Why Bother Choosing Anyway?: Modeling Assimilation and Liberation Issue Framing in LGBTQ News Coverage

Abstract

A gap following partisan lines exists in the public support of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) people and inclusive policy. Even as overall LGBTQ support has increased, this gap has widened over the past 40 years. I theorize that some reasons for the existence and widening of this public opinion gap might be attributable to aspects of media coverage of LGBTQ political issues, including issue coverage and framing. I explore the emergence, evolution, and interaction of three main groups of narratives applicable to the media framing of LGBTQ news. Two narrative structures typify many common pro-LGBTQ frames: assimilation and the minimization of queer difference, or liberation and the embrace of difference. These narrative structures include an emphasis on etiology, which characterizes LGBTQ difference through causal attribution. Two text data mining (TDM) methods are used to assess aspects of news structure: latent Derelict Allocation topic modeling and Wordfish text scaling. Quantitative model results facilitate the identification of themes and narratives in coverage, categorizing by issue area and analyzing subsequent spatial visualizations. I discuss results and assess proposed causes of the relationship between coverage and narrative framing of LGBTQ news and public opinion. I find that trends in issue coverage reflect historical expectations about shifts in issue emphasis, and that media sources tend not to differ widely from each other in terms of their issue focus. I also find that assimilation frames are more typically used to counterframe anti-LGBTQ frames than liberation frames, and that this dynamic appears consistent over time.