News frames as social narratives: TWA Flight 800

Successfully framing a news story is sometimes impossible. In this textual analysis of the New York Times's coverage of the investigation of the crash of TWA Flight 800, I compared the failed efforts of reporters to produce a news frame to those of their official sources, federal forensic investigators. By interpreting the reporters' and sources' conflicting uses of empirical logic, I identified an ideological conflict within the bounds of modernity that makes journalism's connection to postmodernity more understandable. I considered the importance of temporality and the control of time to the definition of modernist ideology. By contrast, Jameson's (1991) postmodern theory makes it possible to understand the postmodern implications of the potential frames that do not become part of the official story.