I have to take you back to the 2004 US presidential election. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, is seen as an over-serious guy and his campaign team comes up with the idea to capture him windsurfing to make him seem more fun and sporty. Conservative blogs quickly attack this “elitist sport” (Zernike, 2004) and then the campaign team of incumbent President George W. Bush, the Republican running for reelection, comes up with the attack-add you can see below. The add paints Kerry as a man who can’t make a clear decision, who changes his opinion often and then ends with the killer phrase “John Kerry, whichever way the wind blows”.
The Bush team carefully crafted a frame of Kerry flip-flopping and inconsistency against him. Research shows that the use of flip-flop and inconsistency against a political candidate had never been used to such a degree and success as in the 2004 election (Verdon, 2008). Morin & Dean (2004) reported that a majority of independents, not registered as either a Democrat or Republican, said they were unsure of what John Kerry stood for, and John Kerry went on to lose the election. So, frame successful right?
Now this ad alone didn’t bring about his loss and probably neither did the inconsistency frame that was so carefully crafted by the Bush campaign, but it did help. Framing John Kerry as a man who’s position you can’t be sure of in a time when stability is needed.
But what is Framing exactly?
According to Entman (1993) ”To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.”
Scheufele (2014) gives a slightly easier definition: “Framing effects refer to communication effects that are not due to differences in what is being communicated, but rather to variations in how a given piece of information is being presented (or framed) in public discourse”
In the case of John Kerry, the perceived reality of him being a flip-flop is made much more salient and even though he did, in fact, do all the things the ad accuses him of, it’s doubtful he would present the information in the same way. So he was in fact, Framed.
We don’t have to stray far from home to find these tactics
In 2006 Jan-Peter Balkenende from the Christian Democratic party (CDA) and Wouter Bos from the Labour party (PvdA) battle over who will become the next prime minister of the Netherlands. Labour is leading in the polls by a decent margin and the CDA is internally surveying citizens about their opinions about Bos and Balkenende. What they find is not what they had hoped, Bos is beating Balkenende in almost every category, citizens like him more, think he is more capable, a better public speaker and would prefer him as prime minister. There is, however, one category in which Balkenende defeats Bos, trustworthiness. These findings are later backed up by a survey of over half a million citizens (Trouw, 2006). So Balkenende’s campaign team decides to make trustworthiness the central issue of the campaign and attack Bos vigorously on it, culminating in the now renowned phrase uttered by Balkenende in the first debate: “U draait en u bent niet eerlijk”, which roughly translates to: “You are twisting and being dishonest”.
This is not just framing, it’s also agenda setting and priming on behalf of the CDA. They framed Bos as untrustworthy and dishonest, but this idea already lived in the minds of many citizens. By talking about it constantly you can put a particular issue at the forefront of people’s minds and they are more likely to attribute importance to it (Scheufele, 2014), that’s agenda setting. Because the debate and the phrase were covered extensively, making it more salient in people’s minds it now becomes more likely to be used as a standard to judge candidates for political office on (Scheufele, 2014), which is called priming. Since Balkenende was already perceived as more trustworthy, that was a battle he couldn’t lose. And he didn’t, winning the election comfortably.
(Image 1: showing the polling in the weeks before the election and the eventual outcome)
Frame your ideals
I’ve shown you that people can be framed in a certain way that makes them lose elections. Not because of their opinions, but of how they are perceived. Is it possible though to change a person’s opinion through framing?
A study by Feinberg & Willer (2015) found that both liberals and conservatives, we’re in the US again, composed persuasive messages that reflected their own moral values, not values unique to those who typically would oppose the political stance. This makes sense right? If I would ask you to give me arguments about why you feel a certain way about a certain topic, it’s likely you would give me arguments that would work on you. The study found that by framing a message by using moral values of your target audience, the message became significantly more persuasive.
To cite a Guardian article: “Environmental issues are often framed in terms of the harm pollution wreaks on the environment. However, when environmental issues are reframed in terms of the conservative value of purity – emphasizing the importance of keeping our forests, drinking water, and skies pure – conservatives are much more likely to support this cause.” (Rathje, 2017)
So yes, it’s possible to frame and change how not only people but even opinions you may have held for a very long time are perceived.
How far is too far?
In the 1988 presidential election between Republican George H. W. Bush (yes the dad), and Democrat Michael Dukakis, a group aligned to the Bush campaign released a now infamous ad about a criminal named Willie Horton.
A strong personal attack on Dukakis, linking him to a violent murderer. But the ad is now infamous because according to African-American Democrats like Jesse Jackson, the ad played on racial fears (Sides, 2016). Is that taking framing too far?
How about this frame of “Crooked Hillary” used extensively by Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. Or this image of Dutch Socialist Party leader Emile Roemer in Quote, a magazine focused on business and wealth, where it looks like he’s covered in blood whilst holding a chainsaw symbolizing what would happen to the Netherlands if he became prime minister. The picture is fake of course. Is this taking it too far?
In this blog, I have tried to show you that with the right kind of framing you can destroy your opponents and win elections. Even though almost none of the frames used were about substance or ideological differences, they were purely attacks on character. That is why I’m going to make a bold statement: “Framing in Political Communication is bad for Democracy”. And I’d love to hear what you think.
You’ve been framed
Yeah. The beauty of framing is that almost everyone does it almost all the time, and so did I in this very blog post. Ask yourself this: How many nuances did I give about the effects of framing on the outcome of elections? How many examples did I give of frames that were ineffective in changing the outcomes of elections? There are plenty, but that’s not the story I wanted to tell, so I cherry picked and thus framed my own message.
The moral of the story is this: be critical, very critical. Because if you try and see the frames that are constantly thrown at you, they might still affect you but at least you know it’s happening.
References
Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58.
Feinberg, M., & Willer, R. (2015). From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(12), 1665–1681. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167215607842
Morin, R., & Deane, C. (2004, July 27) Voters want more specifics about Kerry. TheWashington Post, p. AOL
Rathje, S. (2017). The power of framing, it’s not what you say it’s how you say it. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2017/jul/20/the-power-of-framing-its-not-what-you-say-its-how-you-say-it
Scheufele, D., & Iyengar, S. (2014).The State of Framing Research: A Call for New Directions.The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793471.013.47
Trouw. (2006). Kieskompas: Balkenende klopt Bos op betrouwbaarheid, Trouw. Retrieved from https ://www.trouw.nl/home/kieskompas-balkenende-klopt-bos-op-betrouwbaarheid~a934f1e8/
Verdon, T. (2008). Attacking Ethos: The Rhetorical Use of Uncertainty in the 2004 Election. Dissertations. 1195. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/1195
Zernike, K. (2004). Who among us does not love windsurfing?, The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/weekinreview/who-among-us-does-not-love-windsurfing.html
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Thanks for the great read Michiel! I love how you started with an example of framing by using the Bush versus Kerry example, followed with an actual explanation of framing and got deeper into the subject by using an example close to home.
Regarding your final statement, I do agree that framing can be bad for democracy. as you stated yourself, framing can be used to shape a public’s opinion. So this can alway be used for reasons that won’t benefit the overall country but for example only one individual. However, I don’t necessarily think it is always bad. For example, framing can be used for good causes, maybe even to create certain regulations or laws that benefit a country’s population. I feel like everything can and should be viewed form multiple angles, sadly that does not always happen.
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I really like your blog! I’ve known about the way we are being ‘deceived’ by the media in political situations and I’ve heard about the way that Facebook played a major influential role in the presidential elections, but I’ve never know what exactly happened. Thanks for the insight. I also agree with your statement that framing is bad for our democracy. I do however like to think about the influence on the readers on this matter. We live in 2018, which means that we should educate our modern citizens in a way that can shield them (if that’s possible) from framing. We should therefore offer courses in our educational curriculum that teaches us about the right and wrongs of the new media and how to formulate your own opinion.
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Thanks for sharing! I really like the way you describe a phenomenon with actual examples, and your writing tone is clear and warm. We do know that framing exists everywhere in modern society, things are explained, described in the way that benefits or damages somebody. Living in such a society, we need media literacy to see through these distortions, trace back to the fact, and create our own thought. Therefore, being critical like you stated at the end of your blog, is essential before we comment or evaluate anything. Everything should be inspected from diverse viewpoints, and we need to remind people around us not being affected by a “framed opinion” even it is hard and annoying :D.
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Wow cool! I know it was not the main point of your article, but I especially liked your illustration of framing using the Guardian article about framing of environmental issues, referring to Rathje (2017). I think it s really good to be aware of framing and to research effects like these, so that pressing issues like environmental change can be addressed in different ways as to convince more types of people. I think you’re right in mentioning that people likely propose arguments that would convince them. Not many realise I think that some people might not be convinced by the same information. This is really useful knowledge to take into account, thanks for making me aware of it.
Also, really nice that you zoomed out at the end, explaining how we are framed even when reading a blog about framing.
To refer to your statement: Framing in Political Communication is bad for Democracy,
I think framing is not necessarily bad for democracy. It is nice that we have the freedom to be critical and share our perspectives with the world. It is a good thing that politicians can be criticised. What I do think however is that it can be bad when framing in the way you exemplified, by directly targeting others, is the only strategy a political party uses. If that would be the case, the debate wouldn’t have a rich content, with lots of arguments about the political issues that would have to be faced after the elections. It would create a democracy purely based on some sort of popularity game, in which the people choose the politician they like the most instead of the politician who promises to tackle the issues in a way they agree with.
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You actually got me in the end! I wish a bit that there was a way to put the “You’ve been framed” part after the comment section or something, as actually while I was reading I didn’t really think about ‘unsuccessful’ framings – even though I know that there are many examples, and the final part would’ve hit even harder. 😊 I really liked your article, I think you clearly made a point.
As for your final statement, I have to agree with you, but I’m not sure it could be possible to have politics (and therefore democracy) without framing. I don’t know much about the Netherlands’ politics, but I’m from Hungary and here the government is framing everything for their own good, really stopping at nothing, just so that they can get all the power for themselves – and sadly the are also quite successful. However, I also think that politics is a ground where it’s very hard to go without parties framing every information for their own gain. I think that what is important is that people have access to both sides opinions and that they learn to be critical towards everything, and they can make their own decisions. Perhaps you can look at framing in political communication as a ‘necessary evil’.
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Really enjoyed reading this! I am not a very political person, but this blog is very interesting and clear. I would not say framing is bad for democracy, but only if you keep it real. What I mean by that is, the Kerry vs Bush example. Kerri was the one who decided to go windsurfing himself, Bush took excellent use of that by making fun of Kerry windsurfing but connecting it to the things he said. I think the examples of Hillary and Roemer are a different story, because those are not per se based on anything. So in that case, you put a negative (or opposite than people had before) image in someones minde, without any substantiating information. I believe you always have to be critical when an opposite party says something about the other, because mostly it is to put themselves in a better position, but I do not per se think that that is bad, it also keeps people critical (at least that is what I hope). Good job!
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Great blog! The way you write makes you want to continue and makes you very much think about the topic. The ‘you have been framed’ is just perfect! As mentioned before, I caught myself that I only thought about how effective framing in the elections is and totally forgot that this most likely often is not that effective. About your statement. On the one hand I do think that framing is bad for the Demogracy because it influences how people think about a specific topic. If a politician is framed in a negative way and this is put on the agenda, it is more prominent in the mind of the people who have to vote and thus might influence the way they vote. People might even ‘forget’ about the aspects which made them prefer the politician in the first place. On the other hand, I do think that framing is a good thing, because it can make people think about certain aspect of which they have not thought before and which are very important to think of. It is however important that people are not only shown one perspective, however that they also receive the whole story based on which they can form their own opinion.
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Interesting topic! Remarkable, which also shows from your example, that just reformulating a question can lead to giving different answers. Because you are often not aware of these different ways of formulating, I think it is something that you can not easily take into account as a reader. I also think it is wrong when someone is stealing my opinion. On the other hand, I think, you can not blame people for writing text in such a way that it works out positively for them, and not for an opponent.
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