Narrative Media Framing in Political Discourse (2025)

Abstract: Narrative frames are a powerful way of conceptualizing and communicating complex, controversial ideas, however automated frame analysis to date has mostly overlooked this framing device. In this paper, we connect elements of narrativity with fundamental aspects of framing, and present a framework which formalizes and operationalizes such aspects. We annotate and release a data set of news articles in the climate change domain, analyze the dominance of narrative frame components across political leanings, and test LLMs in their ability to predict narrative frames and their components. Finally, we apply our framework in an unsupervised way to elicit components of narrative framing in a second domain, the COVID-19 crisis, where our predictions are congruent with prior theoretical work showing the generalizability of our approach.

## introduction narrative framing is a type of media framing that uses elements of narrativity to highlight some aspects of a complex issue and condense it into a simplified "story" that promotes a particular interpretation @xcite . these elements of storytelling, such as representing an issue through the lens of stakeholders and conflicts rather than direct description of the facts, make narrative frames a highly effective device, particularly in the context of contested issues such as climate change @xcite . narrative framing can draw the reader's attention to specific, nuanced aspects of an issue and instill a very precise interpretation that differs from the "default" reading inferrable from its generic or issue-specific frame. to give an example, the text in figure 1 frames the topic of climate change through a "polar bear" issue-specific frame @xcite ., hero (denialist scientists) villain (climate advocates) focus (on hero) cultural story (individ.) fuels conflict (promotes harmful pseudoscience) figure 1 : an except from a news article, with hero marked in green and villain in red. entities that are not main characters are grayed out. the box shows the focal character (here, hero). the phrases in italic are cues which show that the article has an individualistic cultural story ("the nature can fix itself") and that it fuels conflict by actively promoting bad science. while the importance of framing narratives for the communication and perception of news has been widely recognized in the social sciences @xcite , automatic framing analysis still mostly conceptualizes frames in a topic-like fashion @xcite . recent work in nlp has studied elements of narratives such as characters or events in news reporting @xcite @xcite @xcite . however, these studies are either topic-specific, or lose the link to the core mechanism of framing: for framing to occur, an ambivalent issue must be present @xcite and described in a way that evokes a larger interpretative context (schema) which goes beyond information directly inferrable from the text @xcite . as such, beyond the issue itself (aka entman (1993)'s "problem statement"), there are other important mechanisms that turn a message into a frame, such as alluding to the conflict that led to the problem (=its cause), making a moral evaluation, or suggesting a resolution to it. we present a general formalization of narrative framing that comprises all these aspects. we do so by integrating elements of narratology with social and media studies on narrative framing, to establish a framework which allows to identify and structurally represent narrative frames and to distinguish superficially similar frames from one another. first, our framework distinguishes character roles, and we show how issue ambivalence arises when actors in an article are assigned an archetypical role @xcite and one of the roles is drawn into focus. this emphasis in turn evokes a moral evaluation of the personas in the article. as a second component, we position each character in terms of exacerbating or resolving the core conflict of the article. finally, to link the presentation in the article to the wider set of associations and beliefs already existing in the receiver's perception @xcite , we link our narrative frames to established "cultural stories" that define the attitude towards external control and the sense of unity with the group @xcite . figure 1 illustrates the three components with an example. we apply our framework to analyze media framing of two distinct public issues -climate change and covid-19. in particular, we make the following contributions: narrative framing and nlp narrative framing intersects the concepts of storytelling and framing, i.e., the presentation of information in a way to evoke a specific association in the audience. automatic narrative understanding has attracted substantial attention in nlp @xcite ; however, it has focused mostly on fictional narratives @xcite , personal narratives in social media @xcite , or specific elements such as event chains @xcite . few works have considered the intersection of stories and framing @xcite , or used elements of narrativity such as events to improve on topicfocussed framing analysis @xcite . while narrative framing research in the social sciences is strongly grounded in the npf, this framework is yet to gain recognition in nlp approaches. closest to our work are @xcite and @xcite who study some narrative elements of framing devices (such as entities framed as heroes or victims), but do not model full narrative frames. in addition to entities gehring and @xcite model relationships between them such as "harm" or "protect"; however, their approach does not map the identified elements back to more high-level (narrative) frames. ## components of narrative framing we motivate our three core components which define a narrative frame. each component contributes to the framing mechanism, by resolving the ambivalence through assigning moral evaluation to stakeholders (characters), capturing the conflict and resolution aspect of a frame (conflict and resolution), and evoking a wider set of cognitive schemata and cultural associations (cultural stories). ## narrative framing of climate change in the remainder of this paper we apply our framework to perform narrative framing analysis on two topics: climate change and covid-19. first, in this section, we use it to manually annotate the three components of narrative frames in news articles, and then map them to established narrative frames in the climate change domain. we use this corpus to evaluate the ability of multiple llms to predict narrative frame components and the frames themselves. then, in section 5 we show how the framework can be generalized to a domain without an established repertoire of narrative frames (politician's speeches on covid-19), where the goal is to discover frames rather than classify them. ## narrative framing of covid-19 in this section we apply our narrative frame structures taxonomy to texts with a different topic and style -politicians' speeches around the onset of covid-19 -to demonstrate its generalizability to other domains. we show how models and prompts developed within the supervised approach (section 4) can be applied to analyze narrative frame components in an unsupervised way. ## conclusion we presented a rigorous formalization and taxonomy of components of narrative framing, synthesizing the npf and entman (1993)'s components of a frame. our method allows to inductively detect narratives from political texts in terms of their character roles, focus, conflict, and underlying cultural story. a high-quality data set of 100 manually labeled articles serves as a benchmark and basis for future annotation bootstrapping. we showed that our framework results in promising improvement of automatic narrative prediction with llms, laying a foundation for the important research agenda of large-scale studies of the manifestation and effects of narrative frames. moreover, we showed that our framework is generalizable to other topics and can assist in exploratory framing analysis without requiring a labeled dataset.