Here's a number that should stop you cold: according to recent surveys, roughly half of Americans get their news primarily from social media. Half. Yet the architecture of what those feeds show you was built decades earlier, in television studios and newspaper editorial rooms, by people who never imagined the algorithm. Sociologist Erving Goffman was the first to name the mechanism behind this. He called them frames — mental structures that organize and interpret experience. Not what you see. How you see it. While legal and constitutional anchoring was discussed in the previous lecture, this lecture focuses on how media shapes public tolerance and influences the Overton Window by framing narratives. Robert Entman defined framing precisely: selecting some aspects of perceived reality and making them more salient in a text. Selection and salience. Those two words contain the entire power of a newsroom. Journalists as gatekeepers consciously choose frames, and those frames perform four distinct functions — they define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies. Consider the difference between covering homelessness as an economic consequence versus a moral failure. Same facts. Radically different frames. Sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann called this the social construction of reality — our perception of what is real is shaped by shared experiences and the stories institutions tell us. Todd Gitlin extended this directly to journalism, showing how reporters guide public understanding not through lies, but through emphasis. What gets the headline. What gets buried. What gets no column inches at all. Media plays a crucial role in reinforcing or challenging institutional changes by deciding which voices are amplified and which are marginalized, shaping the Overton Window's position. Framing simplifies messages to either support or undermine societal changes. Radical voices are often excluded to maintain stability within the current Overton Window. So producers default to what scholar Jay Rosen called the View from Nowhere — presenting two sides of the acceptable spectrum as if that exhausts all possibility. It doesn't. It just maintains the window's current position. And the absence of certain voices, Fabio, is more telling than their presence. When a policy position never appears on a panel, never gets a serious rebuttal, never earns a segment — it isn't being defeated. It's being pre-emptively excluded from the range of the thinkable. Frames are issue-specific and emotionally charged; a single powerful image can trigger immediate shifts in media language and public tolerance. Think of how one photograph has historically moved an entire news cycle's vocabulary overnight. That's not reporting. That's frame-setting — and it moves the window faster than any think tank white paper. Late-night comedy operates by the same mechanism, just with a laugh track. When a satirist frames a policy position as self-evidently absurd, they aren't making an argument — they're repositioning that idea closer to unthinkable without a single factual claim. Framing influences how audiences process information and make choices, and comedy is framing with the friction removed. It feels like entertainment. It functions like agenda-setting. Here's the synthesis, and it matters for everything you'll hear in this course: media outlets are not neutral mirrors of political reality. They are the primary maintenance crew of the Overton Window — deciding which voices belong inside the frame of sensible debate and which get left outside it entirely. The window doesn't just move through social movements or crises. It is held in place, daily, by editorial choices most people never notice. Once you see that mechanism, Fabio, you cannot unsee it. Every panel, every headline, every omission becomes a data point about where the window currently sits.