Digital Commons Network^™

A Textual Analysis Of Media Frames: The Coverage Of The Shooting Of Trayvon Martin, Andrea K. Andrus

USF St. Petersburg campus Master's Theses (Graduate)

This study explores the media’s framing of the Trayvon Martin shooting incident, as well as Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, the individuals involved. Grounded in framing theory this study uses a qualitative textual analysis to examine the employment of five identified news frames in the coverage of the shooting of Trayvon Martin: conflict, attribution of responsibility, human-interest, racial and legal. The analysis of articles from two television news websites, perceived conservative network foxnews.com and perceived liberal network cnn.com revealed that there are both inconsistent and consistent ways in which the stories were framed. Although the presence of the frames in …