On 20 May 2011, the Time weekly published a special report issue in its entirety covering the killing of Osama bin Laden. Clearly, owing to its thematic coherence, the Time Special Report issue could be examined through the lenses of qualitative content analysis tools. This paper, however, applies Goffman’s Frame Analysis. Based on two basic assumptions: (1) that the “frame” amounts to the structured knowledge and (2) that the language of media reports is never neutral, but highly constructed, the paper argues that the examined Time issue is fundamentally built on three frames: the “war on terror” frame, the “hero” vs. the “enemy no. 1” frame and, finally, the “indestructible USA” vs. the “primitive, yet promising Islamic countries” frame. In addition, drawing on the cognitive concepts of figure/ground organization and focalization, as well as the notion of metaphor, it investigates how the above distinguished frames are manipulated and modified.
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