Summary
Episodic and thematic framing are two ways the news can present an issue: as the story of a particular person or event, or as a general trend set in its context. The distinction is the American political scientist Shanto Iyengar’s, from a 1990 paper on poverty and his 1991 book ‘Is Anyone Responsible?’.
In the episodic frame, he wrote, “poverty is covered in terms of personal experience”. Most of the 191 US network news stories on poverty he analysed from 1981–86 took that form. In his experiments the frame changed who viewers held responsible: thematic coverage produced “a stronger sense of societal responsibility”, episodic coverage pointed them towards the individual.
Rationale
Evidence that a story’s form carries assumptions its content never states. We read the episodic habit as one way individualism gets rehearsed daily – our inference: Iyengar measured blame, not dispositions.