Framing of Kennewick Man against the Backdrop of a Scientific and Cultural Controversy

Abstract

The authors examine news coverage surrounding the unearthing of an ancient skeleton known as Kennewick Man. The skeleton was the focus of legal arguments from 1996 to 2004, with a group of scientists countering Indian claims that the skeleton should be rightfully repatriated to the North American tribes. The authors take a case-study approach, examining the theoretical underpinnings of scientific and cultural rationality in contemporary ways of knowing and linking them with communitarian ethics offered by Clifford Christians and others. Through an examination of mass media framing, the authors show how coverage has resulted in a discourse that has limited discussion to a division of rationalities. In this case, rationalist and cultural values unfold with scant attendance to ethical or pluralistic considerations.

The Content Analysis of Media Frames: Toward Improving Reliability and Validity

“…Although most of these studies are well documented and exceptionally thorough in their discussion of media frames, it is fairly difficult to tell how the frames were extracted from the material. For instance, Hanson (1995, p. 384) simply states that the anticolonial frame “emerged from the analysis”; Haller and Ralph (2001, p. 412) indicate that “news frames were found”; Coleman and Dysart (2005, p. 13) assure that “a deep reading […] informed the authors of the emergent frames”; and in Boni’s (2002) study, there is no hint at all about how the frames were extracted. As Simon (2001) puts it, this raises questions about selection bias and robustness of the frames identified.…”

“…Hermeneutic approach There are a number of studies that try to identify frames by providing an interpretative account of media texts linking up frames with broader cultural elements (Boni, 2002;Coleman & Dysart, 2005;Downs, 2002;Haller & Ralph, 2001;Hanson, 1995;Tucker, 1998). Rooted in the qualitative paradigm, these studies are based on small samples that mirror the discourse of an issue or an event.…”

“Wrong, but It Worked”: How Lay Citizens Assess the Ethics of Communicating about Risk in the Context of Local Scientific/Technological Controversy

“…All of these quotations focus on some evaluation of communication from actors directly involved in reacting to and in the process contributing to controversy in their communities, albeit in different ways. To say that one communicative approach was "wrong, but it worked," evokes the sense of competition or conflict over truth claims that arises under these circumstances (e.g., Coleman & Dysart, 2005). To discuss the difficulty of playing down the middles recalls 8 oft-derided journalistic norms of balance in the context of newswriting in the United States (e.g., Clarke, 2008).…”

Navigating US greenways: US political reflections inAn Inconvenient Truth

“…Poff media and ideological standpoints (Carvalho 2007) and political partisanship to perceptual differences (Kim 2011). Coleman and Dysart (2005) find that politically fractured messaging limits public discourse to a division of rationalities. However, few specifically political readings of environmental media exist.…”