Deranged Loners and Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973-2001

Abstract

There were seven assassination attempts on U. S. Presidents between 1973 and. In this article, we critically examine coverage of each attack in The New York Times and The Washington Post, describing how the coverage employs therapeutic discourse frames that position the President as vulnerable and portray the attackers as lonely and demented outsiders.Noticing contradictions in this pattern, we also identify counterframes, including those acknowledging the political motivations of the assassins, the diminished public sphere that is a context for those actions, and the contradictions in a legal system that denies the insanity pleas of those framed so extensively as mentally ill. Political science, psychology, and law enforcement researchers have recognized that assassination attempts are often driven by rational political and economic concerns. Our analysis thus points to the need for further research exploring therapeutic framing techniques of other instances of political violence that may discourage publics from thinking critically about protest, violence and tragedy in the United States.KEYWORDS: assassination attempts, media framing, protest, public sphere, therapeutic discourse, US Presidency coverage that has framed their discontent largely in terms of personal psychological disturbance.The tendency of journalists to foreground the personal psychopathology of would-be assassins has located these attacks in the private, deluded worlds of the attackers rather than as public moments of opposition or as markers of broader social anxiety.Cloud (1998) has labeled this dislocation of social problems into a private, familial or psychological frame therapeutic discourse (see also Cloud, 2003 a & b;Rockler, 2003). Such discourse emphasizes individual responsibility for and the necessity of private rather than societal response to social problems. Cloud (1998) writes,The therapeutic refers to a set of political and cultural discourses that have adopted psychotherapy's lexicon-the conservative language of healing, coping, Table 1). These cases share in common the fact that none was successful and all targeted sitting Presidents or the White House. In addition, all occurred after 1973, a year that marked the beginning of a period in U.S. history of economic downturn (Harvey, 1989). The state of the U.S. economy is important for the current analysis because economic concerns were considered to be connected to some of these attacks (see Clarke, 1982) and because Feierabend, Feierabend, Nesvold, and Jaggar (1971) have observed correlations between economic and systemic grievances and acts of political violence. INSERT TABLE 1Therapeutic Framing of Assassination Attempts 5Furthermore, these assassination attempts all took place in years marked by growing political alienation and frustration. Although collective protest was recognized as a powerful and legitimate form of political engagement during the 1960s, U.S. cultural life increasingly emphasized private, individualized concerns during the decades thereafter (G...

Communication and urban air quality governance in Germany: Discursive framing by selected national environmental NGOs and the Automotive Industry Association (VDA) and its potential impacts

“…For framing analysis, a range of methodologies exist, ranging from purely qualitative document analyses to quantitative software‐based assessments (David et al, 2011). Due to the limited scope of this analysis, it was chosen to conduct a qualitative document analysis in the vein of Tucker (1998) or Hoerl et al (2009), to comprehensively engage with the analyzed resources. Regarding the structure of such qualitative assessments, David et al (2011, referencing Matthes & Kohring, 2008) note: “Elements of texts are examined and given interpretive accounts based on their depictions of the broader cultural context within which the discourse occurs.” The focus is therefore on a holistic assessment of patterns in communication, advanced by different actors, to understand potentially diverging trends.…”

“…For framing analysis, a range of methodologies exist, ranging from purely qualitative document analyses to quantitative software-based assessments (David et al, 2011). Due to the limited scope of this analysis, it was chosen to conduct a qualitative document analysis in the vein of Tucker (1998) or Hoerl et al (2009) This analysis is structured around a mapping of trends in framing through emphasizing (Druckman, 2004), which is achieved by identifying and contrasting each actor group's use of different narratives and scientific references when presenting urban air quality matters in written communication from between 2015 to mid-2019, as provided on their homepages (see Figures 2 and 3). Pre-2015 publications are only included where relevant.…”

Commemorating the Kent State Tragedy Through Victims' Trauma in Television News Coverage, 1990–2000

“…For a different example of how therapeutic framing techniques discourage the public from thinking critically about instances of political violence, see Hoerl, Cloud, and Jarvis (2009).…”

David, Goliath, and the Black Panthers

“…This difference may explain why (in an ideological not intentional sense) mass media and politicians more often than not framed the Panthers in discrediting ways. Explanations of sociopolitical phenomena in terms of system and structure are not commonsense or natural frames within which to interpret violence in liberal capitalist society, but critics should recognize their reasonable-ness (e.g., Hoerl, 2002;Hoerl, Jarvis, & Cloud, 2009). Only the actors already in power maintain the prerogative of system blindness (Hartsock, 1983(Hartsock, , 1999.…”