Using the episode “Drone Queen” from season four of the HBO show HOMELAND as a treatment, I designed an experiment to examine the framing effects of watching the episode in its entirety versus watching the episode with all scenes removed that depicted a positive-valence frame toward the victims of a drone strike in Afghanistan. The initial study ran into technological problems where the edited version of the episode refused to play on the day of the treatment. However, there were still some differences in policy attitudes between the group who watched the entire episode and the control group who read a short article on nano-technology and were not exposed to the show at all.
I am in the process of recreating the edited version of the episode in order to perform the experiment again.
Alexandra C. Pauley 