Winning the Frame Game

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

But something was missing. Bales began to doubt whether the news coverage she was getting was actually advancing the issues she cared about. At the same time, she was reading the work of Stanford University communications theorist Shanto Iyengar, who observed in his 1987 book News That Matters: Television and American Opinion that most media coverage uses “episodic,” rather than “thematic,” frames. In other words, the dominant media approach is an anecdotal story that focuses on individuals and their problems but is short on social context or discussion of public issues. As Bales read more deeply on the subject, she realized that progressive advocacy groups and the foundations that fund them weren’t thinking about how the media affect political debate in creating their own public education campaigns. No wonder they were getting burned. In fact, by putting out ill-conceived messages and reinforcing stereotypes that hurt their ultimate objectives, liberal groups were often doing more harm than good.

Why do conservatives seem to communicate better than liberals? One reason is the liberal left’s tendency to overintellectualize issues. Liberals bombard the public with figures and statistics that prove their cases. But again and again the data bounce off people without making any impression. “If the facts don’t fit the frame, it’s the facts that are rejected, not the frame” is an oft-repeated FrameWorks aphorism.

Rush Limbaugh was up to his usual tricks as I drove to visit Susan Bales at her home. I’d listened to Limbaugh before, of course, but what he was saying seemed cast in a new light by what I’d already learned from Bales. Rather than an arrogant windbag, Limbaugh suddenly seemed like a brilliant conservative tactician. Counterintuitively, he told his listeners that they should be glad when liberal groups attack the president on something like war with Iraq. If the liberals are on the attack, Limbaugh explained, that means they’re not putting forward a positive agenda—and that means conservatives are winning.

“Unfortunately, the research would say he’s right,” Bales later said. “Negative attacks by many of the groups, like children’s advocates and environmentalists, that we see as being caring kinds of groups do more damage to them than they do to the opposition. That’s one of the real hardships [of] liberal advocacy.”

Conservatives also know how to come up with clever frames and stick with them. Take the “death tax,” the right’s reframing of the estate tax. According to a report in The New York Times, Republicans spent five years teaching their troops to use this terminology. A similar story could be told of the frame “partial-birth abortion,” an extremely rare procedure that the right brilliantly renamed for propaganda purposes. Among Democrats, Bill Clinton seemed to have an intuitive feel for the frame game. His resolution to talk about “gun safety” rather than “gun control” was as good as it gets, notes Cornell University communications professor Dietram Scheufele. But it’s not so easy for many on the liberal left, in part because progressives prefer to be tolerant of wide diversity. At antiglobalization protests and the recent antiwar demonstrations, radical messages and realist ones were casually intermingled. But protests characterized by extremism, anti-Americanism, and violence tend to alienate moderates who might otherwise have questioned the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, notes San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Rich Louv, who has worked with Bales in the past.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print