Government frames and their influence on news framing: An analysis of cross-lagged correlations in the Mexican context

Frame building has been described as the flow of frames from political actors to journalists and, thus, to news articles. One influence factor to be considered in the area of framing is media input, which consists of materials that political actors send to newsrooms to facilitate their work while influencing the news. To find out to what extent the government’s frames for the Merida Initiative influenced news frames, we identified the issue-specific frames of the initiative, measured their presence in newspapers and media input, and conducted eight cross-lagged correlation analyses. On seven occasions, the correlation went above the baseline. For this reason, it was concluded that the salience of frames in media input had a significant role in the salience of frames in news.