Narrative Media Framing in Political Discourse

Yulia Otmakhova, Lea Frermann


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.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.477
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9167–9196
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.477/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yulia Otmakhova and Lea Frermann. 2025. Narrative Media Framing in Political Discourse. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 9167–9196, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Narrative Media Framing in Political Discourse (Otmakhova & Frermann, Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.477.pdf