Valence Frames, Journalists and the Production of Political News Content during the Campaign of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum

Using the 2014 Scottish independence referendum as a case study, this paper explores the ways in which the media portray political processes. More specifically, the paper sheds light on the framing process and on perceived factors of news decision making. For this purpose, the research design includes a content analysis of all newspaper articles that covered the independence issue and were published by Dundee’s newspapers, The Courier and Evening Telegraph, during the time period of the referendum campaign. The relevant literature suggests that there is a strong long-established linkage between the Scottish press and Scottish national identity. In fact, it has been argued that the two reinforce one another. Based on this evidence, the study hypothesises that journalists employed valence frames creating a positive image of an independent Scotland when they reported on the independence issue. The content analysis of the newspaper articles does, however, not support this assumption as mostly neutral, impartial frames were discovered during the coding process. The second component of the research project is composed of interviews with journalists working at The Courier and Evening Telegraph which were carried out in order to gain a better understanding of the factors that influence journalists’ news work. Over the last 20 years, studies have discussed various factors of news decision making. These sources of influence on a journalist’s daily news work can be grouped into journalist-originated factors, intra-media factors, and extra-media factors. Since scholars have not come to a consensus as to the relative importance of each of the factors, more recent studies assess journalists’ perceptions regarding the influences on their news work. The study at hand follows this new trend in that it makes use of semi-structured interviews in order to explore perceived factors of news decision making rather than objectively measurable sources of influence. The analytical part of the paper compares the findings of the content analysis to those of the interviews with the aim to draw inferences with regards to the ways in which perceived factors of news decision making are directly translated into newspaper articles. In this way, the study combines two widely used research methods in order to gain a better understanding of the processes that influence the production of political news content. At the time of writing, this analytical comparison is still under way so that it is too early to draw final conclusions.