Dynamic Transactions Between News Frames and Sociopolitical Events: An Integrative, Hidden Markov Model Approach

A central goal of news research is to describe, explain, and predict the dynamic transactions between news and event occurrences (Chaffee & Berger, 1987; Thompson, 1995). Almost 100 years ago, Lippman (1922) began to call attention to how media messages shape the “pictures in our heads” of the outside world, setting the stage for a century of research investigating news media’s role in shaping audiences’ social and cognitive realities. Over the ensuing years, this research has proliferated into many subfields across psychology, journalism, communication, and other fields, producing clusters of research focused on news value theory (Galtung & Ruge, 1965), agenda setting theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), the spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1974), priming (Weaver, McCombs, & Spellman, 1975), and framing (Entman, 1993). This multiparadigmatic pluralism within news research has been demonstrated especially clearly within the domain of news framing. Research in this area integrates several subfields, including production, content, and effects of news (Entman, 1993; Matthes, 2009; Reese, 2007). In this sense, news framing provides a unique lens to examine how news shape and is shaped by societal events, and how news coverage influences, or even foments future events (D'Angelo, 2002; Gamson & Modigliani, 1989; Thompson, 1995).