Blog: May 2007

During the 2004 election, a new idea burst into the popular political consciousness - "framing." The idea is simple, and to me, obvious: the way people talk about an issue influences the way they think about an issue. Say "estate tax" and people think about taxing big mansions for a small number of people; say "death tax" and it sounds like your grandmother is going to have to pay up when she passes away. Say "Social Security privatization" and people think about the failed energy schemes in California, but "personal accounts" sound like prudent saving for the future. "Partial-birth abortion" sounds gruesome, but it's just a scary way of talking about "late-term abortions".

Writers use words to persuade all the time. I called the California energy deregulation plan a "scheme" to convey the disaster that it represented for the state, rather than, say "experiment". Of course words have power, and nobody should recognize that more than writers.

That is why it's baffling the way some writers vehemently dispute the idea that framing could provide value. Jonathan Chait wrote a cover story in The New Republic this month about the rise of the netroots and their value to American politics. All in all, I think it's a remarkably even-handed analysis that gives credit to most of the netroots' major effects on politics, something most commentators outside of that world have thus far been slow to understand or reluctant to admit.

But he takes a sudden dig at framing:

Among the most revealing is the netroots' incessant use of the words "meme" or "frame" to describe ideas. It is a formulation that assumes that establishing the truth about an idea matters less than phrasing the idea in the most politically effective way and repeating it as much as possible. As Ed Kilgore (a moderate liberal blogger with a complicated relationship to the netroots) has put it, this wording "reflects the strange belief that politics is all about noise' and narratives'; whoever makes the most noise or gets the most Google hits is going to win, regardless of objective reality."

Chait's argument makes sense if you assume there is one objective truth and that intelligent people can always arrive at it. The netroots' fundamental claim, which Chait misses, is that it's impossible to agree on a single inviolable truth. Instead, reasonable people can disagree, and whoever is most effective at articulating their beliefs in easily comprehensible language is most likely to prevail. Yet there's remarkable resistance to this simple idea.

When some members of the profession of journalism build their self-images on the notion that they are ferreting out absolute truth, challenges to this orthodoxy can meet extremely strong opposition. Just look at the New York Times Book Review, which essentially printed an attack op-ed in the guise of reviewing an excellent book, Jeffrey Feldman's Framing the Debate. It's a baffling set of untruths and misreadings that Feldman rebuts more effectively than I can. But just the fact that the Times Book Review chose to run such an opinionated, direct argument as a review is telling. When reviewing a book about one of our Founding Fathers do they choose a scholar with an opposing view to write the review? The vehemence of the responses from various quarters can only mean that the idea of framing is hitting an uncomfortable nerve with certain members of the press. And it's long overdue.