How media frame an event shapes the audience’s attitude toward it.

Evidence

By context I mean the picture’s setting, its place in reality, the values implicit in it, and, not least, the kind of attitude it promotes in the beholder. Thus, if the Iranian crisis is regularly rendered by television pictures of chanting “Islamic” mobs accompanied by commentary about “anti-Americanism,” the distance, unfamiliarity, and threatening quality of the spectacle limit “Islam” to those characteristics; this in turn gives rise to a feeling that something basically unattractive and negative confronts us. Since Islam is “against” us and “out there,” the necessity of adopting a confrontational response of our own towards it will not be doubted. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 177

Categorization

• DEFINE: Said’s definition of ‘context’ as the value-laden setting and promoted attitude, not mere background.
• XREF: connects to: Media presence itself becomes the model that precedes and drains meaning from events — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 187; News coverage affects attitudes with a peak two-week memory window. — Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, Why Did the Democrats Lose the South?…, 622