Escaping Frames

Here's an extended soundbite from what is shaping up to be the most crucial battleground leading up to the 2008 election, and everything beyond.

Wolf Blitzer often pretends to be a neutral broadcaster while framing his questions and his news using conservative frames. During the second Democratic debate on June 3, he was caught, and Barack Obama caught him. Wolf's "question" was:

BLITZER: I want you to raise your hand if you believe English should be the official language of the United States.

Obama refused to take the bait:

OBAMA: This is the kind of question that is designed precisely to divide us. You know, you're right. Everybody is going to learn to speak English if they live in this country. The issue is not whether or not future generations of immigrants are going to learn English. The question is: How can we come up with both a legal, sensible immigration policy? And when we get distracted by those kinds of questions, I think we do a disservice to the American people.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that the June 3 debate was the crucial conflict. The bite comes from a June 12 essay by Christina Smith of the Rockridge Institute, the progressive think tank built around the work of UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff ("To Catch a Wolf: How to Stop Conservative Frames in Their Tracks"). Lakoff and his associates at Rockridge have been arguing for years that political discourse has been rendered meaningless by subservient media figures whose questions in interviews and debates reinforce conservative framing of issues. They essentially trap the interviewees into implicitly endorsing that conservative framing merely by answering the questions as posed. It's the old "how long have you been beating your wife" game.

Smith's essay begins by congratulating Obama for seeing the framing under the veneer of the question and pushing back. When other legislators -- all of them, not just the ones running for President -- learn to see the underlying framing in public discussion, especially media coverage of upcoming bills, and then challenge that framing, then we may start to see some lights go on in the Capitol and on the Op-Ed pages. That's the conflict I'm talking about.

There's nothing really newsy in this. I'm just convinced Rockridge is onto something fundamental. At least one credible Presidential contender is getting the hang of it.
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