Drilling: A Narrative Analysis

One way that journalists report news stories is through the use of narratives. Narratives involve story telling and have been considered effective for engaging readers emotionally through captivating plots and characters. Any reader can identify with experiencing a feeling of transportation into the world of a story. In a narrative, readers can share in the experience of others and thus become emotionally immersed in a story. Because of this emotional connection and the fact that narratives do not usually contain obvious arguments for readers to reject, narratives have shown to lower readers’ desire to disagree with the message and increase positive opinions about the themes within the story. Researchers are finding that news framing, the process …show more content…
In order to test these hypotheses, a research experiment was conducted on a group of 179 undergraduate students. The students were divided into groups and asked to read news articles on the issue of drilling for gas in the Marcellus Shale. This topic was appropriate not only because is it controversial, but also because it was a relatively new issue and the pros and cons of drilling for shale gas were constantly being updated in the media at the time of the study. One set of the articles was framed around the negative environmental effects of drilling and the other around the benefits of employment outcomes. The news articles were written in either a narrative style or an informational news report format. The informational news report used the standard inverted pyramid format while the narrative news stories were designed to follow a common narrative structure. A self-report scale was used as the means of measuring readers’ immediate responses to the issue and their responses 24 hours