category to mention that embraces the lexical units such as facial recognition (0,81%), system (0,34%), industry (0,29%), project (0,24%), artificial intelligence (0,19%).

Protection is represented by means of the words such as police (0,62%), security (0,34%), report (0,34%), crime (0,34%).

Figure 1. Frame analysis data of the discourse of the article “Beijing Bets on Facial Recognition in a Big Drive for Total Surveillance”.

The second article under analysis “China’s New Surveillance State Puts Facebook’s Privacy Problems in the Shade” is also taken from the daily American newspaper “The Washington Post” (Pomfret, 2018). Data analysis proves that the discourse of the article is mostly aimed at dealing with two essential categories such as vigilance and confidentiality. The most accurately filled categories (slots) in the article “China’s New Surveillance State Puts Facebook’s Privacy Problems in the Shade” contain the following prototype representatives (see Figure 2).

The first category regarded as vigilance consists of the following lexical units: technology (0,77%), police (0,66%), camera (0,55%), data (0,44%), phones (0,33%), facial recognition (0,33%), security (0,33%), apps (0,22%), messages (0,22%).

Confidentiality as the second category accommodates the following assembly of words: privacy (0,55%), data (0,33%), efficiency (0,22%), safety (0,11%).

Figure 2. Frame analysis data of the discourse of the article “China’s New Surveillance State Puts Facebook’s Privacy Problems in the Shade”.

The article under analysis “Internet Users in China Expect to Be Tracked. Now, they want Privacy” is taken from “The New York Times” (Mozur, 2018). The article concentrates its attention on the tree paramount categories amidst which are social interaction, credit system and personal data (see Figure 3).

The content of the category social interaction is represented by users (0,74%), internet (0,74%), chat (0,52%), online (0,44%), surveillance (0,3%), app (0,3%), social media (0,22%).  Credit system as the category includes the set of words such as privacy (0,74%), system (0,52%), people (0,3%), relationship (0,22%), behaviour (0,22%), finances (0,22%), protection (0,15%).

Personal data as one more category assembles such words as data (1,18%), government (0,52%), information (0,37%), fraud (0,22%), consumers (0,15).

Figure 3. Frame analysis data of the discourse of the article “Internet Users in China Expect to Be Tracked. Now, they want Privacy” is taken from “The New York Times”.

The category vigilance is found to be the most sizeable in the article “Beijing Bets on Facial Recognition in a Big Drive for Total Surveillance” (Denyer, 2018). This category is represented via the widely used word surveillance mentioned in the article extremely often which consequently means that surveillance as the notion is of primary importance for the author of the newspaper text mentioned. The author refers to the methods the government uses to track people’s actions. He points out that the camera and video surveillance is beneficial for the Chinese. The author also lays the stress on the advantages of the camera and video surveillance as e.g. it makes door opening or restraint payment easier. Although, he does not put forward strong arguments against surveillance technologies, but puts the emphasis on the fact the government is in for achieving the control over people’s life. 

The category technological advances is also significant as it proves the Chinese government’s desire to dominate the global artificial-intelligent industry. It shows that the country pays a lot of attention to tech industry, start-ups and head hunting by graduates from top American universities and former employees of companies like Google and Microsoft.

The category protection demonstrates that the facial recognition technology is used for providing safe environment for citizens. Thus, surveillance is featured as a means to track suspects, spot suspicious behaviour and even predict crime. Moreover, it’s an excellent chance for coordinating the work of emergency services, monitoring the comings and goings of people, official documents and security industry reports show.

As the result, all the categories in the article make it possible to mention that Chinese government takes care of its nation. The first dominant category vigilance which seems to sound a bit negative has absolutely positive effects. The surveillance realized via facial recognition and artificial intelligence makes the life of both Chinese people and police better and easier as surveillance technology make it possible to finally achieve the level of control over people’s lives that they aspire to. The author grabs the world’s attention to the Chinese data technologies focusing on the fact that China has more data than anywhere else in the world, the fact that Chinese is the nation that is purely data driven, the fact that it’s easier for them to collect sufficient training data.

In the article “China’s New Surveillance State Puts Facebook’s Privacy Problems in the Shade” (Pomfret, 2018) the category vigilance is considered to be the most essential and is a good size as well. However, in this article this category is full of different prototype representatives. Thus, the same category is seen with some shade of different meanings. In the article “China’s New Surveillance State Puts Facebook’s Privacy Problems in the Shade” facial recognition and other tracking technologies are viewed as powerful tools for law enforcement not only to prevent separatism but also to spy on population whereas in the article “Beijing Bets on Facial Recognition in a Big Drive for Total Surveillance” facial recognition is presented as a way to care about the population and to protect in dangerous and risky situations.

The category confidentiality is a bit narrower. In terms of this article, privacy issue is not a great concern for Chinese. As an example taken from the article there is a situation with Mao Yan who violated the traffic regulations. She apologized pointing out there was no fencing to block jaywalkers like her but the officers were intent on prosecution. When Mao Yan said she had not memorized her ID number, one officer snapped her picture with a camera phone. Within some seconds he read out her name, her ID card number and date of birth. The girl was taken aback by the police experience and quite scared not having personal privacy.

In the article “Internet Users in China Expect to Be Tracked. Now, they want Privacy” (Mozur, 2018) the broadest category is called social interaction. The author refers to the various types of internet activity as a way to track people’s actions. Consequently, social networks, different apps, and chats play a great role in the constant surveillance. Moreover, the author points out that the users themselves reveal personal data that later may be used by the third parties.

The category credit system is of less importance. As Beijing is going to introduce a new social credit system, the authorities claim to give and take away privileges based on spending habits, online and real-world behaviour, and social relationships. Thus, the slots relationship, behaviour, finances, protection are of great importance. The author believes that soon foreign travel, speedy internet, school access and social benefits could be granted or denied based on a person’s score. One of the ways to check and track a person’s score is to collect data by different internet companies. That’s why the author has some concerns about privacy and personal data protection of Chinese citizens.

Conclusions