Abstract:
In this thesis, I study how the most recent federal government shutdown in the United States is framed in The Washington Times and The Huffington Post in terms of positivity and negativity. Precisely, these newspapers were chosen due to their opposing political ideologies, whereby the first one is more conservative and the other one is more liberal. In order to analyze framing, headlines and narratives of news stories were studied in terms of whether they framed the shutdown positively, negatively or neutrally, for which a unique coding scheme was established. Our findings confirmed findings from previous studies, wherein evidence was found that the conservative paper would be more positive than the liberal paper in headlines and narratives. Results also showed that The Washington Times predominantly used neutral framing, and that The Huffington Post predominantly employed negative framing. Also, there was evidence for great consistency between headlines and narratives, implying that headlines were not solely used for their attention-grabbing function.
