How political “framing” shapes our thoughts

We know why we feel the way we do about certain political issues, don't we? Don't we?? It turns out that politicians, political strategists, and the media are working every day to alter what we think about something before we know we're thinking about it. And the way this is done is through "framing." So what is framing? How long have people been doing it? And most importantly, how can we push back against it? Taking us through the Frame Wars is Dr. Jennifer Mercieca, professor of communication and author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump. For those who want to know more, check out our episode on Propaganda, as well as Jen's article on Frame Warfare. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  One of the things that I have been thinking about for the last little while is the bastardization of Hamlet, right? So, nothing is either good nor bad, but framing makes it so.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  It's crunch time in Congress, where Senate Republicans have released their latest version of the president's so-called Big Beautiful Bill.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Beautiful Bill could have on Medicaid and food assistance.

• 0:26Speaker 03

  23% are opposed, have an unfavorable rating of the Big Beautiful Bill. Now, to put that in some perspective, Donald Trump's unfavorable rating with the GOP is 9%. So, this is more than double.

• 0:38Speaker 04

  Big Beautiful Bill, if it becomes law, is going to fundamentally impact every American. If you're hearing my voice and you're watching this on TV, this is going to impact you.

• 0:48Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nikka Padija.

• 0:52Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 0:53Nick Capodice?

  And today, we are talking about something that has a profound impact on our understanding of politics, something that is invisible, effective, and everywhere all at once: framing.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Basically, any concept, any word, any choice or policy that we might make can be shaped for us to understand it. And the way that politicians and propagandists try to shape our reality and the way that we understand reality is called framing.

• 1:29Nick Capodice?

  This is Jennifer Murchia.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  I'm a professor of communication and journalism. I teach argumentation, political communication, and propaganda, and I'm the author of "Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump."

• 1:44Hannah McCarthy?

  I remember Jennifer. She was in our episode on propaganda. She talked about how propaganda is a kind of force.

• 1:50Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, like a card force. A magician says, "Pick a card, any card," but then forces you to take one card in particular. Jen is a scholar of rhetoric, and she studied it for years. And I want to point out real quick, these are her opinions based on that research, and they are not representative of her university.

• 2:08Hannah McCarthy?

  Right, totally understood. And Nick, you've been telling me that you wanted to do this episode for a long time, because you saw a tweet or something, right?

• 2:17Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, it was on Blue Sky, not Twitter, so it's technically not a tweet. I think some people call them skeets. I don't know. Basically, she wrote that people who were opposed to President Trump's tax bill should stop calling it the, quote, "big, beautiful bill." And then she wrote, "These are the frame wars. You're in them." You're in them.

• 2:39Hannah McCarthy?

  You better stop believing in frame wars, Mr. and I.

• 2:42Nick Capodice?

  Ms. McCarthy.

• 2:48Hannah McCarthy?

  Wait, the people who are opposed to that bill, they say it with air quotes and an eye roll. They say it ironically.

• 2:56Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, or they'll start with a qualifier, Trump's so-called big, beautiful bill. But while their intention is abundantly clear, they do not consider the bill big and beautiful. They are echoing the president's framing, and they're doing it unintentionally.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  It's what we call in persuasion theory as an indirect route to persuasion, meaning that it's not something that your brain immediately recognizes as an attempt to persuade you, right? If I call something a stinky bill, you might notice that that's weird, that, you know, stinky isn't normally a way that we would refer to a bill. But if I call it a big bill, or a big, beautiful bill, or something like that, your brain also might not recognize that.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  It's an indirect route to persuasion, meaning that your brain isn't on high alert for being persuaded. Instead, you're just receiving information in a sort of uncritical way. And as you do that, you'll start to think of the bill as stinky, or as big and beautiful, whether you realize that you're thinking in those terms or not.

• 4:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Uh, Nick? This bothers me.

• 4:21Nick Capodice?

  Bother me too, Hannah.

• 4:22Hannah McCarthy?

  I love irony. Irony made me, Nick. Actually, no, sarcasm. Sarcasm made me what I am today.

• 4:30Nick Capodice?

  It breaks my heart, Hannah. But Jen said, if you're a politician, you should never use irony.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Irony is poison to a democracy. It is cynicism. Saying two things at once means that we don't trust you. Instead of directly making a point, you say it in your ironic words, where you use their language, but use a tone that is meant to indicate that you don't agree, which means that, yes, you are repeating their language, which is bad for the framing and the stickiness and the repetition. But it also means that you are not taking ownership of what you actually think. You are using the distancing strategy of irony so that you can't be held accountable. Be earnest, my friend.

• 5:19Nick Capodice?

  So one idea we came up with was to imagine that you're hearing a robot say something without any intonation whatsoever, and then to say, who benefits from this phrase? Like someone who was not a fan of President Joe Biden's policy saying, "Another brilliant move by Dark Brandon", or likewise, a critic of President Donald Trump referring to him as a, quote, "very stable genius."

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Looks like Dark Brandon is totally knocking it out of the park today.

• 5:44Speaker 07

  Ha, ha, ha. I guess the very stable genius is playing four-dimensional chess.

• 5:51Hannah McCarthy?

  Did Jen tell you why, though? Why are we like this? Why are humans like this?

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Our brains are essentially lazy. We're what is called a cognitive miser. We don't like to think about things if we don't have to, because our brain, frankly, is doing other stuff. Our brain's main job is homeostasis. It's to check in on all the bits and pieces of our body and make sure that our temperature is right and our heart is beating in the right way. Things that we don't think about and probably we don't even want to know about. A smaller part of your brain is devoted to scanning for threats. And so your brain is Constantly looking for like, uh oh, is there a bear?

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Um, and do I need to like prime the body to react, uh flood it with stress hormones and you know, put it in the fight or flight response. Anyway, so your brain is busy doing all this stuff that you are not aware of. And then it's doing a little bit of stuff that you are aware of, right? So that's the conscious mind.

• 6:52Hannah McCarthy?

  A little bit of stuff?

• 6:54Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, yeah. The slow, plodding deliberative thought process. I am sitting on a rock by the sea and I am thinking these things. Now, we may feel that is the lion's share of our brain's work, but it is such a teensy little fraction.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  And so framing works precognitively on our lazy brain, um, the one that's working really fast, but uh, doesn't want to do a lot of hard work thinking about stuff. So the more I repeat stinky bill, stinky bill, stinky bill, the more journalists repeat that frame, the more uh, propagandists or supporters or detractors or whoever uh, circulate that frame, the more your brain will uncritically accept the frame and you will begin to think within the frame. Stinky bill.

• 7:46Nick Capodice?

  The scariest part of this, to me at least, is something expressed by George Lakoff. Lakoff is the preeminent thinker on framing and linguistics and politics. He says that the frame is hard, if not impossible, to beat. So I'm linking to Jen's article on Lakoff and all of this stuff in the show notes, but the money line from it is this, quote, "You can't fight a dominant frame with evidence. Your brain's frames don't care about other frames, facts, or their feelings. It rejects anything that doesn't conform with its existing frame's structures."

• 8:20Hannah McCarthy?

  I think this is something that may just be difficult for a lot of people to accept. We don't want to believe that there's some kind of Influence making us think in a certain way and reject other thoughts. This is huge, Nick.

• 8:34Nick Capodice?

  It is.

• 8:35Hannah McCarthy?

  Do you have some examples of this?

• 8:37Nick Capodice?

  Oh, Hannah, I could spend days looking at framing examples. I'm going to keep it to just a few for this episode. But let's start with something that is one of the most hotly debated issues in the country. How do we frame what is happening at the southern border of the United States?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  One side of the controversy would try to frame it as a humanitarian crisis. Begin with new numbers from Customs and Border Protection on the humanitarian crisis here in Arizona. A pregnant woman seen with her children tells us she's been living on the banks of the Rio Grande for several days without food or water. And if you hear those words, there is a humanitarian crisis on the border or at the border. Then it conjures up very specific images in your mind. There are humans involved that are in need and we ought to bring care. And so that means a policy position that would include things like bringing tents and water

• 9:38Speaker 00

  and diapers and baby formula and providing care and assistance to people who are in need. Okay, so that's one frame. A different side of the issue would say that there is an invasion at the border.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  This massive invasion from our southern border was intentional and it was done in a systematic way. And I think it was done by elements of the left that truly hate this country. And I'm going to call it an invasion, like it or not.

• 10:07Nick Capodice?

  If you use the term, it says an invasion, that's not anti Hispanic, it's a fact.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  And if there is an invasion at the border, that conjures up entirely different frames and policies and feelings. And so if you hear repeatedly that it is an invasion, then you think we ought to bring violence to the border, right? We ought to stop the invasion. We ought to bring weapons and barbed wire and build a wall, right? Like an army should be deployed to stop an invasion.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  And so those frames are incompatible.

• 10:50Hannah McCarthy?

  What happens, Nick, when you have incompatible frames?

• 10:53Nick Capodice?

  You just won't be able to easily understand any policy passed by the other side. So if you've heard invasion over and over and over again, the very notion of sending water and diapers to the southern border would be puzzling.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Likewise, if you are someone who has always heard humanitarian crisis, humans in need, and they say, we have to bring the army and the barbed wire, you think that they are inhumane, right? That they're vicious and it's nonsense.

• 11:25Hannah McCarthy?

  This brings to mind for me a term we hear a lot. It's one that really came to the fore after the 2024 election, messaging, specifically that the Democratic Party has a, quote, messaging problem. Now, I have not in my own life, just anecdotally, heard, I think, anyone say that the Republican Party has a messaging problem.

• 11:49Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. And to that point, Hannah, if you look up Democratic Party messaging problem, you're going to see a ton of articles on that topic. The linguist I mentioned earlier, George Lakoff, he studied the writings of a GOP pollster and messaging mastermind named Frank Luntz. Luntz writes a memo to Republicans each year called "The New American Lexicon", with words you should never say and what words to say instead.

• 12:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Wow. Okay. So give me some examples.

• 12:20Nick Capodice?

  All right, we can make a game out of this, Hannah. I'm going to say the term a Republican is told never to say, and you try to guess the replacement.

• 12:28Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, I'm in.

• 12:28Nick Capodice?

  All right. First one, estate tax.

• 12:32Hannah McCarthy?

  This one's easy for me, death tax.

• 12:35Nick Capodice?

  Very good. An estate tax sounds like something a rich person deals with. Death tax sounds more like something terribly unfair that your family has to pay just because you died. All right. Next one, government.

• 12:51Hannah McCarthy?

  I don't know, them, the others, I don't know.

• 12:56Nick Capodice?

  The others from the back of the plane. Like when you're being critical, you don't say, "The government needs to get its act together." Because the government fixes our streets and it funds our troops. Instead, you say...

• 13:10Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, Washington.

• 13:11Nick Capodice?

  Washington, the fat cats in Washington can smoke their Cuban cigars. And outside Washington, this is a contract with Americans for America.

• 13:24Nick Capodice?

  Luntz also suggested replacing undocumented worker with illegal alien, replacing oil drilling with exploring for energy. And he also coined the term "tax relief." Can you hear the implicit framing in that term?

• 13:38Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, yeah. If you're constantly talking about tax relief, you're implying that taxes are a burden, that they are something that puts undue pressure on a person.

• 13:50Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and how on earth do you run against that? "My opponent is offering tax relief, but I desperately want you to know these taxes pay for things you need."

• 14:03Nick Capodice?

  And then, members of the Democratic Party started using the term "tax relief" as well, the public also, and this frame stuck. All right, Hannah, I got one more framing example, as well as Jen's recommendations for how we can all push back against the frames assigned to us. But first, we gotta take a quick break.

• 14:20Hannah McCarthy?

  But before that break, a reminder that if you want to pick us up and carry us around in a non-audio format, check out the book that Nick and I wrote. It is called "A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works."

• 14:36Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing, there are companies called "data brokers" whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers... Sometimes to people running scams. And once your data is out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over. So your info doesn't just pop right back up.

• 15:18Nick Capodice?

  You set it up once and they keep working in the background. You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 15:43Nick Capodice?

  We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. And today we are talking about framing. How politicians and consultants use language to make you think certain things without knowing you're thinking it. And our guest, Jen Richie, gave a classic example I want to share with you, Hannah. Now, we talked a little bit about this in our propaganda episode, but not this part specifically. The earliest and most successful framing war in our country's history.

• 16:10Hannah McCarthy?

  I have a guess about this one.

• 16:12Nick Capodice?

  You do?

• 16:12Hannah McCarthy?

  Might it have to do something about trying to convince a newly formed nation that the answer to all of their problems is in a four-page document that a bunch of guys haggled over one hot summer in Philadelphia?

• 16:29Speaker 00

  People like me who study, you know, democracy and communication, I will look at the Federalist Papers and the whole Federalist Agenda in 1787 and say, that was really good public relations work they did, right? They named and branded themselves as the Federalist Party when they were actually arguing for the opposite. They were arguing for what was known at the time as a consolidated government, a national government. Federalist meant that the confederated states would remain unique and separate.

• 17:05Hannah McCarthy?

  Nick, I did an entire episode on federalism. We talk about the Federalist Papers all the time. I love thinking about federalism and I never made this connection. I am sorry, listeners, I should have. The people who called themselves federalists.

• 17:19Hannah McCarthy?

  We're not, in the true sense of the word, federalists. An actual federalist would want individual states to be powerful and semi-independent and have a weaker central government. But a capital F-federalist, as in the Federalist Party, they argued for the opposite of that.

• 17:41Nick Capodice?

  And it's like a double trick. Like, not only did they frame themselves as the opposite of what they actually were, that then forced the other guys to call themselves anti-federalists, as in anti-what they actually believed, wheels within wheels.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  So the dudes who went to the Constitutional Convention, they tended to support a consolidated national government. But they didn't use those words. No, they did not.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  They sure didn't. And so the anti-federalists were like, hey, what is... They have taken our words from us. It's so confusing.

• 18:25Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, Nick. So framing, or the frame wars, this has been around for quite some time.

• 18:32Nick Capodice?

  Thousands and thousands of years, Hannah, and we are getting better at it every day.

• 18:37Hannah McCarthy?

  So is there anything that we can do about it? Even just we, the individual, you know what I mean? If it is as pernicious and prevalent as you say, might there be a way to fight it? I mean, can we resist the iron hand of the frame?

• 18:53Nick Capodice?

  We have, as of this moment, along with every single person listening to these words, begun. The first step is simply to recognize that frames exist and then to push back against them.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  So you have to contest the premise of the frame. And it's an old strategy, right? So we teach our students to analyze the points of stasis, which I think is traced back to Quintilian, but like, we don't actually know for sure.

• 19:24Hannah McCarthy?

  I don't think I've heard of Quintilian.

• 19:26Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, I thought it was the number initially. He was a famed rhetorician in ancient Rome, taught plenty the younger.

• 19:33Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, well, I know plenty the younger. Okay, so points of stasis?

• 19:37Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, these are the lines of argument in any controversy. Four steps, four points, one after the other, that you must go through to come to an agreement of what's going on. That's the stasis part. Stasis means stopping.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  And so the first point of stasis is, what is it? Right? So describe what happened. What are the facts? The second point of stasis is, what do we call it? And that's the frame. That's the frame war. The third point of stasis is, is it good or bad? And the fourth is, what do we do about it? And if you think about any persuasive speech, if you think about, you know, a legal brief in a court of law, they go through the points of stasis very carefully and very clearly. They lead you through that kind of analysis and assessment.

• 20:28Nick Capodice?

  Now, the points of stasis, Hannah, are a little clearer if we're talking about a dead body on the floor and a man standing over it with a bloody dagger. One, did he do it? This is like the facts of the case. So let's say we agree on that. Yeah, he did it. So then we can go to number two. What are we gonna call it? Murder? Manslaughter? An act of self-defense? A crime of passion? And once we do that, we can go to three. Is this a good or a bad thing? And finally, four, how is he to be punished?

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Clear thinking, right, is very persuasive thinking. Most of the time in public discourse, we're not going through the points of stasis in order. We're not describing the facts and what do we call it? And is it good or bad? And, you know, right, we move right on to policy. And so we assume that point of stasis that is crucial, which is the second one. What do we call it? Do we call it a coup?

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Do we call it an insurrection? Do we call it a peaceful protest? And so we adopt these words that then trigger entire constellations of emotions and policy. And so breezing through the second point of stasis without considering it carefully, we go all the way to the third and fourth point. But we're not really well-prepared to debate those issues. Because until you decide what we should call it, you can't really decide if it's good or bad. Right? You're going to decide something very different if it's a peaceful protest versus it's an insurrection. And so what we do is we rely on heuristics.

• 22:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, because our minds are kind of lazy.

• 22:22Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, it's not their fault. They need a break. They're busy and overtaxed and telling you to drink a dang glass of water every now and then. So they use any shortcut they can.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  There are important differences for scholars of, you know, political violence between a coup and an insurrection and a peaceful protest. And so, so instead of doing that work, right? Because we're not scholars of political violence, we just do the lazy job and the lazy work of adopting whatever frame gets repeated the most, gets repeated by people we respect, gets repeated by our party. Right? And so what we hear becomes our reality. Because we don't think about it.

• 23:09Nick Capodice?

  So I got one last arrow in the quiver to fight the frame wars, Hannah.

• 23:13Hannah McCarthy?

  You realize that you're doing it right now.

• 23:15Nick Capodice?

  What?

• 23:16Hannah McCarthy?

  You are framing. Framing.

• 23:19Nick Capodice?

  Framing? I'm framing me? This is ridiculous.

• 23:24Hannah McCarthy?

  I mean, you're calling it a war. Nick, you're using a weapon metaphor.

• 23:29Nick Capodice?

  Okay, so I am. This is like some postmodern meta-framing of the frame. I'm okay with it. But seriously, something Jen does with her students each day just to recognize the frames is to first put up the homepage of the Associated Press Morning Wire.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Because the AP Morning Wire, as I tell them, is a neutral source of information that provides the backbone for all other news that gets distributed throughout the United States. It's not outrage bait. So we look at that every day and then we compare what we see in the AP Morning Wire to CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and the New York Times and the Washington Post and Yahoo. And when you do that, you'll see very clearly that the stories are given different priority, that the headlines use emotive language, very emotionally triggering language in some

• 24:26Speaker 00

  of those news sources, whereas they do not in others, that the imagery is very different. In some cases, you will see Donald Trump always looks like a hero. He always looks young and tough and strong and energetic. And in others, he's always making a funny face and he looks goofy and he looks old and he looks weak, right? You would have seen the same thing with Joe Biden, but in reverse, of course, different news sources. And so you can see based on the imagery, who is a hero in that news organization's narrative of the world, right? And that's really important because once you know who is a hero, then of course you can tell who the villains are too. And news organizations

• 25:10Speaker 00

  shouldn't be narrating a world of heroes and villains, right? They should let the audience decide who the heroes are and who the villains are. I find that if you do that exercise for a few weeks, then you can figure out which news organization you think is best representing reality to you.

• 25:31Hannah McCarthy?

  Nick, do you think we could do a points of stasis on framing?

• 25:35Nick Capodice?

  Oh, that would be fantastic.

• 25:38Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay. One, what is going on? Politicians and the media are using carefully designed language to make us feel one way or another about issues.

• 25:50Hannah McCarthy?

  And they try to do that without our even noticing it.

• 25:54Nick Capodice?

  That is good. And to be honest, Hannah, if I'd heard just that, I would be tempted to leap to the, "Well, what can I do about this? Won't somebody think of the children?" step. But we're gonna do this step by step. Continue.

• 26:07Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, step two, what do we call it? We've already called it the frame wars today repeatedly, meaning that it's something that involves conflict or fighting.

• 26:16Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and that might even be the title of this episode. You never know until it's up there.

• 26:21Hannah McCarthy?

  But we could have called it the framing trap, which makes you think of maybe defense, of being careful of protecting yourself from something, or the frame mystery, something we have to solve by looking for clues and putting the pieces together.

• 26:37Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, like a BBC mystery with an inspector with a name like Thello or Trowbridge. Trowbridge investigates the deadly frame. But I think we can stick with frame wars.

• 26:47Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, got that. Okay, step three, Nick, is it good or bad? Well, we're calling it a war. Now, some people would say that's a bad thing.

• 26:59Nick Capodice?

  And now, Hannah, now that we've done all three of those, we can ask the final question. What are we gonna do about it?

• 27:21Nick Capodice?

  Well, that is it for framing today. If you want to know more and you're up for falling down the rabbit holes that I fell down, you know, maybe ordered a bunch of books late at night, check out Jen's, as well as anything by George Lakoff and Frank Luntz. This episode was made by me, Nicapadice, with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Marina Henke, our producer. Rebecca LaVoy, our executive producer. Music in this episode by the brilliant and generous folks at Epidemic Sound, Miro Bell, Maiden, Tone Ranger, Blue Dot Sessions, Bombay Jim and his swinging sapphires, and the Captain Jack Sparrow of podcast music, Chris Zabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. All right?

• 28:11Speaker 07

  Did you know that if your spouse goes missing and you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand new season of Bear Brook, the critically acclaimed true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In this season, Bear Brook investigates another New Hampshire mystery. A Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? Don't miss it. Follow Bear Brook wherever you get your podcasts.