The framing of 9/11 in American, French, and Dutch national newspapers (2001–2015): An inductive approach to studying events

Abstract

In this article, the authors employ work on events, framing, and social problems to develop an inductive approach to studying events. The article’s central premise is that tracing direct references made to events offers a fruitful strategy to investigate their framing cross-nationally and over time. The authors apply their approach to the case of 9/11 in American, French, and Dutch national newspapers (2001–2015). By combining word counting, topic modeling, and content analysis they examine the amount of attention given to 9/11, the issues to which it has been linked, and the implications attributed to it. The results indicate that the framing of 9/11 in the above three countries has been stable and uniform regarding foreign issues. There are however enduring, marked cross-national differences with respect to domestic issues. In France, 9/11 has barely been related to such issues; in the United States, the event has been connected principally to national security; and in the Netherlands, it has mainly prompted the problematization of Muslim immigrants. Because 9/11 has been a significant event many years after its occurrence, albeit differently so in each country of study, the findings point to the relevance of studying the framing of events cross-nationally and over extended periods of time.

How happenings do (not) turn into events: A typology and an application to the case of 9/11 in the American and Dutch public spheres

“…The framing of 9/11 in the American and Dutch public spheres offers such a case. In prior research, I have found that significantly different meanings were attached to this event in national newspapers from the two countries over the 2001–2015 period (van Dooremalen & Uitermark, 2020 ). An important part of this research consisted of a topic‐modeling investigation.…”

“…DiMaggio et al., 2013 ; Marshall, 2013 ). A significant number of codes concerned foreign issues such as the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, as well as domestic issues like safety, Muslim integration, or national politics (see van Dooremalen and Uitermark ( 2020 ) for a more extensive explanation of the entire analysis).…”

“…In the second part of the paper, then, I show how this typology can be used to make sense of a concrete event‐case: the distinctive framings of 9/11 in the American and Dutch public spheres. In prior research (van Dooremalen & Uitermark, 2020 ), I have found that within American debates over domestic affairs, this event has been dominantly related to the issue of safety, whereas in the Netherlands, this has been the case for the issue of Islam. The event typology helps to explain this variation, as demonstrated by a follow‐up investigation analyzing how and why public actors in the two countries have drawn links between these issues and 9/11 in national newspapers and legislative debates.…”

Do ‘texto como texto’ ao ‘texto como dado’: o potencial das pesquisas em Relações Internacionais

“…Por exemplo,Dooremalen & Uitermark (2020) combinam o uso de contagem de palavras, modelagem de tópicos e análise de conteúdo para examinar a atenção dada aos atentados de 11 de setembro de 2001, os assuntos aos quais eles foram ligados e as implicações atribuídas ao acontecimento, a partir de um corpus formado por publicações de jornais nos Estados Unidos, na França e nos Países Baixos, entre 2001 e 2015. Para medir a atenção dada aos atentados, os autores contaram quantas vezes o evento aparecia nas publicações.…”

Cross-Border Impacts of Terrorist Attacks and the Importance of Proximity

“…As for the research design, to investigate whether place matters for the cross-border impacts of terrorist attacks, we analyse newspaper articles from four American newspapers to measure three forms of impact: the attention that the attacks received, the degree to which they were 'domesticated', and the implications that were inferred from them (Cf. van Dooremalen & Uitermark, 2020). In addition, to find out why place and distance matter, we conduct a thematic content analysis (Cf.…”