Framing the Culture War: Media Ideology and News Genre across Morality Policies in Canada

• In Event: 30468 - Interrogating the Relationship between Politics and Culture

Abstract

While culture war studies debate whether public opinion has been polarized, fewer have conceptualized culture war as cultural constructs, such as media discourse (Hunter, 2006). Similarly, media studies on political polarization focus on favorable coverage and agenda-setting, with less attention to how culture war is constructed through media frames—interpretive schemata shaped by media outlets with diverse ideological stances. Recent research highlights the Canadian media system as ideologically diverse (Thibault et al., 2020), making it a valuable alternative to the U.S.-focused scholarship. Integrating Entman’s (1993) and Van Gorp’s (2007) framing theories, I define culture war frames as connecting policy disputes to fundamental value differences through devices like word choices and causal linkages. Using Knill’s (2013) policy typology—manifest, latent, and non-morality policies, this study examines three Canadian policies: pronoun policy and gender curriculum, affordable housing, and immigration policies. Applying structural topic modeling and principal component analysis, I test hypotheses on the use of culture war frames, the role of media ideology, and the effects of news genres across policies. Results indicate that culture war frames are prominent in gender curriculum and immigration policies. However, affordable housing is closer to gender curriculum in the latent text-space, likely due to both disputes leading to protests and policing, while immigration policies remain in the state level. Surprisingly, as a latent morality policy, immigration policy has been the most contentious, with the most topics predicted by media ideology. Across morality policies, news reports emphasize event-based information, while opinionated stories deploy culture war frames. This study contributes to culture war and media studies by highlighting culture war frames as shaped by media ideology, with heterogenous effects across morality policies. It suggests that latent morality policies—blending instrumental and moral elements, might be the most contentious, while manifest morality policies, already moralized, require less media framing effort.

Author

• Yi-Cheng Hsieh, McGill University