Framing: School Bans Touching

I chose a video from CNN that covers a new policy implemented by East Shore Middle School in Milford, Connecticut. I found a corresponding article at the Eyewitness News in Connecticut. The story here was in text form and there is a picture of the school sign and a link to a video. This event was presented in two very different ways and it’s clear that framing alters how a story is perceived by the public.

The CNN video begins with a child being interviewed and there is no text version of the story connected to the video. For people who wanted more in depth coverage of the story, more research was required. In my opinion, only providing a video is framing in itself because the public is not provided with helpful links and there are important limitations to be mindful of. One being that videos must be short and to the point. This makes it hard to include all the important information or both sides of the story. In this case, only one side of the story is presented. Only children and their parents are interviewed and we are not told why we don’t hear the school’s side of the story. It is simply left out. By doing this, the audience has one take, a biased take, and therefore it frames the story and our opinions. If we were given the school’s explanation or an interview in favor of the policy, it would be much more balanced.

In the article at Eyewitness News, we have a headline, subhead, dateline, a visual, and a link to the video. This already allows the audience to have a sense of setting and pretense before delving into the issue. A few of the same quotes from the video are used in the article and in the video, but a more balanced view is given. In the article, we are told that the district had no comment on the issue and the town’s mayor trusts the school’s principals and superintendent. This explanation of why there is no comment from the school gives us an opinion of how the school is handling the issue by staying quiet. The town’s mayor said he had faith in the school, and thus the policy, so the end of the article is saying something like, “he trusts it, so should you.” Both the CNN video and the article discuss why the policy came about, but the CNN video is almost completely comprised of interviews. I prefer the article over the CNN video because I had a better grasp of the issue and the circumstances.