Winning the Frame Game

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Isn’t all of this just a more elaborate form of spin? “I’m worried that press secretaries and PR flacks are going to start carrying around cards with bullet-pointed principles based on this kind of research and will devote even more attention to shaping people’s perceptions as opposed to honest give and take,” says Brendan Nyhan, coeditor of the Web site Spinsanity.com, which tracks manipulations of political language and debate.

But the FrameWorks group insists that its mission is about enhancing democracy by opening minds that have been dulled by spin, or constantly forced into confrontational and partisan modes of thought. “Framing is in many ways the opposite of spinning. Spinning is trying to convince people, ‘You know, this really isn’t blue, it’s really green,’ ” argues pollster Meg Bostrom, holding up a glass from the conference-room table during my group meeting with FrameWorks’ members. “What we’re trying to do is help people understand not just that it’s blue, but also the shape, the size, the weight.”

Susan Bales comes across as scholarly and unfailingly collaborative, but she’s also a charismatic figure who has her liberal heroes. She often cites Martin Luther King Jr. as one who knew, intuitively, how to stay on message without sacrificing inspiration. Another is the famed 1930s and 1940s newspaper correspondent Ernie Pyle, whose coverage of economic struggles across the American heartland helped win public support for the New Deal. His stories of ordinary soldiers fighting in World War II are considered classics of war reporting. Pyle just happens to have been a relation. The Bales and Pyle families had adjacent farms in Dana, Indiana. What is her exact relationship to Pyle? “You can call it cousin; it probably works in Indiana,” Bales jokes. She may also be his reincarnation.

Bales has written of Pyle’s columns in which the journalist described his crossing the nation noting how the New Deal could fix the system rather than just help individuals. She concludes, “Progressives have also lost the ability to translate from individuals to programs, and from programs back to individuals.”

“I continue to believe that Pyle’s style of journalism is a real antidote to the kind of popularized television news [format],” says Bales. In a 1939 column about poverty in rural Alabama, Pyle put it this way: “They have a way of using the word ‘sorry’ down here that I’ve not heard in other parts of the country. A listless, no-good, poor-paying fellow is known as sorry. You can be poor without being sorry. You’re sorry when you lack character.” Pyle refused to let the region’s economic problems be described as mere personal failings. “You can’t blame any individual, least of all the poor people themselves,” he wrote. “No, it’s a combination of the landlord and the supply merchant and poor land and low prices and sickness and ignorance—in other words, it’s the whole system.”

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