A Word the Press Should Remember
And it's not "midterms."
This post is about the usefulness of the word framing.
Like some other words in the shaggy vocabulary of today’s English, framing is tricky because it can mean opposite things. Similarly: think of sanction, or oversight.
—In the legal world, framing can mean manufacturing evidence or unjustly accusing someone. Naturally that’s not what I have in mind.
—Instead I mean the rhetorical or logical sense of framing an argument, which in turn means the assumptions, the emphases, the supporting structure for the ideas you want to present.
It’s the conceptual counterpart to the physical work of framing a barn, as shown above. The bones of a building don’t set all the details of its final look. But if the bones are askew or shaky, the structure will not stand.
In thinking about the media, and how and whether it can meet the challenges of this moment, I contend that the framing of stories and coverage is what we should be talking about—more than familiar discussion of “bias” or “balance,” or even refinements like “both-sides-ism” or obsession with “the horse race.” I’ll give a few examples of what I mean.
Framing is hardly a new concept in the media-discussion world. Back in 1998, the Pew Research Center had a full study called “Framing the News.” Jay Rosen, of NYU, was a leader of that project, and he writes frequently about frames of coverage on his Pressthink site. Many other figures I’ll mention in the notes1 have advanced this theme.
But think about some familiar frames:
1. From Fox News: ‘They’re Out to Get You.’
Part of the genius of Roger Ailes was discovering, even before Donald Trump did, that an aggrieved audience would be a loyal and attentive one. Thus most stories and narrative themes on Fox boil down to, someone is trying to get you. And those people are probably being hypocritical or cheaters while doing so.
It could be “the caravan” that is trying to get you. It could be “the Squad.” It could be Antifa — or the proponents of Critical Race Theory. It could be urban shoplifters, or the Chinese. It could (still) be Hillary Clinton. It could be crime in general — which has been going down in the U.S. for decades, while prevailing fear of crime has been going up. (Thanks, in significant degree, to emphasis by local TV news and by Fox.)
It could be anything. But it’s them. And they’re cheating and scheming against you. And against people like us. It’s a sad but true reality of life that as people get older, more of them are predisposed to a “someone’s trying to get me” view of the world. Fox’s audience through the years has been the oldest among the cable outlets (whose audiences in general are older Americans). Ailes’s insight, now embodied in different forms by the Hannity, Ingraham, and Carlson shows on Fox, has been a success in commercial terms, but toxic for civic life.
My point is: Don’t look for the “bias.” Look for the frame.
2. From many mainstream outlets: What’s most interesting about anything, is the politics of it.
When presented with news about migrants drowning at sea, in a failed and tragic attempt to reach America, people might have a range of reactions.
Here was the way the headline writer for the New York Times, and the editors in charge of the print edition, thought to frame the news with a headline that said:
Rise in Migrants at Sea
Poses a Worry for Biden
In its online versions of this story, the paper later thought to change the headline to something less crass. (It now says: “A Surge at Sea: Migrants Seek Entry to the U.S. Aboard Flimsy Boats.”) The point is the initial impulse, that what mattered in the news was: What it meant for politics, and what it meant for “how’s Biden doing?”2
As I mentioned in this previous post, once you start noticing this framing, you’ll see it everywhere. It’s the conversion of something that has happened, into what that something means for the midterms, or for the sitting president’s approval.
Those political implications matter. But usually they’re not what matters most, or to most people. As I discussed 26 years ago in The Atlantic, questions at White House press conferences follow this pattern as well. Most people are interested in the what of government — how it will help them pay the bills or go to school. Reporters are mainly interested in the how of politics. The challenge is to keep the reporters’ own personal framing from controlling what they present to readers.
Watch for this conversion — and when you see it, don’t complain about the “bias.” Rather talk about the frame.
3. Also from most of the media: Grading on the curve, when it comes to Trump and the modern GOP.
On January 6, 2021, both Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican party’s leaders in the Senate and the House, respectively, seemed genuinely shaken by the attack on their colleagues and their institution. They were clear about Donald Trump’s responsibility for the violence and near-coup.
A few months later, McConnell and McCarthy led their Republican delegations in near-unanimous bloc opposition to the creation of a January 6 Commission to investigate what had occurred.
Through the six-plus years of Donald Trump’s rise, the Republican party as a whole has decided to “grade him on the curve” — and live with behavior, excesses, and abuses that would have been deemed the end of an administration in other eras. (I chronicled this change, and the transformation of Republicans into “Vichy Republicans,” during the 2016 campaign.)
Much of what Donald Trump does, and encourages, has been written off as “that’s just Trump” by many of the Republicans. The mainstream press — aware that one established party now thinks and acts this way — is tempted to adopt this framing in its coverage. Here is one more image from the New York Times, on the day that evidence emerged of Trump’s asking whether the Department of Homeland Security could seize voting machines to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
I’ve noted in red where the story appears.
For comparison, when a new wrinkle in the Hillary Clinton email “scandal” erupted ten days before the 2016 election, the Times devoted nearly all of its front page to the story.
To its credit, after this latest Trump story, the Times had a front-page story the next day about Trump’s efforts to hold onto power, however he could. But again, please watch for framing that normalizes the grossly abnormal.
4. From everywhere: What works is suspect, or boring.
By definition, news is about the abnormal. The 100,000 commercial flights that safely take off and land each day around the world are not newsworthy. The one that runs into trouble may well be.
And that’s sensible and fine.
The problem is a framing that is unduly dark, and failure bound. Not everything works, and the press should be alert to these failures to explain why and how.
But some things do work, and they deserve attention as well. That is the only way to have a sense of the world that is proportionate and whole, which in turn is part of the basic function of the press.
Some illustrations:
America’s job growth in the past twelve months has been an unprecedented success. It has coexisted with other problems, notably related to inflation. But the job-boom news itself, which is an important part of the whole picture, has been under-covered, to put it mildly.
Free Covid tests through the mail — what could go wrong! This combined a major area of U.S. backwardness in Covid response (testing); with a symbol of government ineptness (health-related web site); and all being run by …. the USPS! (I say this lovingly, as a one-time letter-carrier and parcel-post sorter, and as someone who goes out of his way to send “actual” letters, to create first-class mail business for the Post Office.)
But in fact it largely has worked. And has receded to inside-page coverage in the papers, and no mention at all in broadcast news, as tens of millions of test kits have been delivered across the country.
But as a reminder, here was the framing recently in a big New York Times overview of Biden-and-Covid, headlined “Biden’s Pandemic Fight: Inside the Setbacks of the First Year”:
“By year’s end, facing a barrage of criticism, Mr. Biden pledged 500 million free tests for all Americans, followed by another 500 million a few weeks later. The first of those tests have just begun to arrive, and the bulk of them most likely will not arrive until after the administration’s own experts predict Omicron will have peaked later this month.”5G and the airlines: The early coordination of this was a mess, as I described here. Now it’s largely been worked out — and has disappeared from the news.
The Webb space telescope. This could have been a heartbreaking disaster. And instead it has been a phenomenal, historic success. As has been noted on the inside pages of the major newspapers. For instance, here in the Washington Post, by Joel Achenbach; and here, today, on page D3 of the Times, by Dennis Overbye.
Every one of us knows that if the Webb space craft had blown up on the launch pad on Christmas day, or if the elaborate arrangements necessary to achieve its deployment had gone awry even in small ways, we would be hearing about them still, as yet another metaphor that, today, things fall apart.
A writer friend of mine, who has covered many technology stories, sent me an email about what could have been. He was talking about the telescope, but about “framing” more generally:
Nowhere has anyone, on any media outlet, latched on to and covered the story about the Webb telescope. None that I've stumbled over, at least. Two days ago, the telescope reached its L2 orbit, a million miles distant from the Earth. It went unnoticed on the evening news. When a $10 billion project that evolved over 30 years, in the workshops of 13 nations, prepares to peer back in time 13 billion years, to the petri dish of the Big Bang, that's the news!. Ho-hum. Let's do the weather.
Once, space exploration galvanized Americans and led the news. Sure, arm wrestling for scientific glory with our Cold War opponent helped raise the bar.
The networks should have raced each other to report on a complex transformer-like telescope unfurling itself into a tennis-court-sized lily pad, lassoing the planet as it orbits the sun. I've seen zero TV coverage of the telescope's many difficult and risky milestones it has mastered over 30 days. "60 Minutes" did a piece, shown weeks before the Ariane launch.
One more crucial development lies ahead. If the 18 golden mirrors, which are at the heart of the mission (and the telescope), fit together to the tolerance of 1/10,000th the width of a human hair, Webb will have saved NASA. Move over Charles Darwin.
Sadly Webb might have been held up and celebrated as a source of national pride, an event that fused the nation to a common purpose. But no, night after night, the Evening News tracks an on-again, off-again snowstorm that might tear up the knickers of the East Coast. My goodness, who would have imagined, snow in the winter.
It’s fitting and proper that news emphasizes what goes wrong. But it can be a problem if it emphasizes only what goes wrong.
As a reminder, rather than talking about “bias,” please look for framing:
That is largely intended to make people feel angry or victimized;
That reduces everything to its party-politics ramifications;
That normalizes abnormal behavior; and
That gives a disproportionate view of what works, and doesn’t.
And, subscribe to your local paper! That is it for now.
People who have written extensively on this theme include Eric Boehlert, Margaret Sullivan, Dan Froomkin, Jennifer Rubin, Judd Legum, Jackie Calmes, Greg Sargent, and many others
To spell out something I’ve belabored many times: I consider the New York Times overall the finest news organization in the world. The ambition, creativity, and excellence of its coverage in countless realms exceeds what other organizations even try to do. These include: global affairs; climate; technology; cyber security; business; finance; the arts; books; medicine and health; an innovative approach to graphic design; its regular Kids’ sections; puzzles and games; and countless other aspects.
But then there is its framing of national politics, which is different from its approach to these other topics, as illustrated by the “Worry for Biden” headline. You wouldn’t see something like this on most other topics in most other parts of the paper.
I learned about frames, mental models and schema (all similarly concepts) back in the 80s when I was studying cognitive development in grad school. There is strong evidence that frames are how most of our knowledge and understanding of the world is organized. Frames are incredibly powerful and can be manipulated by those who understand how they work.
Republicans learned a long time ago that people often have competing frames/models of different issues and that the words we use can activate one scheme over another. That is the basis for the work of people like Frank Luntz. Luntz conducted focus groups to test which phrases evoke the frames Republicans want us to bring to mind. That is why Republicans decided to use the term “privatize” when talking about Medicare. The public hated the idea of giving Medicare to insurance companies because that idea brings up frames or storylines about greed, price gouging, denial of coverage, etc. Luntz found the term “privatize” was the most positive way to frame their Medicare messages because it conjures up frames about controlling your own money and having choices rather than the big bad gubmint choosing for them.
The framing of government as bad, as the cause of our problems was one that Reagan worked hard to implant in Americans’ minds. I am convinced that while some people already had that frame, many adopted it after that kind of right wing, anti-government propaganda.
Many, if not most of our frames/mental models come from experience. For example I have two mental models about welfare based on my personal experience growing up. One is of an older relative who lived in a state that had generous welfare benefits. He wasted his life drinking and was often unemployed because he got enough money to scrape by with just odd jobs. He was smart guy who could have done well in many things. I always thought he might have been forced to get a regular job if his benefits had been lower. (He was not someone who would not have tolerated being homeless.) This is the frame that Reagan’s “welfare queen” was designed to activate — the person who is capable of work but lives off the money provided by those of us who work.
My second frame/model comes from growing up in a small town in Appalachia before LBJ’s War on Poverty. The town itself was prosperous but the surrounding rural areas were not. I had classmates who were literally dirt poor because their homes had no indoor plumbing and they rarely washed. They were filthy, smelled bad and were clearly undernourished. Most were terrible students because their parents didn’t think learning was worth the time. Parents often kept them home from school to help out and encouraged them to drop out as soon as they turned 16. Because our school didn’t do social promotions I had often boys in my grade school classes who were over six feet tall! (My husband freaked out the first time he saw my class pictures). One of my classmates managed to move out of poverty but she was the rare exception. She recently told me that she had only succeeded because our 4th grade teacher had taken her aside and told her she didn’t have to live like that, that she was smart and could improve her life if she stayed in school. She said it had never occurred to her before that she had any choice. Most of her 16 siblings dropped out and still struggle to get by but at least their standard of living is higher because of anti-poverty programs that started with LBJ.
This is the mental model that frames my understanding of poverty — most people are trapped in poverty and need help to get out of it. They aren’t stupid, bad or greedy. I understand that a small percentage of people may abuse welfare but that doesn’t offset the great good it can do.
All of these examples are of white people. The black kids I grew up with had parents whowere working class or middle class. Most graduated and many went on to college or job training.
Because of the frames I subconsciously created growing up I have always supported anti-poverty programs. People I know who have never known personally known any poor people and whose exposure to poverty has been in urban areas think most poor people are black or Hispanic which evokes their (usually negative) frames about race. Hollywood helped strength that image with their constant depiction of urban poverty and violence. As a result of their experience many of these folks have the “welfare queen” model in their minds. They see those programs through the frame of “inferior people taking away my money”. That mental model has been strengthened by the media’s obsessive focus on sensational crime stories. Those people are all Republicans who have fell for their welfare queen messaging.
Jim...it is so heartening to be reading your blog. I am glad to see someone else write about the miracle that is the Webb Telescope. Why do I have to search the back pages to find out how it is progressing? It is an example of what can be the best -- the 'exceptional' -- of this country, as was (and is) the Hubble. And of course, as you say, if something had gone awry, that would have been the front page news, another example of American failure. Its success (so far.....) is so much more interesting than the political inside baseball and scare stories that grace our front pages. And I say this as a fellow political junkie.
I am so looking forward to seeing the images coming from the Webb, looking deep into Creation. That is a true gift from the US to mankind....
Thanks for all, Randy