"Dog-whistle" frames

Following up on my previous post: Newsday's John Riley presents a good example of how a frame can be implicitly invoked without being stated directly, but rather by how the communicator includes certain things and excludes others.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been running an ad attacking his Democratic opponent Barack Obama as the "biggest celebrity in the world" and associating him with former scandal tarts Britney Spears and Paris Hilton (both of whom, I've read, are in fact Republicans). McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, explained: "What we decided to do was find the top three international celebrities in the world. And from our estimations, Britney and Paris came in second and third. From our perspective, we have in this ad the three biggest celebrities in the world."

Riley has his doubts:

The problem: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday's news. Here's a link to Forbes' Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don't even make the list any more.

Instead, the top 10, in order: Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce Knowles, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, The Police, JK Rowling, Brad Pitt.

So, they didn't pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married.

What they picked was two sexually available white women.

Commenters at Kevin Drum's blog point out that they also didn't pick liberal playboy celeb George Clooney or attractive blonde celeb (and Obama supporter) Scarlett Johanssen, both of whom are more widely recognizable.

The coded message: Obama is a black man who wants to have lots of sex with white women. Among certain groups of white folks in this country, that's a threatening image.

Note that it wasn't stated outright. An association was implied, and the further associations in the target audience were assumed. A lot of folks without the scary-sexual-black-man "schema" already in their heads missed the message completely. Some politicos call this sort of message "dog-whistle politics", because only certain people can hear it, just as we can't hear an actual dog whistle but a dog can.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Terry Nelson is part of Sen. McCain's campaign team. He produced a notorious ad in a Senate campaign in Tennessee two years ago against charismatic black Democrat Harold Ford that showed an attractive blonde woman saying she met Ford at a "Playboy party" and telling him to "Call me!" It came to be known as the "bimbo" ad. The black-guy-after-your-women message, or "subtext", was remarked upon in the political press at the time, but most of the voters it was aimed at don't read the political press. (Us pointy-head types like to think that the American populace looks to us for guidance and hangs on our every word. 'tain't so.)

Digby has more on dog-whistle politics.

So what's the relevance for journalists? A couple of things. First, journalists have to be alert for dog-whistle messages. The religious language I discussed in the post below might be an example if it were inserted deliberately (which, again, I am sure was not the case). Journalists have to understand this sort of thing in order to report on it -- and they should be reporting on it.

Second, at the very least, journalists should take care not to simply pass along the message that the source or newsmaker wants to put out -- in other words, take care not to adopt the politician's own frame. Occasionally a politician will make a straightforward declaration of facts, and there's no need to re-frame it, but more often a candidate (especially for president) is trying to frame and spin and whistle and do all sorts of things. A constant criticism of the political press is that it adopts its sources' frames rather than taking a more critical approach. It's hard work to do it the other way (Scott Adams: "Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same"), and reporters these days are more pressed for time than ever. But it has to be done.

A bit of an update

I haven't been posting much because school has gotten real tough. So if you don't see updates, that's what that means.

My big looming deadline at the moment is a research paper that I will submit to an academic conference by April 1. But first the paper is due in class tomorrow, Monday. So I'm charging hard to get it turned in on time and reasonably complete.

It's about framing -- the way news media select and arrange facts and images to create a coherent story. That may sound sinister, but it's generally not; reporters can't tell you every fact they find out because it would be too much and would be a senseless jumble. So they and their editors figure out "what's going on here" and produce a story explaining it. If they've done their jobs well, then you, the reader, will be better able to make sense of things.

Where it gets interesting, from a researcher's standpoint (or a media critic's), is when you consider how the reporters and editors decide what to put in, what to leave out, and how to frame the story. A lot of factors enter into these decisions: the reporter's personal experience, the routines of news gathering, the news organization's corporate culture and priorities, outside influences such as PR reps and spinmeisters, and the wider culture itself. Some of these influences are so familiar that we take them for granted and don't question them.

I'm interested in questioning these influences. I did it some when I worked at a newspaper, and now I hope to do research that sheds more light on the frame-building process, in a way that reporters and editors can use. My main interest is cultural influences.

But that's a big project, and my research paper at hand is a bit smaller: A review of other researchers' framing studies. There are few broad themes in framing research, and I'm looking for some, in hopes of helping focus future scholarship.

That's if I manage to finish this paper in the first place. So back to work I go.