What lies beyond the tip of the "narrative" iceberg?

Narrative frames is a type of media frames that use elements of narrativity to highlight some aspects of a complex issue and condense it into a simplified "story" that promotes a particular interpretation. These elements of storytelling, such as representing an issue through the lens of stakeholders and conflicts rather than direct description of the facts, make narrative frames a highly effective device, particularly in the context of contested issues such as climate change.

Despite that, automatic framing analysis still mostly disregards narrative frames and conceptualizes frames in a topic-like fashion. Recent work in NLP has studied elements of narratives such as characters or events in news reporting, but these studies often lose the link to the core mechanism of framing, and do not allow to abstract away from particular events and characters in order to differentiate between contrasting narrative frames.

In our work, we dissect narratives into components which allow to link them to mechanisms of framing, on one hand, and help to understand, distinsguish, and model them. We show how:

  • Character roles (framing particular entities as heroes, villains, and victims) as well as focus on a particular character helps to resolve ambivalence of interpretation (which is necessary for framing to occur) and assign a particular moral evaluation.
  • Conflict and resolution represent causes and solutions to complex issues, which are core elements of their framing.
  • Cultural stories link to broader value systems, allowing the frames to evoke wider associations existing in the culture.

More details about these components can be found in our method section and in our paper. The benefits of the structural approach to narratives are summarised here.

On this page we present several additions to our paper:

  • An interactive example of how narrative components are used to frame the text.
  • A live demo of the model.
  • A comparison of climate change narratives in the USA and Australia.

Interactive Example: Are melting icebergs actually good for us?

Hover over the highlighted text below to explore how narrative framing components work in practice:

Global warming fail: Study finds melting sea ice is actually helping Arctic animals

Proponents of the theory humans are primarily responsible for rising global temperatures long claimed wildlife are harmed significantly by global warming, and that unless mankind stops producing significant amounts of carbon-dioxide emissions, the world's animals will not be able to thrive.

While rising temperatures have certainly put a strain on species in some parts of the world, a new study by researchers at the University of Southern Denmark suggests animals in the Arctic region are thriving because of higher global temperatures.

USA Today recently declared the loss of sea ice "terrifying," but global warming skeptics have long suggested these claims are overblown when put into perspective.

Overall, this structure points to a denialist narrative frame ``No need to act'' which questions or ridicules the reality of climate change.

Interactive Model Demo

Test our narrative framing model with your own articles. Our trained model will identify heroes, villains, victims, focus, conflict type, and cultural story components.

Input Article

Paste a news article below to analyze its narrative framing components. Our model will identify heroes, villains, victims, focus, conflict type, and cultural story.

Analysis Results

🔍

Enter an article above and click "Analyze Article" to see the narrative framing predictions.

USA vs Australian Narratives

Another country, another time

The beauty of our framework is that it can generalize across topics and context. In particular, it allows to discover new narrative frames which were previously not included in the framework, rather than force them into one of the pre-existing "bucket".

To demonstrate that, we additionally annotate climate-focused articles from Australian outlets published in 2024, with a similar distribution across left-centred, left and right-centered sources.

As the picture below shows, we are able not only to compare the relative frequency of the narrative frames included in the USA dataset in Australian media, but also to discover new combinations of frame componets.

Specifically, we discover two new narratives of denial and delay ("Adaption" and "Fossil fuel solutionism" [Lamb et al., 2020]), as well as two pro-climate narratives ("Pollution is choking our planet" [Bevan et al., 2020] and "Win-win scenario" [Hinkel et al., 2020]).

We also note that narratives of denial and delay, especially the once criticisng climate solutions and suggesting "better" fossil fuels and technological solutions, are much more present in Australian media, which confirms previous findings [Arranz et al., 2024]

Distribution of Climate Narratives: USA vs Australia

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Citation

If you find our work useful, please cite our paper:

@article{otmakhova2025narrative,
        title={Narrative Media Framing in Political Discourse},
        author={Otmakhova, Yulia and Frermann, Lea},
        journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.00737},
        year={2025} }