Framing similar issues differently: a comparative analysis of Dutch and Iranian news texts

ABSTRACT In this study, the concept of framing is applied in order to show differences in the conception of crime events in the genre of news texts across socio-cultural contexts. Three aspects of framing at the thematic, lexical and syntactic level are defined: occurrence, marked description and prominence and, accordingly, a corpus of one hundred crime-news articles in Dutch and Iranian national newspapers is analyzed. Taking a systematic and replicable approach, it was found that crime-news narratives in the two countries frame crime and crime-related events in different ways with regard to the representation of participants, actions and circumstantial elements. The implication of these different framing patterns is explained in terms of different socio-cultural contexts and discussed with regard to the discourse culture of journalism. The study has implications for further exploration of the interdependence of discourse, context and cognition.