Tackle Marijuana Legalization

Framing is the “selection of a specific aspect of an event to emphasize one dominant feature in a news item” (Professor S. Jeppeson, personal communication, Feb 26th 2016). The news article chooses one dominant feature to focus on and excludes other information. This creates a bias in the information presented because they are purposely focusing on certain information and emphasizing that feature. Therefore media framing is how the news is presented in a way that changes the audience’s perception on a certain topic. The same topic can be presented differently by different news sources. “Considerable variation in the way a national press reports on global events, as each tends to frame the observed news in a light favourable to its national …show more content…
This is the dominant message because it is stated clearly in the title and then within the article it is reiterated multiple times. For example “As Justin Trudeau prepares to tackle the politics of legalizing pot as part of his Liberal government’s legislative agenda” this is another way the article makes the dominant message clear (Kirkup). This article has a positive look on the legalization of marijuana as it discusses how prepared Canada will be, the resources Justin Trudeau has and how it will be a “landmark change for Canada” (Kirkup). The articles includes a broad plan that the government will take, “We will remove marijuana consumption and incidental possession from the Criminal Code and create new, stronger laws to punish those who provides to minors, operate motor vehicle under the influence and sell outside of the new regulatory framework” (Kirkup). The article including a plan makes the audience think that this is happening and will somewhat force them to be content with this change. It also states that Justin Trudeau “will have access to a world-class marijuana framework” this makes the audience feel more comfortable that there is a structure in place for Trudeau to follow (Kirkup). The articles says that “it is a landmark change for Canada and I think they’re on the cutting edge of what will be essentially an international movement” (Kirkup). Including this quote in the article might influence the audience to think that one day all of the world will have legalized marijuana therefore they should accept it now. This forces the audience to think positively on this topic. Especially, because the implied audience is older adults, who may be uneducated about this topic. They focused on the positives because the older generations might have a negative opinion on youth