Reps overwhelmingly shape reality -- especially in the context of poverty.

News media seek to reduce the complexity of the issues by presenting them in easy-to-understand interpretive packages. Framing Responsiserves as a packaging process, which involves selecting certain aspects of reality and making them more salient, while leaving other aspects out of the package.26 It is in this selection process that the media promote a particular problem definition, leading the audience to make attributions of respon~ibility.~~ Attributions of responsibility can be categorized into two types: causal  and treatment responsibilities.28 Causal responsibility deals with the source of the problem, while treatment responsibility focuses on who has the power or the responsibility to alleviate the problem. More simply put, causal responsibility addresses the question of who causes the problem, while treatment responsibility identifies who should be held responsible for solving it. These two definitions of responsibility are particularly useful in understanding public dialogues on social problems. Social problems are inherently political in nature, involving compromise and conciliation of competing intere~ts.2~ Itis critically important for these competing interests to be able to successfully define the responsibility because it will eventually determine which interest (eg., the government, industry, or individual citizens) should be held responsible for fixing the problem.30 The discussion of responsibility involves two conflicting views.31 One view holds that a social problem is caused largely by the deficiencies of individuals, often those who are affected by the problem. Because the problem is considered as resulting from flaws in individual behaviors, change efforts tend to focus on modifications of the problematic behaviors. According to the other view, a social problem results pri marily from flaws in social and environmental conditions, such as unequal distribution of economic resources, unsafe environments, or unethical business practices. Remedies require changes in government policies, business practices, and/or other larger social forces.32 News media are often criticized for reducing important social issues to mere individual-level problems.33 Social responsibilities are largely ignored, while individual causes and solutions are repeatedly emphasized. There are several reasons. First, as mentioned earlier, the emphasis on individual responsibility may well reflect the strong individualism of the American culture.% Second, societal approaches are often considered too radical either politically or economically, and are thus rejected in news coverage in favor of less drastic measures, like changing individual behaviors.35 Prescriptions for such ”societal remedies” include, for example, new laws, new taxes, and new regulations. Finally, news coverage of social problems is typically episodic, focusing largely on a specific event that has happened to certain individuals? It is in this act of presenting a specific event that the media necessarily divert attention from social conditions and instead focus more on individual accountabilitie~.~~ While some researchers assume that the media play an active role in shaping people’s understanding of who is re~ponsible,~~ a recent study by Kensicki brings into question the media’s r01e.3~ Her content analysis of news articles about poverty, pollution, and incarceration indicated that news coverage was overwhelmingly ”neutral,” and rarely suggested any causes, effects, or responsible agent for the problems. Through the overwhelming uses of neutral frames, she concludes, newspapers have promoted general political apathy among readers, creating a disconnection between the problem and actual ramifications. That is, the unbalanced emphasis on social responsibility was considerably smaller among conservative newspapers, indicating that organizational pressures can also play a role. The political orientation of the organization may become a powerful influence as it becomes a form of organizational pressure. It is likely that conservative publishers’ deeper financial and organizational resources for skilled management put a limit on how far to the left their employees can go on the ideological Episodic framing of the issues, or focusing on personal stories rather than social backgrounds, is a kind of professional routine for the American news media.51 A necessary consequence of episodic framing is to displace attention away from larger social conditions, placing people-rather than society-at the center of discussing how to solve a problem. We hypothesized that if this routine practice does affect which frames will be selected, television would be less likely than newspapers to emphasize societal causes and solutions. Compared to newspapers, television is much more event-oriented. Television is a story teller. By and large, it does not cover the issues; it tells It is in this process of telling stories that television diverts attention from systemic and institutional resp~nsibilities.~~ Supporting the hypothesis, we found that television was slightly less likely to assign responsibility to society. Though the finding was only marginally significant, it provides at least some evidence that the professional routine of news media-as being episodic and event-oriented-may affect the media’s selective use of one frame over another. While previous research has focused largely on stereotypical portrayals of the our study offers an analysis of how the media present the question of responsibility. In particular, we examined an important function of news framing: diagnosing the causes and suggesting ~olutions.~~ What then are some potential effects of such framing on the audience? Does news coverage of poverty affect people’s perceptions of who is responsible? Is this perceived responsibility in turn related to the public’s attitudes toward the poor? More important, do the different ways to talk about poverty influence people’s support for government aid to the poor? Future research building on our findings needs to explore such consequences of responsibility framing, looking directly at the impact of news coverage on the public’s perceptions and attitudes. It will also be important to examine whether the typical ways poverty is framed are driven by politicians. To what extent do the media parrot what politicians tell them about poverty? Or is there a mutually reinforcing relationship between politicians’ and the media’s uses of frames? According to the indexing hyp~thesis,~~ news professionals tend to “index” the range of viewpoints according to the range of views expressed in the mainstream government debate. Other studies, however, reported that news media operate somewhat independently, often adopting a set of frames different from that of politicians and interest groups.57 Future research needs to explore in detail the interplay among the media, politicians, and interest groups TALKING ABOUT POVERTY 577 in the process of framing building, looking at how these players influence one another to shape the public discourse on the poverty issue.