Susan C. Strong: How to take the latest framing buzz

[Ed. note: Susan C. Strong, Ph.D., is the founder of the Metaphor Project. The following appeared as a recent communiqué from Susan, and is republished here with permission.]

It seems like there's just been an explosion of new sites, blogs, articles or online debate about framing.

For example, we have Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack's "Our Ten Words" project, and AlterNet's new "Echo Chamber" blog. Then there's Don Hazen's self-explanatory "Lakoff is Correct," and Peter Teague's "Suitable for Framing?", pointing out widespread confusion about what framing is. Last on my list, but by no means least, is Garance Franke-Ruta's "Remapping the Culture Debate," in The American Prospect (February 2006), for its review of research that supports outreach to voters concerned about our nation's direction.

Unfortunately, and perhaps even dangerously, some of this buzz is wide of the mark. How so? And what to do instead?Let's start with the "10 words" idea. It is vital for our people to realize that in actual political communication, framing does not proceed by means of single words. Think "tax relief," for example, or "welfare queens," or (some of ours) "peace is patriotic," or "frankenfood." Whether you think framing means referring to deeply-held unconscious emotional assumptions and values or carefully articulating a system of new ideas, or creating the sound bites required to express any of these in today's short attention span arena, one thing is sure. As the examples given above show, framing requires mentioning one thing linked to another. Another way to say this is that you have to create an easily accessible metaphor -- one thing described in terms of another. That is where the rubber hits the real framing road.

There's only one way to do this in English. You have to use at least two words. You can pair a noun with an adjective, or create a very short but simple sentence, preferably with a strong verb in the middle of it, or choose a strong adverb to go with a powerful, active verb. There are a few other grammatical combinations that work like these, but describing them with more technical terms will just get us bogged down. The point is that 10 words that refer to ideas or values are not enough; we will need at least 20 words, two by two, one word for the idea/value category (opportunity, liberty, etc.), and one more to modify it, so that it has some special meaning.

That need for a modifier with special meaning is the source of some of the other current framing anxieties right now. One big worry out there concerns the latest findings, passed along again by Don Hazen, that you can't easily persuade people who really don't agree with you. Because people's beliefs are seated in largely unconscious emotional frames, research shows that even the most damning set of facts may not do the job. Hazen's recommendation that the progressive solution is to "re-frame the issues from [our] point of view," that is, our ideas, and "then make the facts fit the frame" is correct as far as it goes, but it remains abstract.

But as Garance Franke-Ruta's American Prospect piece reports, lots of people do still agree about very specific core American values like fairness, freedom, or opportunity. And they also care about the way our country behaves when promoting those values. If we progressives choose our ten words from the best shared American value set, then select those ten modifiers from the pool of everyday American political images, we'll actually be a long way to our goal. For example, I'm thinking about a value like "opportunity," and a common conveyer image for it like "level the playing field." The sound bite might be "keep the field fair," if you are talking about a specific policy. That sound bite is more than two words and still needs massaging, but you get the idea.