"Media framing" is a vague term which refers to the various methods corporate-owned news organs use to set the parameters of our political debate and define reality. Considering how thoroughly mass media saturate most Americans' daily lives, no topic is more critical to the functioning of current American politics and American democracy. The problem is that most Americans don't understand the term. Media framing reamains an ambiguous abstraction to the people most affected by it.
However, a perfect illustration of what media framing is and how it works is offered by the pulling down during the early days of the Iraq War of the huge statue of Saddam Hussein that used to stand in Baghdad's central square. American and British viewers watched with rapt attention as an ecstatic crowd of celebrating Iraqis mobbed the square and helped American troops pull the statue off its pedestal, then showered it with abuse before demolishing it with hammers. That's what we saw on CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, and all the major networks, with newspaper photos and stories echoing the TV event the next day.
The problem is, it didn't happen. Aerial photos of the event show a mostly empty square with a few dozen Iraqis clustered near the statue, which is being pulled off its pedestal by an American tank. Most of those present were American soldiers, and some of the Iraqis were later identified as paid shils in the employ of Ahmed Chalabi, an American-backed Iraqi politician and financier. The event was a military public relations exercise, and the corporate media allowed itself to be used as the primary vehicle of deception.
In this case, "media framing" refers to a literal picture frame -- by drawing the frame as closely as possible to the back of the "crowd," the corporate media conveyed the false impression that the huge square was thronged with Iraqis euphorically greeting their liberators. The truth could only be communicated by drawing the frame from farther away, something the embedded cameramen traveling with their U.S. Army tenders prudently avoided doing.
It's no exaggeration to say that if we don't understand media framing, we can't understand how or why the American political system is tilted toward the right. One of the most prolific and critical students of the American mass media, Norman Solomon, said in his 1994 book, False Hope, "Today's dominant news media are good at repeatedly covering the same ground, carefully avoiding much exploration beyond the sanctioned boundaries. A narrow band of terrain is trod as if it were the universe of ideas. We may get used to equating what is familiar with what is objective; what is usual with what is balanced; what is repeatedly asserted with what is true. All the while, enthroned pundits fill the airwaves with nonstop droning that offers little diversity. As with broadcasts, so with print: Newsstands display dozens of papers and magazines, endlessly repetitious and confined."
And exactly where is this "narrow band of terrain" Solomon refers to located? Who sets the "sanctioned boundaries" he claims monitor and limit our political discourse? If we answer that NBC is owned by General Electric, ABC by Disney, and CBS by the Westinghouse Corporation, does that help define the boundaries of the frame which circumscribes our political life?
One need look no further than the critical presidential election of 2000 to understand the disastrous effect right-wing media framing has had on American life and politics. During that campaign, the supposedly "objective" media continually portrayed Albert Gore as a bumbling and dishonest clown, while his opponent Bush was generally characterized as a regular guy and a "different kind of Republican."
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review during the fall 2000 campaign season, Jane Hall noted that "Gore's motives are frequently questioned, frequently framed in the most negative light -- even in the lead of straight-news stories from some of the most respected and influential news organizations. When Gore made an economic proposal for tax relief, The Washington Post said in the lead that Gore 'muscled in on the debate' as the Republican-controlled Senate approved its multibillion-dollar tax plan...In contrast, Bush's proposals are not only treated straight, as they should be, in straight-news stories: he's often been given the benefit of the doubt on subjects where he could be vulnerable."
Hall cited a Pew Research Center survey of that year's press coverage which concluded that "The press has been far more likely to convey that Bush is a different kind of Republican -- 'a compassionate conservative,' a reformer, bipartisan -- than to discuss Al Gore's themes of experience, knowledge, or readiness for the office."
The best post-mortem of the media lynching of Gore's campaign, by Eric Boehlert, ran in the December 6, 2001 Rolling Stone. Boehlert cites dozens of examples how of Republican talking points about Gore metamorphosed into essential elements of the mass media framing of the campaign. To cite one example:
"In 1999, candidate Gore was taping an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer in which he said, 'During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.' He was no doubt referring to his landmark 'information superhighway' speeches, as well as his well-known support of high-tech research that stretched back into the 1980s. (For the record, Vinton Cerf, often called 'the father of the Internet,' not to mention futurist Newt Gingrich, have both publicly vouched for Gore's role in helping to shepherd the Internet to life.)
"So who coined the phrase 'invented the Internet' and attached it to Gore? His Republican opponents, who faxed out a press release suggesting Gore had claimed to have done exactly that.
"It's no surprise that GOP operatives would willfully misinterpret a statement from a Democratic presidential candidate. What's amazing is that the press went along with it so uncritically. Was it accurate? The press didn't care, as virtually every major media outlet in the country followed the Republican lead and reported over and over again Gore's claim to have invented the Internet."
Despite the media framing his campaign in a manner which was nothing short of sabotage, Gore managed to eke out a razor-thin victory in the general election, but it was nullified by an unprecedented Supreme Court action which drew surprisingly little media coverage.
As we enter the 2008 campaign season, we need to bring this issue to the top of our agenda, not just because we may favor one candidate over another, but because the very nature of our lives is diminished by corporate control of public perception. Norman Solomon quotes Alduous Huxley's introduction to "Brave New World," which contains a description of the terrible vulnerability of American public life today: ""A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."
Do we love our mass media? They do have the virtue of turning the world into a show which exists only to entertain us. The first Gulf War, after all, was the first to have its own television theme music. But the price is too high, and the time has come to recall the Who's lyric, "Just like yesterday, I'll get on my knees and pray we don't get fooled again."
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