[Neurons] 2012 Meta Reflections #4

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2012  #4

January 23, 2012

 

 

THE ART OF FRAMING

 

            

Whether you like him or not, Newt Gingrich has an amazing and skillful
ability to frame.  And if you are outside the USA and don't know who Newt
is, he was the former Speaker of the House during the Clinton Presidency and
is now one of the candidates for President on the Republican side.  Now his
skill in framing and reframing has appeared recently during the Republican
Presidential debates.  In those debates, Newt has showed himself incredibly
skilled in detecting frames, identifying frames, challenging frames,
deframing, reframing, and outframing.  

 

I first began noticing this in the early debates when the "media" people who
were asking the questions would ask a rhetorical, manipulative and
semantically loaded question which Newt called a "gotcha" question.  Then
Newt called their hands on it.  "That's a gotcha question, can we raise the
level of this conversation?"  He did that several times last year.  At first
it seemed to have embarrassed the person who asked the unfair question that
was semantically loaded and after doing that two or three times, the media
news people stopped doing it!  I found that amazing!  Single-handedly he
called them on the assumptions inside of the questions and because he didn't
take the bait and get caught up in the content, he brought to people's
attention the framework that the questions were coming from thereby exposing
the uneven hand in the media people.

 

That's leadership by framing.  That is both detecting the frames and by
identifying it and making it conscious, reframed it.  And whoever sets the
frame controls the game, so Newt's ability to frame demonstrated leadership.

 

In the days after Newt started to do that, there was lots of political
analysis about the questions and his answers.  And as a result, the
questions became "cleaner" - more honest, more straightforward, and less
semantically loaded.  And that improved the quality of the following
debates.


 

Last week Newt again went for frames rather than content.  When Juan
Williams asked him about his comment about Obama being the "food stamp
President" and "isn't that belittling him?"  Newt made a meta-comment to the
effect that while those who are politically-correct may "dislike
uncomfortable facts," the facts are the facts and one fact is that Obama has
put more people on food-stamps than any other president in history, now
costing $76 billion a year.  

 

When asked about his comment about getting inner city kids to work in the
schools, to do some janitorial work and be paid for it, the questioner posed
it as an insult to them.  "Don't you realize that some people hear that as
if you are belittling them?"  Newt's answer was as blunt as it was succinct.
"No."  Then he explained by setting out the difference between being "taken
care of" by government and "learning the work ethic and the pride of a job."
Newt said he wanted people to take pride in working, earning money, becoming
independent, and growing up to "own" the job.  For that he got a standing
ovation. 

 

The frame of the question tried to hook him about a low-level job, doing
"janitorial" work.  The frame of Newt's answer was about the value and honor
of any and all jobs.  The battle was about meanings. One assumed the
cultural meaning that cleaning things up is something shameful like it means
being a servant.  The other meaning views work as honorable and that the
experience of learning to work, learning to do well whatever one does,
learning to see it as the first steps and as confirmed by many of Newt's
supporters, "That's how I also got started, washing dishes, bussing tables,
cleaning up, etc."

 

Another comment that Newt made concerned the government giving longer and
longer periods of unemployment pay.  In the US it is now 99 weeks.  And
while the official unemployment rate is 8.5, the actual rate is between 12
and 15 and those who are under-employed extends to another 5 to 10 percent.
That's somewhere around 25 million people.  Now statistics about that have
consistently indicated that the longer the unemployment lasts, the longer it
takes a person to find a job.  Newt made a comment about the 99 weeks was -
"That's an Associate Degree."

 

Meaning what?   Meaning that that is the amount of time it takes to earn an
Associate's Degree at a College or University.  Meaning that if a person is
unemployed the best thing government could do would be to ask people to use
that time to learn- to learn a trade, how business works, how to be an
entrepreneur, how to add value, how to learn, etc.

 

Instead of sitting at home or doing whatever they do, they should be asked
to attend 99 weeks of training in business skills.  Now that would truly
support people- it would teach them "how to fish" in addition to giving them
a fish.  

 

After writing the above, I watched the next debate on CNN Thursday night,
Jan. 19 and Gingrich did it again.  During the day, more "dirt" was thrown
at Gingrich, ABC using his ex-wife and some of her accusations.  So John
King, the moderator started by asking about the "accusations that your
ex-wife has made..."  That was the content.  Newt refused to take the bait.
Instead he turned to the frames:

"I am astonished that you would start a Presidential debate with that."

The way the media goes after those who would run for public office is
destructive, vicious, and despicable.

The way the mainstream media is protecting Obama and attacking the
Republican candidates is appalling.

 

And when John King said, "This story did not come from this network..."
Newt didn't let him off the hook:

"John, you chose to start the debate with it.  Your network made that
choice.  So you can't blame someone else."

 

Now later on CNN, a panel interviewed John King and he kept defending
himself in asking the question.  "It was the story in the news that day;
everybody was talking about it; it had to be asked."  He presented his
reasons so as to say that he didn't have a choice as a journalist but that
he had to bring it up and ask the question.  Hmmm.  So that was (is) his
frame and so explains his game.  With those frames, no wonder he felt and
behaved as he did.  As such, I would say, he was thereby the victim of his
own frames.  He certainly had other choices which from his interview he
apparently didn't realize or see.  For example, he could have started the
debate like this:

"Mr. Speaker, the news of the day has centered around accusations of your
ex-wife and it may or may not have anything to do with this presidential
race, it is personal and not political, if you want to say something about
it, fine.  If not, then we will start with the issues of this campaign that
face the American people- the economy, the wars, the budget, etc."

 

A framing like that would have brought it up the subject and given Newt an
opportunity to do with it whatever he wanted to.   But John King didn't do
that.  He presented "the news of the day" to wit, the nasty accusations of a
bitter ex-wife two days before the primary election as the first thing to
talk about.  That prioritized it, that tried to make it an issue.  In terms
of that content, Newt afterwards simply said it was false, his daughters
wrote to ABC to deny it, and they offered witnesses, but ABC refused.

 

Now in the few days that have now passed, every news commentator that I've
heard do not seem to understand what Newt Gingrich did.  This is true for
those on the right and the left.  Most called it "shrewd" dealing with
things; others described it as "turning the tables on them," several morning
shows decided that it was "media bashing," "... blame it on the media, the
American people love it."  Then there were many who decided to interpret it
as Newt being an "angry" person.  "He's just angry, that's why he did that."

 

I even heard other commentators complain that after the shrewd attack, Newt
never dealt with "the substantial details" of the question.  In these words
they equated "the substantial details" with the content rather than the
frame.  Yet I shouldn't be surprised by this.  This is the seduction of
content.  Content seduces us as it gets us to confuse the details with the
most important part of the message.  But for Neuro-Semanticists, we know
that the frame governs how to interpret content.

 

Ah, the battle of the frames!  It's always about frames, everything human
is.  And at this point in human history, this is a leadership skill, that
is, the ability to detect frames and then address them effectively.
Interested?  Welcome to Neuro-Semantic NLP!   

 

Two books to get you started in this realm: 

Winning the Inner Game and Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds.  

 

And if you want to advance beyond these, then 

Neuro-Semantics: Actualizing Meaning and Performance.

 

 




 

 

 

L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Neuro-Semantics Executive Director  ----   <http://www.neurosemantics.com/>
www.neurosemantics.com

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA                              

1 970-523-7877                                               

     

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