News frames and differences in their application according to the author’s beliefs. Polish conservative vs. liberal press on the protests against tightening the abortion law

ABSTRACT

This article studies the application of framing in press publications concerning the protests against the ruling of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal respecting the legality of abortion. Using the modified method of Semetko and Valkenburg the analysis shows that both liberal- and conservative-leaning journalists employ the same types of frames but do it for different purposes and suggest different interpretations of events to the readers. At the same time, the article looks into the possibility of studying evaluative vocabulary and collective symbols as indicators, which help measure the frames used by authors of journalistic pieces. The analysis of these two elements allows for determining which particular frames serve to substantiate the opinions of the authors and to direct the recipients toward the senders’ desired interpretations. The analysis also makes it possible to reconstruct the images of the protests presented by conservative and liberal press, respectively, thanks to which their attitude toward the situation in Poland between October and December 2020 becomes apparent.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ A rightist political party registered in July 2019, whose leaders are Grzegorz Braun, Robert Winnicki, and Janusz Korwin-Mikke.

² The dispute over the independence of the Constitutional Tribunal judges, who rule on whether a legislation is compatible with the constitution, began as early as 2015, when PiS, soon after rising to power, annulled the election of three judges by the previous Sejm and appointed others in their place.

³ According to Halliday, “[s]ince reality is a social construct, it can be constructed only through an exchange of meanings. Hence meanings can be seen as constitutive of reality” (Halliday, 1978, p. 191). In view of the quotation from Gamson and Modigliani, it can be concluded that frames, by investing events with meanings, play a key part in how reality is constructed in the media.

⁴ Cf. also Mohan’s considerations on situational types/frames, which are uniform units of cultural significance (Mohan, 1987, p. 516).

⁵ In research practice, it can be thus seen not just in the context of media content, but also of news selection and production (De Vreese, 2005).

⁶ After the initial spontaneous demonstrations, the protests were taken over by the established in 2016 Women’s Strike organization under the leadership of Marta Lempart, a leftist activist.

⁷ The conflict frame is also discussed by e.g. (Jiyoung & Federico, 2017).

⁸ Collective symbols are words (or expressions) imbued with a clearly defined value and cultural connotations which transgress lexical meaning. Both the value and semantic excess are commonly known in a given culture (Fleischer, 2003).

⁹ Bearing in mind low levels of Cronbach’s alpha we decided to measure also mean differences for original 13 frames (before factor analysis and reduction of questions). As it turned out, only for ideologization, violence and emotion the differences were significant (significance respectively: .000, .001 and .019). Liberal press used the emotion frame more frequently (26% to 14%), while conservative press showed greater inclination to use ideologization (59% to 26%) and violence frame (60% to 39%). This observation is consistent with the assumption that combining variables into main factors maximizes the differences between them.

¹⁰ In Polish conservative press abortion is referred to as “killing children” or “murder” 21 times.