Speaking of language and framing

Framing, of course, refers to the idea that how an argument is presented affects how it's perceived by others. (A version of which I described over 35 years ago by saying that the first rule of effective communication is that what you say is not as important as what the other person hears.) Some framing, both positive ("we good") and negative ("they bad"), is done deliberately. Other framing is done unconsciously, the result of assumptions that may or may not square with logic or reality but which persist because they are unexamined. That sort of framing can be even harder to overcome, being built right into our social and political discourse. And it can lead to some really weird results.

Consider this article from DailyFinance.com:

Almost half the country opposes tax increases for the richest Americans, according to a poll suggesting that congressional Democrats are taking some risk by backing President Barack Obama's plan to boost levies on the wealthy. ...

The Associated Press-GfK Poll is stuffed with encouraging signs for the GOP. ...

By a 46 percent to 41 percent margin, people want Republicans steering the economy....

[W]hile Americans are evenly split over whether they prefer their district's Democratic or GOP congressional candidate, those likeliest to vote tilt toward the Republicans, 53 percent to 43 percent. ...

The survey showed that by 54 percent to 44 percent, most people support raising taxes on the highest earners....

Even so, the poll underscored the political pickle Democrats face in the tax fight. ...

Overall, 40 percent said the country is heading in the right direction, slightly better than last month but below the 48 percent who said so in the early months of Obama's presidency. ...

More than one in four expressed support for the conservative tea party movement....

Okay. So it's an "encouraging sign for the GOP" that by 46-41, those polled prefer GOPpers to "steer the economy" - even though that gap is well within the margin of error. And it's another good sign that the most likely voters prefer GOPpers by a 10-point margin - even though that tells you little unless you know how that support is distributed. (For example, if this so-called "enthusiasm gap" is very wide in a few places but narrow in most places, the effect on overall national totals is seriously diluted.) And it's apparently also good news for them that the percentage saying we're heading in the right direction is down from a peak - even though the pollsters own chart shows that over the last two years, that number has been trending up. And finally, it's also good news, apparently, that somewhere around 25% support the TPers - even though in another context that number would be dismissed as a "small minority."

But on the other hand, now, the same poll says that by a 10-point margin, people support raising taxes on the wealthiest. Is that "good news" for Obama or Congressional Democrats? Of course not. The headline is that "almost half the country opposes" such an increase, that's it's a "risk" to support the plan and the poll "underscored the political pickle Democrats face in the tax fight" by virture of, um, having the support of the majority.

That's how the game is played. That's how unconscious framing - or as it's often called in the case of the media, "the script" - traps you in your own assumptions in a way that can produce inanity. The script this year is "Republicans are rolling, Democrats are doomed" and everything, just everything, has to be fit into that pattern even when it requires overstatment and contradiction to do it.

I want to emphasize that this is not about GOPpers vs. Dims, it's about the failure of our national media to see beyond the limits of their own assumptions and the distorted coverage of events, trends, and issues that generates. It is surely not meant to endorse Dimcrats, especially when they are so totally gutless that the party leaders in Congress won't even commit to having a vote on the matter before the elections. (As a sidebar, the same fate - a "keep your head down" cowardly refusal to act before the election - may well befall a new nuclear arms control treaty negotiated in April by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev even though it just passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a vote of 14-4, including three Republicans in the majority.)

And by the way, another finding in the poll was that

[t]wenty-six percent of Democrats said they are excited about politics, compared with 80 percent of Democrats who said so in a November 2008 AP-GfK Poll just after Obama's election.

Gee, I can't imagine why that would be.