As outlined in the Literature review section of this thesis, it was Goffman and Bateson who first came up with the concept of framing. And although such idea is used to make sense of everyday social experiences, framing has been useful in understanding media’s role in political and social life in particular (Reese, 2001).
Studies of news ‘frames’ and ‘framing’ attend to processes of news selection and salience and how news representations are structured to promote a ‘particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation’ (Entman, 1993: 52).
According to Cottle (2011), a lot has changed since earlier studies of the framing theory. The analysis of mainstream national media now demonstrate that they portray protests and demonstrators through a dominant law and (dis)order frame, which delegitimizes the protesters, as well as aims at emphasizing drama, spectacle and violence over the reasons why demonstrations occurred in the first place (Halloran, Elliot & Murdoch, 1970; Gitlin, 1980; Murdoch, 1981 in (Cottle & Lester, 2011). This remains a generally persuasive framework to this day.
Protests and demonstrations have historically performed an integral part in struggles for democracy and contentious politics more generally (Thompson, 1991, 1993;
McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly, 2001; Tilly, 2005), and they continue to do so nowadays (Etzioni, 1970; Norris, 2002; Milne, 2005; Tarrow, 2006). Whether the media’s reporting predictions towards violence, spectacle and drama, or its structural orientation to powerful elites and their definitions of protest events (Cottle & Lester, 2011). Indeed, as the findings of this research demonstrated, the majority of articles published in both Kazakhstanskaya Pravda and Golos Respubliki framed the events in Zhanaozen through the prism of law and (dis)order. In particular, the President Nazarbayev prioritized the consequences of the disorder and their resolution over understanding what caused violence in the first place.
However, as Cottle and Lester (2011) state, although there is a continuing culture of prediction and structural orientation of the news media, there might be some opportunity for different voices and definitions of events, whether through time, across different media, in respect of different protest issues, or based on a more open theorization of the power of spectacle and protest performance. Consequently, as findings have demonstrated, being the opposition-supporting media, 40 per cent of the Golos Respubliki article framed the events in Zhanaozen through socio-economic perspective. Indeed, some of the movements not presented through the law and (dis)order frame by the Western media either. In fact, much depends on the democratic credentials of the state and oppositional movements involved as well as
Lester, 2011). Such desire to frame the events from a non-law and (dis)order point of view was demonstrated by the member of the EU Parliament Paul Murphy, who looked at the events in Zhanaozen from the economic point of view.
Although traditional print and broadcasting media continue to perform a critical role in defining, framing and dramatizing protests and demonstrations, new digital means of recording, storing and disseminating information have also eased the practical cross-over of scenes of dissent into wider communication flows and mainstream media (Cottle, 2011). Indeed, mass actions can now be recorded and communicated directly by protesters or their supporters via new social media websites, as well as by the members of the general public via everyday communication technologies, which include mobile phones and cameras. When uploaded and circulated via the Internet, these new forms of “citizen journalism” can play a part in altering the balance of communicative power (McNair, 2006; Allan & Thorsen, 2009; Gowing, 2009 in (Cottle
& Lester, 2011). And although the news presented online are also framed via certain perspective, the findings of this research demonstrated the events in Zhanaozen were framed through socio-economic perspective by not only the online version of the Golos Respubliki – Respublika Portal, the ‘free bloggers’ and the ‘other bloggers’, but also by those who supported the government from the start – the ‘bloody bloggers’.
In other words, traditional media tend to frame demonstrations in a way that deligitimasizes them by putting emphasis on the ‘disorder’ of the society, which lead to disruptions that affect everyone including citizens and the government. Traditional media often tend to disregard the cause of the issue and have less reporting from those who are directly affected and if they let them speak. Such channels frame their stories in a way that allow the state officials to prevail in their explanations of what happened. In short, the traditional media, especially in authoritarian countries, tends to tell people that those who are demonstrating are disrupting social order and peace.
The new forms of media, on the other hand, as demonstrated above, tend to go past such representation and framing of protests and their participants and focus on the causes which result in mass movements. Could this mean that new forms of media no longer delegitimizes the protesters, instead, allows them to be heard by a wider
audience? And in doing so, new framing techniques provide the alternatives to the citizens of the authoritarian states.
6.3 Digital divide and the role it played in covering events in Zhanaozen