| Sharp divisions cleave the scholarship on intimate partner violence. Prominent family violence scholars argue that feminist scholarship has overshadowed all other approaches to domestic violence in both academic and public discussions. Media scholars, on the other hand, argue that texts passing out the media bottleneck generally conform to elite conceptions of the social order, however they arrive in that shape. The research explores ways of looking at this social problem that have been salient to a lay understanding of domestic violence by using news frames to read stories in general news magazines. A content analysis of 58 news stories from 1960 to 2000 reveals that frames pertinent to a feminist understanding of domestic violence exercised the most influence on stories about domestic violence in the 1970's, weakening thereafter, except for brief reappearances in 1993 and 1994. No evidence exists to attribute long-term changes in the framing of domestic violence in newsmagazines to feminism. Implications for further research are discussed. |
