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Spinning the Frame, Framing the Spin

November 08, 2005

On my copyediting e-list a few days ago, someone asked about the verb "frame," is in "John framed the task this way." I replied:

It's become indispensable to politico-speak, right, left, and center -- the good guys (self-defined) "frame" their arguments; the bad guys (but never, never our guys) "spin" theirs.

Unfortunately, there's not much a copyeditor can do about it. The problem isn't in the word; it's in the thoughts and probably the whole worldview behind it.

Two editorial colleagues, both of them intelligent and conscientious people, suggested that there is indeed a qualitative difference between framing and spinning, so I've been mulling it over.

I started paying serious attention to "frame" in the aftermath of the last U.S. presidential election. Neither the term nor the usage was new to me, but since I don't follow the national news or the commentary thereon, "framing" remained on the peripheries of my consciousness. The post-election gloom-and-dooming on the so-called left brought me up short: All this because John Kerry lost?? When did my fellow travelers start sounding so millenarial? So I started paying more attention to How Leftists, Progressives, and Liberals (LPLs) Think.

Much of what I heard boiled down to "we need to do a better job of framing the issues" and "if we frame the polling percentages this way, we didn't do so badly." Liberally [sic] interspersed with this were gross generalizations about people in "red states," Bush voters, Republicans, Christians, the religious right -- generalizations that would have qualified as "stereotypes" had they been made about, say, women, gay people, African Americans, or illegal immigrants. From this I drew two tentative hypotheses: (1) our side frames; their side spins; and (2) when you're in the middle of the picture, it's hard to see the frame.

Both framing and spinning are about manipulating the audience to see things the way you want them to. Both treat the audience as a pretty much passive consumer: they/we can buy it or reject it, but we don't get to help tell the story.

Oddly enough, it just occurred to me that "spin" and "story" go together. "Spinning" and "spin doctor" make me think of billiard balls: the right spin will cause the ball to hit another ball at exactly the right angle to send it into the pocket. It's a more mechanistic image than "spinning a tale." Tale-spinning isn't exactly an innocuous activity: among other things it's a synonym for "lying," though it concedes more creativity to the teller than "liar." Even at its most benign (which, the more I think of it, isn't very benign at all), the tale-spinner is trying to persuade, entrance, capture, change, manipulate her audience. "Beware the tale-spinner" is actually sensible advice; the implicit "or else" goes something like "or else you'll run off with the raggle-taggle gypsies, O."

Which some of us do, and without regret, but that's another story, O.

On the surface of it, "framing" seems more solid than "spinning." Think about framing a house; if you don't frame it first, what do you nail the walls to? If you don't frame a discussion, or a debate, it'll wind up unfocused and all over the landscape (like your papers if your house doesn't have walls, and what would you hang your [framed] pictures on?). But the way the politicos and other public relations people use it, it's not so innocuous. Conversation, discussion, and even debate are collaborative: each participant has input, and the ongoing outcome embodies a little of you, a little of me, a little of her, him, and it. "Framing," as the politicos and the PR people use it, isn't collaborative. They do the work for us -- or we do the work for "them." We tell them where to look and pretty much what to see. (Think of how cropping changes the way you see a photograph, and how the way it's cropped begins to seem inevitable -- until you see the raucous every-which-way scene that inspired the picture.)

I can see that I'm a half step away from one of my favorite rants, which is about how lasting change has to come from the bottom up. I'm still waiting for the current wave of LPLs to re-invent consciousness-raising (CR). Howard Dean had a glimmer early in the 2004 election campaign; if he'd been the Democratic nominee, I would have registered to vote.

Ain't nobody else can do it for you, or us. That's what both the framers and the spinners forget, or maybe they never knew it; they're so sure that they know what's best, and that all we need to know is what they know.

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