Careless Framing by Journalists, and Its Real-World Consequences

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Carolyn Jackson-Brown, who highlights the dilemma for journalists inherent in their dual missions to inform and entertain (or, more to the point, attract clicks from news users). Her focus here is on the reporting of the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022, and she worked with journalism students on how they received news about the war – in the first place, from TikTok, Twitter, and professional journalists’ accounts.

Quickly, the students discovered that much of the early coverage by pro-Russian actors on TikTok was fake. Moving to the television coverage, they encountered very different framings of the invasion by British and Russian media, too – and a great deal of that framing even in British media can be careless and inaccurate, and looking for ‘gotcha’ moments with political leaders.

Carolyn now also walks through an example of the depictions of Boris Johnson through his period as UK Prime Minister – from the supportive, establishment framing of his early career and the COVID-19 crisis to the more questioning, critical, and finally openly ridiculing coverage of the final stages. Such examples show that journalists’ role in constructing meaning and opinions is obvious but also discreet; some contemporary journalism does lack integrity for the sake of audience engagement – and this can have real-world consequences, for individuals and society.