Between frames and ideology: representing work in Romanian on-line media

After 2008, Romania faced a difficult economic crisis manifested in the increase of unemployement rate, high migratory flows in the EU and a drop in the national GDP. As existing literature showed, in the period of economic crisis, media exposure strongly affected expectations regarding the future development of the national economic situation. The present article presents the ways in which media frames were used to represent different occupations within the Romanian mass media. Using a content analysis as the main method applied to a sample made up of 944 news published in the online newspapers in Romania, the results of the study pinpoint the fact that each type of media presents the same occupation in a specific way. Another important result of the study is that the reader’s perception of the occupations presented in the Romanian mass media – expressed in the form of comments to the online articles – is similar to the presentation of these occupations in the news published by Romanian mass media.