Lipstick politics and framing competition: an experiment about the Turkish Airlines news

ABSTRACT: Framing is a discourse forming procedure with a direct effect on the very meaning of the news coverage. While framing itself is unavoidable, its controlled usage requires not only individual journalistic awareness of cultural, social, ideological and even psychological factors, but it also requires an institutionalization and cultivation of journalistic best practice. This experiment studies the effects of different news framing practices of the same event on audience reception by using actual news coverage from the Turkish media. 348 students were randomly assigned to three experiment groups where they were exposed to actual news stories about a corporate attire regulation at the Turkish Airlines that had been recently issued. A factor analysis explored their thoughts on the news stories and produced respectively the managerial requirements frame and the repression of women frame as most apparent in the thoughts of the participants of the respective groups.