Winning the Frame Game

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One of Bales’ major premises is that Americans overwhelmingly get their information about public affairs from the news media, which in turn establish persistent frames. To help progressive advocates, the FrameWorks team first surveys and analyzes past media coverage of an issue to detect the patterns or frames. They use extended interviews with citizens, in addition to conventional polling and focus groups, to uncover the “hidden reasoning” or mental shortcuts that condition how people respond to the topic. Finally, Bales and her crew test out different “reframes” to learn how people’s minds can be opened to new policies. Often, as on the issue of global warming, the goal is to bridge the gap between what academic experts have to say about a given problem and how the media and political commentators treat proposed solutions, which too often are dismissed as unrealistic or even impossible.

If Susan Bales were giving advice about how to write this article, she would probably advise me to mention her as little as possible. It’s not that Bales is shy, though she keeps a low profile compared with other accomplished Washington communications consultants. Her reasons would be more strategic.

A constant theme in her work is that the media’s penchant for human-interest stories distracts us from a more thorough presentation of social problems. In fact, coverage based on anecdotes has a way of implicitly blaming individuals, rather than government or society, for hardships and is thus inherently hostile to liberal policy solutions. So if this article were just about Bales—her background in English and French literature, how she works from her suburban home in the woods of Potomac, Maryland, and has five cats—it might be part of the problem.

In fact, this story is just as much about liberal activists who are despondent after Republican victories in the last two elections and are on the defensive as the Bush administration pursues a sweeping, hard-right agenda on foreign policy, the environment, public services, and other issues. Many progressive advocates are looking for new approaches. Though there’s still a lot of resistance, some activists may even be willing to let go of their reservations about coming off as calculating and Machiavellian if they adopt the kind of strategic thinking found in the FrameWorks message

Founded in 1999, FrameWorks grew out of Bales’ two decades of experience in communications, starting with her work on women’s and civil-rights issues and continuing through her years as a consultant for a wide range of liberal groups. Among other projects, Bales worked for the National Women’s Law Center to oppose Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Later, in the early ’90s, she organized the Coalition for America’s Children and its campaign to coordinate more than 300 groups working to turn concerns about children into real “voting issues.”

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