What is the meaning of "measure the ease" in below sentence?

[Ahmet Faruk Cecen]

Cultural congruence "measures the ease" with which—all else equal—a news frame can cascade through the different levels of the framing process and stimulatesimilar reactions at each step


Source: Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion by Robert Entman

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

A dictionary can answer that as well as any of us can. Just look up the verb measure and the noun ease.

It's interesting that you understand congruence and framing but are stuck on ease and measure!

 

[Ahmet Faruk Cecen]

Dear Charlie

As you can get I can understand congruence and framing but not measure and the ease. Do you really think that I have not given the chance to take a look at dictionary. It has something bigger maybe to do with cultural thing. Thanks for your effort to type but If you do not understand what is written there just say it or do not bother to type.

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

Hi, Ahmet!

Good. I wanted to make sure you had tried looking the words up. Again, I was surprised that you had no problem with the most difficult words in the sentence but were stuck on others.

Yes, I do know what "measures the ease" means, and no, I do not feel like I'm wasting time typing.

What problem are you having with ease and measure? You know that in this context the noun ease means lack of effort and the verb measures means gauges, quantifies, right? So:

Cultural congruence helps predict how easily —all else equal—a news frame can cascade through the different levels of the framing process....

Cultural congruence tells us how effortlessly —all else equal—a news frame can cascade through the different levels of the framing process....

Cultural congruence gives us a way to anticipate —all else equal— how smoothly, quickly, and accurately a news frame can cascade through the different levels of the framing process....

Cultural congruence provides a method by which we can guess how readily —all else equal—a news frame can cascade through the different levels of the framing process....

In fact, this exercise is, itself, an example of cultural congruence, isn't it?

I hope that helps!

 

[Ahmet Faruk Cecen]

Hi again Charlie

First of all I really appreciate your effort. As I said I had looked virtually all dictionaries in web for the possible meaning of measure. I do not want to be too challenging as it is possible for you to show a meaning of measure which easily covers the meaning in the mentioned sentence and it is possible that I might have missed the proper meaning but to me it is something cultural though it might not seem to you as a native speaker because it is something hardly likely to think that we can paraphrase measure as "helps predict", "tells us how " or the others you stated below. As I said it might be the case that I might miss the proper meaning written in one dictionary but when you are not native speaker it is likely that you become so much conditioned. Consider the verb "measure", it has a bearing on statistic or math to me rather than the way you proposed.

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

Yup, I know this is sometimes a hard language. Here's a dictionary page that might help. Scroll down to the verb form and see definition #2:

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/measure