How Media Frames Move Public Opinion: An Analysis of the Women's Movement

We examine the weekly print media's coverage of the women's move ment and ascertain the presence of five unique frames from the 1950s through the 1990s: a sex roles frame, a feminism frame, political rights frame, economic rights frame, and an anti-feminism frame. After describ ing the frames we discuss an experimental test of four of the media pack ages on voters' political attitudes using a non-random sample of adults. Experimental results indicate that the economic rights and anti-feminism frames had a strong, negative impact on subject attitudes toward gender equality, support for women's rights, support for non-traditional gender roles and the frequency with which subjects mentioned "women's issues" as among the most important issues facing the U.S. In addition, the femi nism frame also exerted negative effects; while, conversely, the political rights frame had a positive influence on similar gender attitudes. Results were moderated by respondent gender with men demonstrating greater susceptibility to issue framing than women.