framing
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2010Here are some 'interesting' results from a poll conducted by Research 2000:
QUESTION: Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?
Yes 63Not Sure 16No 21
But that's not the crazy part. There's more:
QUESTION: Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?
Yes 24Not sure 33No 43
Moving right along....
QUESTION: Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?
Yes 21Not sure 55No 24
Yes, three-quarters of Republicans are open to the idea that a cash-strapped community group composed of a lot of poor and working class people created millions of illegal votes. But we're still not at the…
mikethemadbiologist | November 19, 2009At TPM, Josh Marshall asks an "obvious" 'framing' question about the ARRA:
Why was the Stimulus Bill called the 'stimulus bill' and not a 'jobs bill'?
To which Atrios responds with a "Pretty Obvious Answer":
Because for whatever reason, economist lingo is what people in the Obama administration are comfortable with.
I actually don't think that has much to do with it at all. I can't be certain, but someone in the Hopey Changey administration must have thought of calling the stimulus bill a "jobs bill" (if nobody did, then these guys are a lot dumber than most people think they are). They…
mikethemadbiologist | October 9, 2009I've said it before, but I'll say it again: everything you need to know about movement conservatives, you can learn by watching creationists (and admittedly, there's substantial overlap between the two groups). Think about creationists, and then consider this column by Neal Gabler:
In their postmortems, liberals have placed blame on the way they frame their message, or on the right-wing media drumbeat that drowns out everything else, or on the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents.
It's understandable…
mikethemadbiologist | October 5, 2009I realize that much of the political establishment, particular on the right, has adopted the Peter Pan philosophy of public policy: anything's possible, if you wish hard enough. Consequently, too many Americans think that our infrastructure is not only fine, but the best in the world. This, I think, has made it much harder to convince people to support the stimulus package--which should have been called a rebuilding package. But two news items underscore how the pie-in-the-sky way of thinking isn't sufficient for rebuilding a nation. On the internet front:
The report by the…
mikethemadbiologist | September 6, 2009(from driftglass)
You might have heard about the latest successful rightwing hissy-fit: environmentalist and White House advisor Van Jones is being attacked by conservatives for calling Republicans "assholes." But he's saying what many Democrats are thinking. I don't mean that any individual Republican is an asshole (or that there aren't Democrats who are assholes). I'll willing stipulate that they are no less kind to small animals and children. But as a party and as a political movement and organization, they are assholes. Consider:
Invading a country which had nothing to do with the…
mikethemadbiologist | September 2, 2009Stupidly, Democrats have never pushed back against the idea that a hard-line deficit reduction hawk is a 'moderate', which I think might be what leads an astute political observer like Steve Benen to describe Senator (D-ND) Kent Conrad as a "moderate." To me, a moderate is someone who attempts to synthesize and find the balance among several objectives that may contradict with each other: while I think limiting the stimulus package was stupid fiscal policy, arguably that's a 'moderate' policy, in that there is an attempt to balance out different concerns (of course, if moderation becomes…
mikethemadbiologist | September 1, 2009During one of the many framing-related flare ups (kinda like zits, aren't they?), I argued that biologists have done the following things well while confronting creationism:
Calling creationists fucking morons (because they are).
Arguing that a better understanding of how life evolved is good in and of itself, and can imbue us with a certain sense of wonder.
Refuting specific creationist claims.
But this is what I thought was missing:
What we rarely do is make an affirmative, positive argument for evolution (as opposed to against creationism). I proposed one particular argument: we can't do…
mikethemadbiologist | August 2, 2009Because fiscal responsibility is a conservative frame:
In its healthcare messaging, the White House has taken an issue more intimate and immediate than perhaps any other in a voter's life and transformed it into an abstract, technical argument about long-term actuarial projections. It's a peculiar kind of reverse political alchemy: transforming gold into lead....
Obama has inherited a shared political vocabulary in Washington (with phrases like "fiscal discipline," which he himself employs) that shapes the contours of the possible and semantically militates against progressive politics at…
mikethemadbiologist | July 26, 2009Katrina vanden Heuvel makes a good point about some bad framing in the healthcare debate--the 'centrists' aren't in the center at all:
Even a good regional paper like Louisville's Courier-Journal-- in rightly blasting the Blue Dogs as "deplorable" for being "unable to muster the spine to pay for health care reform with even so innocuous a measure as higher taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans"--calls them "centrist".
The danger is that promoting the view that these conservative Democrats are somehow at the center of our politics plays into the hands of those who would like to…
mikethemadbiologist | July 22, 2009In an earlier post (with the strikethrough eliminated--weird, it didn't show up when I looked at the preview; it's been fixed), I mentioned that it was hard to determine what Mooney and Kirshenbaum want scientists to actually communicate. One commenter pulled this from Unscientific America:
After all, America doesn't merely need non-scientists to better understand the details of science, or the nature of the scientific method: we need them to see why science matters in their lives and careers whether they're working in politics, the media, the corporate world, or some other sector.
That's it…
mikethemadbiologist | July 17, 2009Hopefully, this post won't degenerate into a flame war (ZOMG! TEH RELGIONISMZ!!!), but I've finished reading Unscientific America. Unfortunately, right off the bat (page three), the 'Pluto argument' bothered me (on the other hand, the book could only improve). From my perspective (and what do I know, I'm just a scientist), it seems that if astronomers think Pluto isn't a planet (and there seems to be some honest scientific debate about whether it is or not), then it's not a planet. It doesn't matter if it upsets other non-scientists: a planet means something to scientists and, apparently,…
nisbetmc | June 7, 2009[Contributed by guest blogger Katherine Broendel]
Before I begin writing about what my research has found regarding the framing of sexual violence in the media, I'd like to take a moment to define some of the parameters of my research. I focused my attention on sexual violence committed against women. I recognize that approximately 10% of sexual violence victims and survivors are male, and I do not discount their experiences. However, considering the vast majority of the violence is aimed at women and girls, I chose to focus my study on women. In addition, I'd like to note that I did not…
mikethemadbiologist | April 14, 2009While I'm away on vacation, here's a blast from the past:
Once again, the science framing wars have flared up. While I'm not allergic to the concept of framing as some are, one of the major reasons why I'm not a big fan of dwelling on the topic is that obsessing over language reminds me of the late 80s and 90s when the Left won the battle of words, and the fundamentalist Uruk-hai took over the damn country.
I've been doing some thinking about the 'progressive' concern with media communication (including my own)--and it is important, no doubt about it. But, as the 2006 elections have shown,…
bioephemera | April 14, 2009As I put it at a blogging panel last fall, "in science, it is normative to be not sure." It wasn't my most eloquent moment, but at least AAAS' president-elect Alice Huang agrees with me that one of the biggest challenges to public science literacy is understanding the contingent nature of scientific "truth".
But probably the most difficult concept to get across to nonscientists is that we look at data and then use probabilities to judge those data. The public wants an absolute black-and-white answer. We may look at something that is 80 percent likely as being good enough to base decisions on…
bioephemera | March 29, 2009Continuing the current discussion of the questionable quality of popular science journalism, British researcher Simon Baron-Cohen weighs in at the New Scientist with his personal experiences of misrepresented research. Baron-Cohen complains that earlier this year, several articles on his work linking prenatal testosterone levels to autistic traits, including coverage in the Guardian, were titled and subtitled misleadingly:
It has left me wondering: who are the headline writers? Articles and columns in newspapers are bylined so there is some accountability when they get things wrong. In this…
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2009One of the rhetorical strategies that has been employed against science deniers has been the claim that a 'broad scientific consensus exists' to support a certain position (e.g., global warming, evolution). A problem with this strategy is shown by the blog belonging to this commenter (I don't give links to wackaloons) which provides lists of scientists that don't think global warming is partly due to human influences.
This misses the entire meaning of scientific consensus: it's a process, not a list of names.
This is not how a scientific consensus is reached:
"Dude, the earth is kinda hot…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2009This weekend, I was going to blog about framing the tax cuts as the 'Pornography Stimulus Plan', since the last tax cut rebate benefited few sectors other than the pornography industry. It would be similar to the Republican term for the estate tax--'the death' tax.
And then Larry Flynt arrived and screwed everything up:
Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment…
mikethemadbiologist | December 7, 2008One of the things that I don't write about much on the blog, but that I do follow with great interest is urban planning and transportation (yes, I need new hobbies). Among the glitterati of blogtopia (and, yes, skippy invented that phrase), there's a lot of discussion of how to develop better transporation policy. I find these posts to be really annoying, with the exception of Atrios who writes about his attempts 'to turn your suburb into midtown Manhattan' (he, at least has a sense of humor about it).
I should be the last person to be annoyed by these posts. I live in a city, don't own a…
mikethemadbiologist | November 24, 2008ScienceBlogling Matt Nisbet argues that scientists* shouldn't call science denialists, well, denialists. I listened to the audio clip he linked to, and I'm unconvinced.
Leaving aside the issue that denialism (or calling someone a denialist) actually has a use--according to the clip, the term describes a certain set of behaviors, which the clip splits into three categories:
"Strategic denialism" or cynical denialism. The speaker knows something is correct, and lies anyway.
Fear-based denialism. The denialist is afraid to confront a known fact. For example, if you were vomiting blood, you…
mikethemadbiologist | September 11, 2008One of the tools that people interested in framing use is the focus group. I've always been wary of them because I think researchers and the participants can strongly bias your results. Joe Klein described a focus group involving Colorado independents. Klein describes the group:
There was some doubt among commenters that these independents were actually...independent, especially since a majority of them voted for Bush last time--but that's how Independents broke in Colorado in 2004. Four years ago, I attended a Hart focus group of undecideds in Kansas City and it soon became apparent that…