Sorry to be a bit late on this- just getting over a mild case of COVID, so just getting to this now.
Thank you for the section on Texas and Houston. As Dallas, Harris (Houston), Bexar (San Antonio), and Travis (Austin) counties all went blue in the last presidential election, you would think the WashPo would know better than to publish such a simplistic job posting. There is a flip side to this, as many clusters of Trump voters live within two hours of the DC or Midtown Manhattan flatlands that an "enterprising reporter" could visit for another perspective.
Sadly, the problem exists beyond journalism. Some time ago, I heard the Democratic nominee for president speak (I won't say the candidate's name, but-read on-it's not too hard to figure out). Afterward, I went up to the candidate and said, "I think you are great, but what do I say to my family in Texas?" The candidate gruffly replied (perhaps it was the end of a long day), "Tell them I served in the military. Tell them I hunt and am a gun owner." I was a bit shocked at this response- we have few gun owners in our family. My parents, who have never shot a gun, are small business owners and artists- certainly not the Texas stereotype. They were concerned about economic issues, not guns.
The Flatland analogy is excellent. I took Herbert Gans' "Sociology of News and Journalism" course at Columbia when his book “Deciding What’s News- A Study of CBS and NBC Evening News, Time and Newsweek” was first published. Gans does not use the word “framing," but the last prescriptive chapter of the book is called “Multiperspectival News," which gets at many of the same points (and, you could say, uses a similar spatial analogy). Sadly, over 40 years later, we do have some multiperspectival news in the sense that there are different cable channels and programs for different audiences. Still, much of it is driven by ratings/market needs and the related need to cater to the confirmation biases of the audience. Journalists have enough trouble just satisfying these market imperatives to stay employed. Still, we can only hope that they can stretch themselves further to provide more perspectives and dimensions to stories.
Thanks for pointing me to the Swan/McConnell interview. I agree with you that often times, the foreign questioners get to the critical point whereas US interviewers tend to be too deferential. McConnell's carefree "things will self correct" throw away near the end was a misreading of history. It would have been nice to get some answers about how valuable the tax cuts enacted at the beginning of the Trump Administration have done as this appears to be the only proactive plan advanced by the Republican Party in the past decade and a half.
This discussion of "flattening" put me in mind of a little book I read way way way back in the 1980s, "America's Hidden Success", by a political scientist at the University of Arizona, John Schwarz. At the time -- I myself was in college then -- Reagan and the conservative movement had successfully convinced many people that government was "the problem". If you weren't there then, it's difficult to capture how pervasive this view was. Schwarz's book -- I think it was all of 150 pages -- simply produced the statistics to show how much government programs had successfully created a middle-class nation in the 50s, 60s, and even the dreaded 70s (mostly through paying for college and Social Security). I well remember how strikingly out of sync with the times that book was. (Conservatives were busy writing books telling us how diseased all of American culture was and how broken education was; they kept producing lists of items Americans "should" know and demonstrating how few were familiar with the items on their carefully chosen lists). And it seems the run of that particular daydream has not broken even today.
Looking around the net, it seems that little book has gone down the memory hole, but I did find an intriguing review of it, in Commentary of all places, focusing on the power of "bad news" in the news biz.
Bravo! In reading what you set forth today about framing, and the Want-Ad by the Washington Post for a journalist who would cover "red state" culture (which the paper seems to presume Texas is), I'm reminded of the 6 months I lived there in the winter of 2010-2011, in Houston as a Muslim. The religious community was quite large and diverse, Houston is a city of many people who come from all over, and there is no monolithic "conservative" viewpoint, yet the stereotype "conservative guys hanging out in a diner" is the framing for the type of reportage expected from the successful candidate. Where are the Mexican-Americans, Pakistani and Arab Americans, the British transplants in the petroleum industry, the coastal residents, and the many people who moved to Texas from Louisiana? It's as though none of them are real, none of them count, there are no viewpoints to include in that "diner" scenario beyond the perpetually unemployed in their MAGA caps.
Thank you. Yes, something I have always loved about Houston is its wide-openness. The bad side of this (arguably) is its long opposition to zoning laws of any kind. The good side is the sense that people can come from all over and get a new start there. Back in the early 1980s, when I was back in Texas but working for the Atlantic, I did a magazine story comparing how Detroit had responded to one of the (many) auto-industry shocks, versus Houston and one of that era's oil-business declines. Obviously "resilient culture" goes only so far in coping with world-economy changes. But the "everyone's a newcomer" (despite River Oaks etc) idea in Houston seemed significant.
And, yes, summing this up as "red state America" is ... not precise.
We lived in Houston for a short time then in Dallas for nine years. Those are two very different cities! I agree with what you love about Houston as well as the problem of no zoning laws. I had never lived in a city like that where you could find a sleazy bar next to an upscale neighborhood.
Thanks for this great article. I have been thinking about the effects of framing on our political and our media for a very long time. I have come to believe the media’s simplistic portrayal of red vs blue states comes from their implicit framing of complex reality as simplistic either/or situations. One result of that framing is too many journalists portray the political parties as simple opposites of each other, as equally leftwing or rightwing. As Republicans have moved to the extreme right the media has been compelled to portray the Democrats as equally extreme. As a result they give far more attention to the very few people on the left who advocate for extreme, unpopular ideas like “defunding the police”. That has led many people the think that is what the Democratic Party stands for when almost no Democrats and no party leaders do.
Another example that stands out to me is the inordinate amount of attention the media has given to the very liberal AOC rather than to the other more moderate freshmen congressional Dems who flipped red districts to blue the same year AOC won in a deep blue district. AOC fits in with the media frame that the Democratic Party is getting more “extreme” so she is focused on and portrayed as the future of the Party while the others mostly get ignored. (This is in no way a criticism of AOC who is politically savvy and smart to use the attention to increase her political influence.)
Putting a spotlight on outlier examples is a tried and true tactic deliberately used by Republican spinmeisters to make voters afraid of Democrats’ “radical” ideas. In my opinion that tactic started after the political unrest on the left in response to Vietnam frightened a lot of Americans. The terrorist tactics of some of the radical left wing groups and the insanity at the Chicago Democratic convention were particularly damaging to Democrats. Republicans have effectively kept that fear alive by wrongly portraying Democrats as far out of the mainstream. Unfortunately the mainstream media has often helped.
I also believe the media’s need for simplistic either/or framing is at least part of the reason that they are so wedded to the “Dems in Disarray” frame and that frame is actually embedded in the either/or frame. That “subframe” is particularly destructive because its carries a very strong strong implicit message that a party whose members don’t just follow its leaders is dysfunctional. In fact truth is the complete opposite — Democracy is necessarily messy. Disagreement and negotiation are a necessary condition for a healthy democracy. Our media portraying it as a sign of sickness is undermining our democracy.
One question I can’t answer is whether the media adopts these powerful frames deliberately or if those frames just the way most journalists and pundits subconsciously view the world. Clearly Republicans have a long history of deliberately creating and/or invoking frames which make their ideas more acceptable to the public. Reagan’s either/or frame “government bad/private entities good” has been very effective. Frank Luntz used that frame when he convinced Republicans to use the term “privatization” to reframe the public’s perception of policies they had traditionally opposed. The did this by framing the idea of shifting control of Social Security and Medicare to private, for-profit companies as empowering individuals to manage their own retirement funds and insurance, as giving them choice. I always believed that Democrats should have countered by calling it “profitization”, as turning Social Security over to risky Wall Street management, but what do I know?
Another powerful frame that clearly affects public perception is the masculine vs feminine frame. That frame communicates that “manly, macho men” are powerful and strong and will protect our country’ women and more “feminized” men are weak and put Americans at risk. Clearly that frame drives a lot of our politics, as a recent article by Thomas Edsall in the NY Times describes:
Republicans have been using that frame to imply that Democrats (the “Mommy Party”) is not strong, i.e. “manly” enough to lead this country. They used to be more subtle about it but now they are explicitly fearmongering about the dangers of making our society too feminine. Tucker Carlson’s bizarre new pseudo-documentary is titled “The End of Men”. Its trailer claims that in hard times manly men are the ones rise up and restore order. (Who wants a bunch of squabbling Democrats in charge in a crisis?)
The research summarized in Edsall’s article shows that that framing is a powerful political influence for many men (not just white men) as well as for many women.
I believe that the “Manly man” frame is one that many in the media also have internalized and that implicit frame biases them against Democrats, male or female because the “mommy party” prioritizes traditionally feminine values and concern. I found it disturbing that Clinton was mocked for “feeling our pain” and gobsmacked when Maureen Down wrote that Gore’s concern for the environment showed he was was so “feminized” that he was “practically lactating”. That statement was not just massively stupid but deeply insulting to women.
In contrast our political journalists were clearly impressed by Bush’s faux manly displays. They knew that Gore (and Kerry) had volunteered to serve in Vietnam but Bush had deliberately avoided doing that. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised because this is the same media that thought Bush senior had a “wimp” problem even though he had volunteered to be a combat pilot in WWII.
We will never be able to fight these corrosive biases unless we are able to identify and understand the powerful mental frames that are driving them. Thanks for shining a light on this important topic! (And sorry for the long post. )
AOC is a target because she's a hottie, and that triggers the incels on the right. It also triggers male journalists. The WashPost's Aaron Blake wrote a horse race piece recently where she's actually listed as a possible candidate. The rest of the "Squad" is equally targeted by misogynists more than happy to label them as extremists and commies. I personally like these women very much.
Bernie Sanders is another example of a politician with important ideas being demonized. During the 2020 campaign Jennifer Rubin, the biggest hypocrite in journalism, never missed a chance to portray him as a nutcase and, in her words, a "backbencher," yet she's never been bothered by the role Sanders has played as an adviser to Pres. Biden.
Framing is what tells the audience how to perceive and interpret the information they're given. It's as least as important as the information itself.
I agree with you that perception is powerful and that frames structure our perceptions. It can also be deliberately manipulated to distort people’s perception of reality — which is how Frank Luntz and other Republican spinmeisters have used it. They have consciously and repeatedly use frames to shift peoples perception of Democrats as extreme, as decadent, irresponsible, radical etc. They know Democrats are extremely left wing as Republicans are right wing but they also know it benefits to make voters believe that is true.
Cognitive psych research has proved that everyone has unconscious frames. Most help us function smoothly but some can also distort how we perceive situations in negative ways. I was recently talking to a psychologist friend about how the Trumpers we both know seem to perceive the world through a win-lose frame while we both frame the world as mostly win-win. Policies that help low income people survive don’t take away from us; they make our world better.
The win-lose frame trigger the frame that sees competition as more effective than cooperation, a traditional gender role frame. (Many women also have this traditional frame.) Cooperation is devalued because it is what the weaker sex and girly men have to use. As I result these people will usually think war is more effective than diplomacy; that police using force as their go-to is the right choice; that de-escalation and diplomacy are not just ineffective they are a sign of weakness. (Trump invokes that frame when has said Biden is to blame for Putin’s war because Biden has been weak, unlike him.)
I don’t have a problem with AOC. In fact I think she is very impressive. My criticism was not about her or the reasons rightwingers focus on her, my criticism is about the effect of the mainstream media putting so much attention on her while ignoring other freshman Dems who won by flipping red seats to blue. They are the ones who gave control of the House back to the Democrats which you would think would be of interest to the political journalists.
I also wonder about what people in Texas are experiencing with Abbott as governor. The family we were extremely close with when we lived there has been badly split by Texas politics because the father — who is one of the nicest people I have ever known — started watching Fox and has become thoroughly brainwashed. The acrimony between him and his daughter is heartbreaking to see.
You are right about Texas’s dependence on undocumented workers. The dad is a builder and always laughed about how the contractors’ workers at his sites would vanish if the cops came around. His business depends on those undocumented workers. In fact he has always said they are very skilled and hardworking.
For years media has let Republicans get away with publicly pretending to oppose all those immigrants just to please their base while refusing to do anything about it to please all their business supporters who benefitted front he cheap labor. Whenever the idea of targeting the people who hired undocumented workers was brought up Republicans would become outraged. I am convinced going after business owners would have forced Republicans to finally support immigration reform. Trump would have been one of the business owners who would have been held to account.
By the way the more you write about all the places you have lived the more intrigued I am. It sounds like you could have you own game a la “where in the world is Carmen Sandiego” (That was how my son learned geography. )
I suspect that Abbott knows damn well how Texas' economy works and has no intentions of dismantling it. He whines about all immigration, which is simply theater played to everyone who would possibly vote for him as president. BTW, Houston is as much like a foreign country as anywhere I've been. Everything is in Spanish, and because I don't speak Spanish I couldn't find a good job there. Otherwise, I would have never gone to the middle east. At the time, it was a great alternative to living in a homeless shelter. The NGO in Jordan paid for my plane ticket, gave me a place to sleep and paid me $10 a week for food. Going there was so badass, and the next 6 years were badass as well. Sometimes I miss it. I didn't know who I was or what I could become until I had that challenge. It was the best thing I ever did.
I only lived in Houston for a very short time before my husband was transferred — again — to Dallas. Dallas also had a large Hispanic population but not quite as large as Houston’s. I was pleasantly surprised that our small street had quite an interesting mix of people — white, black, British, Korean and even a Palestinian family. We also had a family of very devout fundamentalist Christians. The father was a very nice man who sculpted his shrubs to look like an erect male organ, apparently without realizing it. Freud would have loved it!
Living in Houston was actually very similar to living in Cairo. I arrived there In August, and it was very hot. Cairo and Houston are both huge, sprawling cities, and both cities are home to people from all over the world. I lived in a poor Mexican neighborhood in Houston, and I lived my last two years in Cairo in a slum.
Knowing that Texas is not as it seems, I wonder how it can have a governor like Greg Abbott, who appears hellbent on destroying it. Everyone who lives in Texas knows how a huge part of its society and its economy depend on illegal immigration and specifically, undocumented workers. Abbott wants to choke the life out of Texas.
Labels ("framing") are an inescapable human response to an outrageously complex reality. Our current hyperpartisanship, it appears to me, is due to the fact that we are choosing to rely more and more on labels and the stereotypes that accompany those labels than we do our personal intellects, our interactions with individuals, and our innate sense of fairness and open-mindedness. I abhor tfg, but I know plenty of genuinely good people who support him. If I were to follow the instructions of memes and comments I see daily on social media, I would have nothing more to do with those supporters. I have to constantly filter out those demands that I join the angry masses, and it gets more and more challenging every day. I once told someone, "My TV isn't working, so I have no idea who I'm supposed to be angry with today! It's disorienting!" (Although I have absolutely no patience with TV "news" programs any more; I ceased tormenting my brain with CNN or MSNBC or FOX or even the "old school" NBC, ABC, or CBS, many years ago.)
I, too, have lived many places. I'm currently in Houston, teaching at a private international school until the end of the school year in May, after which I will return to my happy retirement near the home of my youth in western Michigan. But I've spent several decades in Central Florida, one year in northern Vermont, 3 years in Cairo, Egypt, 3 in Accra, Ghana, and several months in Dubai in the spring of 2020, where I saw firsthand how that country dealt with the emerging pandemic. I interact frequently with friends from all 'round the world. I love to witness the diversity of the human experience, and to find the similarities and differences among us.
One thing I have learned: each of us is a complex mixture of beliefs, experiences, positives and negatives. Our labels, essential though they may be for survival, too often hinder us from the truth about individuals or groups or cities or nations - and ultimately imprison us within a world concocted by others out of fear or ambition or spite. It is a cold, wicked prison, and the greatest punishment within those walls is the abandonment of truth.
Thanks very much for this. One of my many wishes is that it were more practical for more people to have more extended exposure (ie, living somewhere) within the country and around the world. Otherwise you're left with second-hand reports on what things are like in China — or Texas, or Brooklyn, or wherever. I know it's a huge privilege for those of us who have the means and freedom to move around, and that most people can't do so. But it's worth promoting as a goal.
Accra! Deb and I spent our several-month "honeymoon" with the Voluntary Work Camps of Ghana, in: Assin-Fosu, Tamale, Bolgatanga, and Winneba. We went to Accra for the flights in and out.
I have also lived in Florida, Texas and western NY State, spent 6 years living in Cairo, Alexandria and Mahalla el Kubra, 3 months in Amman, Jordan and 6 weeks living in Multan and Lahore, Pakistan. I would love to go to Ghana, and if I had my way, I would live all over the world. In my travels I discovered that life everywhere is richer and more complex than I ever realized, and in acclimating myself to living in these various places, I had to let go of what I believed and learn the definition of "open mindedness." Perhaps that's what is missing in the news coverage we receive - instead, we are getting information framed by a preset narrative, an agenda that must be followed because it conforms to a business model and not to the truth.
Yes, as noted above, it is an enormous privilege to be able to live in different parts of the country and the world — and an irreplaceable introduction to the similarities and differences of people and cultures.
It is indeed. I started out by going to Jordan as a volunteer working at a tiny NGO for Iraqi refugees. Flat broke, I learned about what it means to be poor in other cultures where kind people are the only "safety net" there is. I learned about what war does to an individual, a country and a culture. I learned about forgiveness. I lived under hardship but oh, it was the most incredible time of my life. Americans know so little about the middle east and yet our foreign policy is based in our ignorance. Perhaps if we learned more about places like Texas we would be better off as well.
Sorry to be a bit late on this- just getting over a mild case of COVID, so just getting to this now.
Thank you for the section on Texas and Houston. As Dallas, Harris (Houston), Bexar (San Antonio), and Travis (Austin) counties all went blue in the last presidential election, you would think the WashPo would know better than to publish such a simplistic job posting. There is a flip side to this, as many clusters of Trump voters live within two hours of the DC or Midtown Manhattan flatlands that an "enterprising reporter" could visit for another perspective.
Sadly, the problem exists beyond journalism. Some time ago, I heard the Democratic nominee for president speak (I won't say the candidate's name, but-read on-it's not too hard to figure out). Afterward, I went up to the candidate and said, "I think you are great, but what do I say to my family in Texas?" The candidate gruffly replied (perhaps it was the end of a long day), "Tell them I served in the military. Tell them I hunt and am a gun owner." I was a bit shocked at this response- we have few gun owners in our family. My parents, who have never shot a gun, are small business owners and artists- certainly not the Texas stereotype. They were concerned about economic issues, not guns.
The Flatland analogy is excellent. I took Herbert Gans' "Sociology of News and Journalism" course at Columbia when his book “Deciding What’s News- A Study of CBS and NBC Evening News, Time and Newsweek” was first published. Gans does not use the word “framing," but the last prescriptive chapter of the book is called “Multiperspectival News," which gets at many of the same points (and, you could say, uses a similar spatial analogy). Sadly, over 40 years later, we do have some multiperspectival news in the sense that there are different cable channels and programs for different audiences. Still, much of it is driven by ratings/market needs and the related need to cater to the confirmation biases of the audience. Journalists have enough trouble just satisfying these market imperatives to stay employed. Still, we can only hope that they can stretch themselves further to provide more perspectives and dimensions to stories.
Thanks for pointing me to the Swan/McConnell interview. I agree with you that often times, the foreign questioners get to the critical point whereas US interviewers tend to be too deferential. McConnell's carefree "things will self correct" throw away near the end was a misreading of history. It would have been nice to get some answers about how valuable the tax cuts enacted at the beginning of the Trump Administration have done as this appears to be the only proactive plan advanced by the Republican Party in the past decade and a half.
This discussion of "flattening" put me in mind of a little book I read way way way back in the 1980s, "America's Hidden Success", by a political scientist at the University of Arizona, John Schwarz. At the time -- I myself was in college then -- Reagan and the conservative movement had successfully convinced many people that government was "the problem". If you weren't there then, it's difficult to capture how pervasive this view was. Schwarz's book -- I think it was all of 150 pages -- simply produced the statistics to show how much government programs had successfully created a middle-class nation in the 50s, 60s, and even the dreaded 70s (mostly through paying for college and Social Security). I well remember how strikingly out of sync with the times that book was. (Conservatives were busy writing books telling us how diseased all of American culture was and how broken education was; they kept producing lists of items Americans "should" know and demonstrating how few were familiar with the items on their carefully chosen lists). And it seems the run of that particular daydream has not broken even today.
Looking around the net, it seems that little book has gone down the memory hole, but I did find an intriguing review of it, in Commentary of all places, focusing on the power of "bad news" in the news biz.
https://www.commentary.org/articles/nelson-polsby/americas-hidden-success-by-john-e-schwarz/
Bravo! In reading what you set forth today about framing, and the Want-Ad by the Washington Post for a journalist who would cover "red state" culture (which the paper seems to presume Texas is), I'm reminded of the 6 months I lived there in the winter of 2010-2011, in Houston as a Muslim. The religious community was quite large and diverse, Houston is a city of many people who come from all over, and there is no monolithic "conservative" viewpoint, yet the stereotype "conservative guys hanging out in a diner" is the framing for the type of reportage expected from the successful candidate. Where are the Mexican-Americans, Pakistani and Arab Americans, the British transplants in the petroleum industry, the coastal residents, and the many people who moved to Texas from Louisiana? It's as though none of them are real, none of them count, there are no viewpoints to include in that "diner" scenario beyond the perpetually unemployed in their MAGA caps.
Thank you. Yes, something I have always loved about Houston is its wide-openness. The bad side of this (arguably) is its long opposition to zoning laws of any kind. The good side is the sense that people can come from all over and get a new start there. Back in the early 1980s, when I was back in Texas but working for the Atlantic, I did a magazine story comparing how Detroit had responded to one of the (many) auto-industry shocks, versus Houston and one of that era's oil-business declines. Obviously "resilient culture" goes only so far in coping with world-economy changes. But the "everyone's a newcomer" (despite River Oaks etc) idea in Houston seemed significant.
And, yes, summing this up as "red state America" is ... not precise.
We lived in Houston for a short time then in Dallas for nine years. Those are two very different cities! I agree with what you love about Houston as well as the problem of no zoning laws. I had never lived in a city like that where you could find a sleazy bar next to an upscale neighborhood.
Thanks for this great article. I have been thinking about the effects of framing on our political and our media for a very long time. I have come to believe the media’s simplistic portrayal of red vs blue states comes from their implicit framing of complex reality as simplistic either/or situations. One result of that framing is too many journalists portray the political parties as simple opposites of each other, as equally leftwing or rightwing. As Republicans have moved to the extreme right the media has been compelled to portray the Democrats as equally extreme. As a result they give far more attention to the very few people on the left who advocate for extreme, unpopular ideas like “defunding the police”. That has led many people the think that is what the Democratic Party stands for when almost no Democrats and no party leaders do.
Another example that stands out to me is the inordinate amount of attention the media has given to the very liberal AOC rather than to the other more moderate freshmen congressional Dems who flipped red districts to blue the same year AOC won in a deep blue district. AOC fits in with the media frame that the Democratic Party is getting more “extreme” so she is focused on and portrayed as the future of the Party while the others mostly get ignored. (This is in no way a criticism of AOC who is politically savvy and smart to use the attention to increase her political influence.)
Putting a spotlight on outlier examples is a tried and true tactic deliberately used by Republican spinmeisters to make voters afraid of Democrats’ “radical” ideas. In my opinion that tactic started after the political unrest on the left in response to Vietnam frightened a lot of Americans. The terrorist tactics of some of the radical left wing groups and the insanity at the Chicago Democratic convention were particularly damaging to Democrats. Republicans have effectively kept that fear alive by wrongly portraying Democrats as far out of the mainstream. Unfortunately the mainstream media has often helped.
I also believe the media’s need for simplistic either/or framing is at least part of the reason that they are so wedded to the “Dems in Disarray” frame and that frame is actually embedded in the either/or frame. That “subframe” is particularly destructive because its carries a very strong strong implicit message that a party whose members don’t just follow its leaders is dysfunctional. In fact truth is the complete opposite — Democracy is necessarily messy. Disagreement and negotiation are a necessary condition for a healthy democracy. Our media portraying it as a sign of sickness is undermining our democracy.
One question I can’t answer is whether the media adopts these powerful frames deliberately or if those frames just the way most journalists and pundits subconsciously view the world. Clearly Republicans have a long history of deliberately creating and/or invoking frames which make their ideas more acceptable to the public. Reagan’s either/or frame “government bad/private entities good” has been very effective. Frank Luntz used that frame when he convinced Republicans to use the term “privatization” to reframe the public’s perception of policies they had traditionally opposed. The did this by framing the idea of shifting control of Social Security and Medicare to private, for-profit companies as empowering individuals to manage their own retirement funds and insurance, as giving them choice. I always believed that Democrats should have countered by calling it “profitization”, as turning Social Security over to risky Wall Street management, but what do I know?
Another powerful frame that clearly affects public perception is the masculine vs feminine frame. That frame communicates that “manly, macho men” are powerful and strong and will protect our country’ women and more “feminized” men are weak and put Americans at risk. Clearly that frame drives a lot of our politics, as a recent article by Thomas Edsall in the NY Times describes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/opinion/gender-gap-republicans-democrats.html
Republicans have been using that frame to imply that Democrats (the “Mommy Party”) is not strong, i.e. “manly” enough to lead this country. They used to be more subtle about it but now they are explicitly fearmongering about the dangers of making our society too feminine. Tucker Carlson’s bizarre new pseudo-documentary is titled “The End of Men”. Its trailer claims that in hard times manly men are the ones rise up and restore order. (Who wants a bunch of squabbling Democrats in charge in a crisis?)
The research summarized in Edsall’s article shows that that framing is a powerful political influence for many men (not just white men) as well as for many women.
I believe that the “Manly man” frame is one that many in the media also have internalized and that implicit frame biases them against Democrats, male or female because the “mommy party” prioritizes traditionally feminine values and concern. I found it disturbing that Clinton was mocked for “feeling our pain” and gobsmacked when Maureen Down wrote that Gore’s concern for the environment showed he was was so “feminized” that he was “practically lactating”. That statement was not just massively stupid but deeply insulting to women.
In contrast our political journalists were clearly impressed by Bush’s faux manly displays. They knew that Gore (and Kerry) had volunteered to serve in Vietnam but Bush had deliberately avoided doing that. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised because this is the same media that thought Bush senior had a “wimp” problem even though he had volunteered to be a combat pilot in WWII.
We will never be able to fight these corrosive biases unless we are able to identify and understand the powerful mental frames that are driving them. Thanks for shining a light on this important topic! (And sorry for the long post. )
AOC is a target because she's a hottie, and that triggers the incels on the right. It also triggers male journalists. The WashPost's Aaron Blake wrote a horse race piece recently where she's actually listed as a possible candidate. The rest of the "Squad" is equally targeted by misogynists more than happy to label them as extremists and commies. I personally like these women very much.
Bernie Sanders is another example of a politician with important ideas being demonized. During the 2020 campaign Jennifer Rubin, the biggest hypocrite in journalism, never missed a chance to portray him as a nutcase and, in her words, a "backbencher," yet she's never been bothered by the role Sanders has played as an adviser to Pres. Biden.
Framing is what tells the audience how to perceive and interpret the information they're given. It's as least as important as the information itself.
I agree with you that perception is powerful and that frames structure our perceptions. It can also be deliberately manipulated to distort people’s perception of reality — which is how Frank Luntz and other Republican spinmeisters have used it. They have consciously and repeatedly use frames to shift peoples perception of Democrats as extreme, as decadent, irresponsible, radical etc. They know Democrats are extremely left wing as Republicans are right wing but they also know it benefits to make voters believe that is true.
Cognitive psych research has proved that everyone has unconscious frames. Most help us function smoothly but some can also distort how we perceive situations in negative ways. I was recently talking to a psychologist friend about how the Trumpers we both know seem to perceive the world through a win-lose frame while we both frame the world as mostly win-win. Policies that help low income people survive don’t take away from us; they make our world better.
The win-lose frame trigger the frame that sees competition as more effective than cooperation, a traditional gender role frame. (Many women also have this traditional frame.) Cooperation is devalued because it is what the weaker sex and girly men have to use. As I result these people will usually think war is more effective than diplomacy; that police using force as their go-to is the right choice; that de-escalation and diplomacy are not just ineffective they are a sign of weakness. (Trump invokes that frame when has said Biden is to blame for Putin’s war because Biden has been weak, unlike him.)
I don’t have a problem with AOC. In fact I think she is very impressive. My criticism was not about her or the reasons rightwingers focus on her, my criticism is about the effect of the mainstream media putting so much attention on her while ignoring other freshman Dems who won by flipping red seats to blue. They are the ones who gave control of the House back to the Democrats which you would think would be of interest to the political journalists.
I also wonder about what people in Texas are experiencing with Abbott as governor. The family we were extremely close with when we lived there has been badly split by Texas politics because the father — who is one of the nicest people I have ever known — started watching Fox and has become thoroughly brainwashed. The acrimony between him and his daughter is heartbreaking to see.
You are right about Texas’s dependence on undocumented workers. The dad is a builder and always laughed about how the contractors’ workers at his sites would vanish if the cops came around. His business depends on those undocumented workers. In fact he has always said they are very skilled and hardworking.
For years media has let Republicans get away with publicly pretending to oppose all those immigrants just to please their base while refusing to do anything about it to please all their business supporters who benefitted front he cheap labor. Whenever the idea of targeting the people who hired undocumented workers was brought up Republicans would become outraged. I am convinced going after business owners would have forced Republicans to finally support immigration reform. Trump would have been one of the business owners who would have been held to account.
By the way the more you write about all the places you have lived the more intrigued I am. It sounds like you could have you own game a la “where in the world is Carmen Sandiego” (That was how my son learned geography. )
I suspect that Abbott knows damn well how Texas' economy works and has no intentions of dismantling it. He whines about all immigration, which is simply theater played to everyone who would possibly vote for him as president. BTW, Houston is as much like a foreign country as anywhere I've been. Everything is in Spanish, and because I don't speak Spanish I couldn't find a good job there. Otherwise, I would have never gone to the middle east. At the time, it was a great alternative to living in a homeless shelter. The NGO in Jordan paid for my plane ticket, gave me a place to sleep and paid me $10 a week for food. Going there was so badass, and the next 6 years were badass as well. Sometimes I miss it. I didn't know who I was or what I could become until I had that challenge. It was the best thing I ever did.
What did you do there? I agree that was badass!
I only lived in Houston for a very short time before my husband was transferred — again — to Dallas. Dallas also had a large Hispanic population but not quite as large as Houston’s. I was pleasantly surprised that our small street had quite an interesting mix of people — white, black, British, Korean and even a Palestinian family. We also had a family of very devout fundamentalist Christians. The father was a very nice man who sculpted his shrubs to look like an erect male organ, apparently without realizing it. Freud would have loved it!
Living in Houston was actually very similar to living in Cairo. I arrived there In August, and it was very hot. Cairo and Houston are both huge, sprawling cities, and both cities are home to people from all over the world. I lived in a poor Mexican neighborhood in Houston, and I lived my last two years in Cairo in a slum.
Knowing that Texas is not as it seems, I wonder how it can have a governor like Greg Abbott, who appears hellbent on destroying it. Everyone who lives in Texas knows how a huge part of its society and its economy depend on illegal immigration and specifically, undocumented workers. Abbott wants to choke the life out of Texas.
Labels ("framing") are an inescapable human response to an outrageously complex reality. Our current hyperpartisanship, it appears to me, is due to the fact that we are choosing to rely more and more on labels and the stereotypes that accompany those labels than we do our personal intellects, our interactions with individuals, and our innate sense of fairness and open-mindedness. I abhor tfg, but I know plenty of genuinely good people who support him. If I were to follow the instructions of memes and comments I see daily on social media, I would have nothing more to do with those supporters. I have to constantly filter out those demands that I join the angry masses, and it gets more and more challenging every day. I once told someone, "My TV isn't working, so I have no idea who I'm supposed to be angry with today! It's disorienting!" (Although I have absolutely no patience with TV "news" programs any more; I ceased tormenting my brain with CNN or MSNBC or FOX or even the "old school" NBC, ABC, or CBS, many years ago.)
I, too, have lived many places. I'm currently in Houston, teaching at a private international school until the end of the school year in May, after which I will return to my happy retirement near the home of my youth in western Michigan. But I've spent several decades in Central Florida, one year in northern Vermont, 3 years in Cairo, Egypt, 3 in Accra, Ghana, and several months in Dubai in the spring of 2020, where I saw firsthand how that country dealt with the emerging pandemic. I interact frequently with friends from all 'round the world. I love to witness the diversity of the human experience, and to find the similarities and differences among us.
One thing I have learned: each of us is a complex mixture of beliefs, experiences, positives and negatives. Our labels, essential though they may be for survival, too often hinder us from the truth about individuals or groups or cities or nations - and ultimately imprison us within a world concocted by others out of fear or ambition or spite. It is a cold, wicked prison, and the greatest punishment within those walls is the abandonment of truth.
Thanks very much for this. One of my many wishes is that it were more practical for more people to have more extended exposure (ie, living somewhere) within the country and around the world. Otherwise you're left with second-hand reports on what things are like in China — or Texas, or Brooklyn, or wherever. I know it's a huge privilege for those of us who have the means and freedom to move around, and that most people can't do so. But it's worth promoting as a goal.
Accra! Deb and I spent our several-month "honeymoon" with the Voluntary Work Camps of Ghana, in: Assin-Fosu, Tamale, Bolgatanga, and Winneba. We went to Accra for the flights in and out.
I have also lived in Florida, Texas and western NY State, spent 6 years living in Cairo, Alexandria and Mahalla el Kubra, 3 months in Amman, Jordan and 6 weeks living in Multan and Lahore, Pakistan. I would love to go to Ghana, and if I had my way, I would live all over the world. In my travels I discovered that life everywhere is richer and more complex than I ever realized, and in acclimating myself to living in these various places, I had to let go of what I believed and learn the definition of "open mindedness." Perhaps that's what is missing in the news coverage we receive - instead, we are getting information framed by a preset narrative, an agenda that must be followed because it conforms to a business model and not to the truth.
Hi Marycat2021😊
Hi PKC! :) How great to see you and Theodora again! Eric would be pleased!
Indeed he would. Love to ‘see’ u both.
Yes, as noted above, it is an enormous privilege to be able to live in different parts of the country and the world — and an irreplaceable introduction to the similarities and differences of people and cultures.
It is indeed. I started out by going to Jordan as a volunteer working at a tiny NGO for Iraqi refugees. Flat broke, I learned about what it means to be poor in other cultures where kind people are the only "safety net" there is. I learned about what war does to an individual, a country and a culture. I learned about forgiveness. I lived under hardship but oh, it was the most incredible time of my life. Americans know so little about the middle east and yet our foreign policy is based in our ignorance. Perhaps if we learned more about places like Texas we would be better off as well.