Framing political sexual harassment scandals in lithuanian media before and during the #metoo movement

Political scandals have the ability to influence society‘s views on the politicians involved in the scandal and on the political system itself. There has been a rise in sexual harassment scandals in the past few years and that is because of the social movement #MeToo, which has brought the societal problem to light and exposed many prominent members of the society as perpetrators, politicians being no exception. The movement started on social media in the October of 2017 and has had an impact worldwide, sparking conversation about sexual harassment and sexual assault. Since media‘s role in shaping society’s views is prominent, it is important to analyze the way media frames these problems. This work aims to analyze the way sexual harassment scandals in the government of Lithuania are framed in Lithuanian media and how this framing changes in the light of the #MeToo movement by using framing theory. In order to be able to track change, two study cases were chosen: the first sexual harassment scandal took place before the #MeToo movement and the second one during the #MeToo movement. The first case is the scandal of the former minister of education Gintaras Steponavičius, which happened in 2012. The second scandal, which happened in 2018, involves the current member of the Lithuanian parliament Mykolas Majauskas. These cases were chosen because of their similarities – both the characteristics of the politicians and the circumstances of the scandal are similar enough to think that they would be framed the same way if it weren‘t for the #MeToo movement. Question of the study: How has the framing of politicians’ sexual harassment scandals changed in the light of the #MeToo movement? In order to answer the question of the study, the following objectives were chosen: - Present framing theory and theoretical insights into political scandals and social movements‘ ability to influence discourse; - Perform framing analysis of the media coverage of Gintaras Steponavičius and Mykolas Majauskas’ scandals, looking for recurring frames: a) How the persons, associated with the scandal, were framed, b) The kind of narratives that dominated the discourse; - Compare the frames used by the media to frame political sexual harassment scandals before and during the #MeToo movement. After conducting the framing analysis on 26 articles in the case of Steponavičius’ scandal and 136 articles in the case of Majauskas’ scandal, gathered from the three most popular Lithuanian news websites, differing frames were found. In the case of Steponavičius, four dominating frames were noticed: conflict, morality, attribution of responsibility and human interest frames, with the conflict frame being most dominant. In the case of Majauskas, six dominating frames were found, three of which – morality, conflict and human interest – were also found in the previous scandal. The remaining frames were political consequences, legal evaluation and analogical frames, with the political consequences frame being most dominant out of all six. While social movements face a lot of challenges in attempting to enter public discourse, the development in social media helped the #MeToo movement to reach society in unconventional ways and to start a conversation about sexual harassment. The analogical frame illustrates that without the questions that were raised by the social movement, the framing of Majauskas’ scandal would not have been possible. This means that #MeToo was a necessary factor for explaining the differences between the framing of Steponavičius and Majauskas’ scandals. That being said, #MeToo is still a fairly new social movement, so it is hard to evaluate whether the change it brought will have a lasting effect. Therefore, future research could focus on evaluating the long term effects of the movement in Lithuania and analyze whether media‘s framing of the #MeToo movement had any impact on society and its views on sexual harassment and sexual assault