Media Framing

This is one issue that directly influences audiences worldwide as to how we view certain newsworthy stories. The way media, specifically news media, frame their stories emphasizes gender, sex, and race more than that actual issue at hand. Our example of such framing is the Matthew Shepard murder. In nearly every news article published about Shepard, his sexual orientation and physical body make-up were the principal focal points. The news media frame stories as, not newsworthy events that affect a wide range of viewers with crucial social, political, or economic issues, but rather as sensationalistic melodramas. They see the news as entertainment, just bloody good television, and not as objective, truthful broadcasting. The framing of this crime didn’t help the murderers at all either. They were depicted as monsters, sub-human. It would be extremely difficult in providing someone with a fair trial if the media is consistently labeling the two men as such as equal to Frankenstein’s monster, a thing with no such empathy toward the human race as to toss an innocent, young girl into a lake where she drowned.

            Nearly every article on Shepard’s murder began with the word “gay.” This is the media’s way of relieving any viewers with opposed ideologies toward the subject to believe this was more than just a simple robbery-homicide but actually a hate-crime, although the police clearly stated that the chief motive of the crime was robbery. The media emphasized the fact that Shepard was different than the socially accepted norm of sexual orientation, thus making viewers believe that was what the murder was actually about. Knowing this, a traditional, conservative, heterosexual viewer may receive comfort because they are not that way and those types of crimes do not affect them. They don’t embrace the difference of intolerance but keep it at arm’s length, thus never actually transcending from their traditional views to more progressive ones that may actually help make our world a better more tolerable place for people like Matthew Shepard.