Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on June 5" (Cheah 2017, para. 1). e article then re- counted earlier legal actions involving the project, and identified the players involved, namely Diller, Durst, and their respective political allies. Although the article mentioned "concerns that the pier's construc- tion would impact the river's estuarine sanctuary" (para. 2) and that "the project has been advertised as an extension of the Hudson River Park with ample rec- reation space" (para. 4), the merits of such claims were not examined. e issue-based articles suggest that resilience is more of a contested concept than a unifying goal. Lo- cal communities, in particular, were concerned about the uneven distribution of environmental goods and bads that would potentially result from the develop- ment of Pier 55. Resilience for these communities was less about park space and more about staying in their homes. However, once coverage of Pier 55 shied to a game frame, community concerns ceased to be part of the public conversation. e point was no longer about the merits of the project, but rather who was winning the battle over whether to build it. Project and methods Data for this paper comes from media coverage of Pier 55 between November 2014 and September 2017. Arti- cles were identified through Google News searches for the keywords "Pier 55," "Pier55," and "Pier 54." "Pier 54" was included as a keyword because Pier 55 was ef- fectively proposed as a replacement for Pier 54. Arti- cles that were labeled editorials, opinion, or letters to the editor were excluded, as were articles that included one or more of the keywords but whose primary focus was a different topic. 2 Each article was coded based on a dominant frame, based on Lawrence's (2000) definitions of game frame and issue frame, adapted from a political context to one covering public policy more broadly (for other examples, see Cappella and Jamieson 1997; Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011; Strömbäck and Luengo 2008; Strömbäck and Van Aelst 2010). When the dominant frame was an issue-based frame, articles were coded based on the following list of sub-frames: resilience, recreation, public-private partnerships, design, and transparency. Issue sub-frames were developed induc- tively from an initial reading of the articles and refined aer an initial round of coding. Two coders performed the content analysis. e second coder analyzed a sub- sample of 10% of the articles. Intercoder reliability was high, with a 0.829 Cohen's Kappa score. To ensure that online searches captured the maximum possible results, researchers also performed site-specific Google searches. at is, the web domain of each news organization identified as having pub- lished at least one relevant article in the initial search was itself searched for the keywords listed above. is technique oen yielded additional articles. Drawing on a content analysis of 211 news ar- ticles from November 2014 through September 2017 (from when plans for Pier 55 were publicly announced until Diller recently announced he would abandon the project), we examined the use of frames in coverage of the project by testing the following hypotheses: H1: Game frames were more common than issue-based frames in Pier 55 news coverage. H2: Game frames became more common over time in Pier 55 news coverage. Findings H1: Game frames were more common than issue-based frames in Pier 55 news coverage. e data clearly supported this hypothesis. e game frame was used far more oen than issue-based frames. Of the 211 articles in the dataset, 174 (82%) used the game frame. Issue-based frames appeared in 37 ar- ticles (18%). Of the 37 issue-based articles, the most common sub-frame was design (25 articles) followed by recreation (6), transparency (3), resilience (2), and public/private partnerships (1). H2: Game frames became more common over time in Pier 55 news coverage. e results supported this hypothesis as well. A turn- ing point in the timeline was the lawsuit filed by City Club of New York in June 2015 in an attempt to stop the construction of Pier 55. Half of all articles written before the lawsuit was filed used issue-based frames. Aer the lawsuit was filed, game frames dominated news coverage (Table 1). 2 For instance, the August 12, 2015 Wall Street Journal article "Heard and Scene: Aer Diesel Campaign, Model Turns Up the Gas" was excluded because it focused on a modeling agency, not the Pier 55 project. e article turned up in searches because it mentioned Pier 54 as the site of one the agency's past photo shoots. 62

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