"You're wrong" is not a frame

A few weeks ago, the Democrats fought back against the Frank Luntz-written "bailout" frame that Senator Mitch McConnell tried to apply to the proposed changes to the financial system - see the video above.

But did the Democrats reframe - did they proactively send out their own message? No. The Democrats just pointed out Luntz's framing and the fact that McConnell was using it. Some journalists acknowledged that the GOP talking points, as applied to the financial reform proposal of the Democrats, were too laughable to repeat verbatim (the video features a couple of those journalists; see also David Weigel of the Washington Post).  The GOP frame fizzled somewhat as a result.

But that was an unlikely victory, because the Democrats' "you're wrong" rebuttal was not a frame that drove the debate in their direction, either. And people know this, including Mike Konczal:

When it came to the House vote, where you had no Republicans voting for it and an endless drum-banging about this “bailout bill”, I heard a lot of “that’s not in the bill” rather than a defense of what they were voting for. Pointing out that the Republicans are distorting things and expecting that to be the end of the argument is so John Kerry, so 2004. We need to come up with our own positive arguments and narratives for why these reform works.

Do the Democrats even have a frame for financial reform?  The White House seems to be using the "you're Main Street; they're Wall Street" frame, but it's buried as story #3 on a rotating featured story graphic on whitehouse.gov, at least today (here's how the main page looked this morning). The Democratic Party doesn't even have financial reform as an issue on its web page democrats.org - not even under the Agenda item "Economic Stewardship" (I've captured here how the front page of the site looked this morning). Two issues that are highlighted by both the White House and the Democratic Party web sites are (1) the benefits of health reform, and (2) the Elena Kagan nomination to the Supreme Court.  At least they're consistent in focusing on those two messages.

Still, one thing Luntz got right in his memo is that Americans desperately want financial reform. The White House and the Democratic Party, however, haven't made it a priority to communicate their proactive message to the American people - their frame - on that issue.

Is "net neutrality" too geeky?

Photo by Julia Roy.  Licensed via Creative Commons.

Renay San Miguel of TechNewsWorld laments two overtones that he says have been imbued into the term "net neutrality": geekiness and government intrusion.

He says he favor a "freedom" frame, but at the same time, he seems content to stick with geekiness and only once refer to freedom in his suggested replacements for the term "net neutrality" (note that I've bolded geeky terms and italicized his one freedom term):

...my advice for any representative or senator willing to pick up the mantle of "Net neutrality": Avoid that now-cliche like ... well, you know ... a botnet-enabled plague.

The words are now not only fraught with political baggage that can be used in a Drudge Report headline denoting overbearing government interference or a Huffington Post piece about big business messing with your downloads; they also just sound too damn geeky for anybody's good. Ideological stereotypes, like pirated movie files, flow freely in the media canals of the Internet, so why play into that anymore? Call it "Net equality," "high-speed freedom," "I can't drive 55 (Mbps)," whatever. Just stay away from the chamber of commerce-style (or in this case, government-approved) labels.

The wikipedia entry for the concept of net(work) neutrality has a few different frames:

• freedom ("no restrictions on content, sites, or platforms")
  
• equality/fairness ("if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, that the two users should be able to connect to each other")
  
• competition (net neutrality fights practices that "remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services")
  
• inclusion (fights "against the fragmentation of the net whenever this becomes excluding to other participants")
  
• consumerism ("Consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire...Consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer")
  
• openness ("Open application...Open devices...Open services...Open networks")
  
• choice ("access the lawful Internet content of their choice...run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement...connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network")
  
• control ("Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet")

The better frames listed above are those that are consumer-focused and not technology-focused, so in a sense I agree with Renay San Miguel when he says the frame should be less "geek" and more "freedom."  The frame needs to trigger that heart switch of being wronged when a merchant gives you bad customer service or something less than what you thought you would get.

So San Miguel's framing instinct may be on the right track, but judging from his three suggestions for a replacement term, I think he needs to work on his stickiness instinct.

My fellow framers: leave your suggestion in the comments.

Who's the lead and who's supporting?

According to Entertainment Weekly, the framing of who is a "lead" actor among the Modern Family cast is still up in the air, with the cast working along the lines of the following frames:

• age (adult actors v. children actors)
• résumé clout (favors Ed O'Neill)
• "traditional" family roles (favors Julie Bowen and Ty Burrell)

Which actors would you submit for the "lead" role of Modern Family, and on what basis?

Sell your body to the polluters

Photo by Todd Sanders. Licensed via Creative Commons.
"Cap-and rebate" would be a more sensible, persuasive frame for the President than his existing "cap-and-trade" proposal, according to this suggestion by Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter:

Banks remain loathed, which means that financial regulation, including a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, should be within reach if Obama can elevate his game on framing issues persuasively—and win over a couple of GOP senators, which is doable. Energy is just a few tweaks away from being a political winner. Changing cap-and-trade to the far more sensible cap-and-rebate (in which polluters' fees go straight back to the public as checks) could make it very popular—and confirm the role of clean energy in rebuilding the economy.

I'm not so sure Alter should be giving the President framing tips.  It sounds like his idea - giving the public cash every time a company exceeds a pollution cap - is an even clearer demonstration of the whole "pay to pollute" concept, in which the capped corporation gets a chance to release its illicit discharge in exchange for cash.  If the public gets the cash, it thus takes on the role of the oldest profession, and receiving "dirty checks" in the mail would remind John and Jane Q. Public that they had sold their bodies (i.e. their health) to the highest bidder.

But maybe Alter is right after all.  Reinforcing the frame of pollution as vice - and painting the public an immoral, self-destructive participant in that vice - could spark an outbreak of emotionally evisceral outrage about pollution that comes in handy for a politician pushing clean energy.

Overlabeling

pickles & olives, then pickles, then olives
Photo by Sandy Kemsley.  Licensed by Creative Commons.

In a story about immigration bureaucracy reform, doesn't the following sentence make a redundant reference to the legal status of the students?

...education legislation, in the form of the Dream Act, will allow better access to universities for promising illegal students who are working toward legalization.

Why the word "illegal?"  If the students are working toward legalization, isn't it understood that they have an immigration status problem?

This is a perfect example of the point I made in my previous post, and a demonstration of the erroneous but common tendency of journalists to define people with immigration problems with labels that refer to their immigration status more frequently than they define people with other legal problems with labels that refer to their alleged violations.

The sentence in the story above could have been reworded as I've indicated below and been just as accurate, without the person-defining word "illegal" (or "undocumented" or any similar variation):

...education legislation, in the form of the Dream Act, will allow better access to universities for promising students who are working toward legalization.

If you must, end it with "toward their own legalization."  But once these people are defined as students in this sentence, that is all the labeling and the defining needed there.

The nouns of lawbreaking and how the immigration beat overuses labels like "illegal"

Defining the person by a label

Photo by Bill H-D. Licensed under Creative Commons.

How do we frame people who break the law? From my observation, reporting on immigration law violations tends to define the person who is on the wrong side of that law much more than reporting on people who are on the wrong side of any other law.

For example, a January Tennessean cover story on business tax amnesty described the people who had violated the law as, "companies," "people," "businesspeople," and "owners." Barely used were terms that turned the lawless behavior into a noun or adjective that defined the offender, like "scofflaws" and "noncompliant businesses." The term "illegal" doesn't appear once.

I point this out because of two stories in the Tennessean today.

The first is a story about a driver who crashed a stolen car onto the steps of City Hall yesterday. The AP story refers to the person as the "driver" five times (including in the headline) and uses no other description. WSMV's report uses the word "man" once, "driver" four times (including in the headline), and "car thief" only once.

The second carries this headline: "Lipscomb University recruiter bonuses broke federal law." Note that no person broke the law; it was the bonuses who did it. And that frame carries beyond the headline to this statement in the story itself: "Unfortunately, the incentives also broke federal law." The words "unethical recruiters" appear in the story, but only as background for why the law was created. (No surprise, then, that after the article concludes with "Lipscomb did not suffer any penalties for the incident, and all the recruiters were allowed to keep their bonuses," the normally venomous Tennessean commenters chimed in with "Yawn. Non story" and "Just another non-story from The Thin-essean.")

When the law is immigration, however, defining the person by the legal violation is much more prevalent. Just look at the story today in the Tennessean on the 100,000-500,000-strong immigration march yesterday in D.C.: people with immigration law problems are described only three times, and with the exact same words: "illegal immigrants."

In theory or in isolation, that use of the modifier "illegal" to construct and repeat the term "illegal immigrants" might seem to make sense, but not when businesses that violate tax laws are called - without any legal modifier - "companies," "people," "businesspeople," and "owners;" not when a man who violates property and vehicular laws is called a "driver" with no accompanying adjective; and not when the people who commit recruiting violations at a Nashville university are merely called "recruiters."  Those stories all explain the violation without legally defining the violator.

Legal tags like "undocumented" or "illegal" are unnecessary.  The right practice is not to choose which is the least offensive or the most accurate of the two.  The right practice is to stay away - from these labels or any variant.

It's not that reporters on immigration should do anything different that their colleagues working other legal beats. Avoiding labels like "undocumented" or "illegal" is standard media practice in every other context. Deviating from that practice at the immigration desk is probably an unconscious act, but as a result, it is both unwarranted and unprofessional.  It has become a scarlet letter.  I'll leave it for you to decide who's wearing it.

Health care framing could have made GM bailout more popular: BusinessWeek

In February, BusinessWeek devoted its cover story to the business messaging of President Obama. In a key interview question, the President displayed a tendency toward bloated framing:

If you had to distill your economic message into a single declarative sentence, what would it be?
That having broken the back of this recession, our goal now is to build a new foundation for long-term, sustainable economic growth, and that that requires innovation. It requires a smart energy policy. It requires a health-care system that is not a drag on business. And it requires an education system that is producing the most productive workers in the world.

The magazine's subsequent podcast about the cover story featured this unsolicited advice to the White House about framing the GM bailout:

The messaging on the other side has been very strong, whereas the messaging out of the White House has not been.
...
It comes back to this inability to get across a cohesive message. And let's talk about GM for a minute. You know, one of the ways that I think the administration could have been more successful in the past year was to realize that words like, "regulation" - "bailout," they don't play very well. There was an opportunity with GM to make it all about health care, and say, "Folks, the reason we have to go in here and save these jobs and save these companies is that, they can't afford to insure people anymore. Look at the pension program. Look at the costs they pay for their employees." And just by shifting that lens a little bit at the front, I actually think they could have had a smoother way to the bailout.

"Shifting that lens a little bit at the front" - that's framing.

So if the author's theory is that the widely unpopular bailouts could have been made more popular under a health care frame, he's assuming there's a heart switch for easing the burden of corporate America that doesn't also trip the corporate-giveaway or self-defense switches that would tend toward voter backlash.

What are you thoughts on BusinessWeek's framing advice to the President who just beat the odds against passing health care reform?