About the Guest:
Gil Duran is a journalist and political strategist who has worked as a spokesman for Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Kamala Harris. He later served as California opinion editor at The Sacramento Bee and editorial page editor at The San Francisco Examiner. His work has appeared in The New Republic, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Times. He publishes two newsletters: The Nerd Reich, on tech authoritarianism, and FrameLab, on political language and framing.
Episode Transcript:
Cory Barker: A New York Times article detailing the actions of the 47th president during his first few days in office was initially published with the headline, “Trump Asserts a Muscular Vision of Presidential Power as He Takes Over.” The headline was later changed to, “How Trump is Pushing at Limits of Presidential Power in Early Orders.” And the contrast between the two illustrates the vital role framing plays in how a story is received. President Trump has frequently been framed as a strongman and strict father, with a number of high-profile Republicans even referring to him as daddy. When news outlets lean into this type of rhetoric, they miss a vital opportunity to draw attention to critical issues at the heart of the story. This goes beyond burying the lead. It fundamentally changes how we understand a story, downplaying the stakes for democracy, while simultaneously bolstering the mythology of the person behind these actions. Journalist Gil Duran addressed this in his FrameLab newsletter, writing, metaphors play a crucial role in shaping how we perceive the world. The metaphors employed in politics, consciously or unconsciously, often establish a moral point of view.
Matt Jordan: We're going to talk with Gil about what framing is, how it works, and why the framing of doing government by force, which is often applied to President Trump, is extremely problematic in a functioning democracy. In addition to his work for the FrameLab newsletter and podcast, he regularly contributes to the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications. Gil started his career in journalism in 1998 at the San Jose Mercury News, before transitioning to political communications in 2003. During that time, he worked as a spokesman and strategist for Joye Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Kamala Harris. In 2018, he returned to journalism as California opinion editor of The Sacramento Bee, writing columns and editorials on local, state, and national issues. In 2021, he became editorial page editor of The San Francisco Examiner. Gil Duran, welcome to News Over Noise.
Gil Duran: Thanks for having me.
Cory Barker: Let's start with a simple definitional question. How does framing work in the news? And how does it shape our thinking?
Gil Duran: Well, framing is literally the process of shaping how people perceive and interpret information by structuring language, metaphors, and narratives in a way that evokes specific mental models, emotions, and values. And the way it works in the news is that editors and reporters pick certain words and metaphors and frames and use those in the news all of the time. And I think in some ways, this sort of framing, often subconscious, has a much bigger impact than the more superficial considerations over whether something is objective or not. If your definition of objective does not also apply to the metaphors you're using and the frames you're using, then you're not truly being objective. So, I know there's a lot to unpack there, but that'd be my basic starting point for a definition.
Matt Jordan: So, if there's a news event might be the thing that triggers a news story, and then there would be a frame that is taken in order to package the news story for it that might have something like an underlying meaning out there for the listener or the reader?
Gil Duran: Yeah, definitely. Or even an overt meaning. In the case of the recent plane crash at National Airport where immediately, without any details being known, a frame was being posed that of DEI that somehow, improbably, without fact, diversity had something to do with the plane crash. Turns out that, obviously, there was nothing like that involved, but the people who were framing that narrative were able to get it repeated and debated and make that a huge part of the story in the complete absence of any other facts or truths that we knew about the crash because it was so recent. So, there's one example of how it happens.
Matt Jordan: And in that case, the frame is set by the person who is making the sound bite, the primary definers then the spokesperson for the Trump administration, in this case, those are the people who are choosing the frames. But where does the frame like diversity, equity, inclusion to talk about issues of equality and fairness, where does a frame like that come from that is available for people to use like that?
Gil Duran: Well, I would say it's usually someone in a position of power doing the framing, right? People are deliberately picking out the words and the concepts they're going to introduce. The right wing tends to be very, very good at that, much better than the Democratic Party than doing that. And so often, if a press release says a certain phrase or if the President of the United States says a certain thing, the press sort of has to cover that. And often that takes the form of making that frame the major frame in the story. So, it's often the case that that's how it happens. I think that one of the great problems of journalism, and one thing that journalism doesn't really grapple with, is how to combat that particular dynamic. There's this idea that you have to go along with it, and that you have to just repeat it. And often, I think time is part of the problem. You're in a rush to get the story out to get the story posted. And so, here's a ready-made narrative that a political team has put together, and you have an obligation to include it. And that ends up being, I think, the primary frame. What was the second part of
your question there?
Matt Jordan: Where do they come from? Like, in that case, are these things derived from think tanks or are they something that just start to get seeded in the media ecosystem and start to gain traction and gain dominance over the way that we think about events and stories?
Gil Duran: Very often from think tanks, from polls, from political groups, sometimes also from other places, like some author or writer, might introduce a frame. Academia might introduce a frame.
DEI is an acronym. This used to mean a good thing. Companies were trying to be virtuous and include people and show the depth of their inclusion. And what's happened in recent years is that people on the right have tried to reverse the meaning. So, the DEI has become a bad thing, and it's a form of oppression and something we must get rid of. And so, there's been a lot of work done to demonize DEI so much so that it is a ready-made frame for certain people to go to anytime anything goes wrong. Doesn't matter what it was. If aliens invaded tomorrow, certain people would be online saying it was DEI. And that's largely how an important concept there is. It works through repetition. If you can keep repeating something, no matter whether it's true or not, and keep people attacking what you're saying, then you're actually forcing them to have it in their brains a lot longer. And you may not convince the people who are your opposition, but there's a lot of people in the middle who don't know what to think and are just listening. And those are the real target audience for people who are framing in this negative, aggressive way to make sure that those people are ready-made, have the, as Dr. George Lakoff with whom I work would say, that their neural circuits are activated and strengthened to accept that die is bad. And if something goes wrong in your personal life, in the life of the nation, in the world, DEI might be to blame. That's how framing works. You want to make it so that it's almost an automatic physical circuit that's in people's brains. And you can activate it at will, or it activates itself whenever there's a negative stimulus or a positive stimulus. You're trying to do a positive frame. And so, often, the frames that are in the news have been cooked up somewhere. It's very rare, especially in politics that you see a framing or a language that someone hasn't worked over. And I think that journalism hasn't really grappled with this. And I speak as someone who's both a journalist but also worked in political communications. And in political communications, you judge your success by, or at least I did, I know others do as well, how much your catch phrase and language appears in all the media stories that occur after you have done some kind of event or announce some kind of thing. Is our key phrase in there? That's a key search, and you show, here's how many stories our phrase turned up. And, oh, it's in the headline in these five stories. And so, I don't think that your average editor or reporter has any awareness of what's going on in the other world, and that's a massive flaw in journalism.
Cory Barker: You mentioned earlier that time is one of the reasons why a lot of this framing just gets accepted and repeated in the news industry. Are there other reasons why, especially the rights manipulation of framing that they're so successful in getting their talking points into mainstream news coverage?
Gil Duran: Oh, definitely. I think the way that Dr. George Lakoff has described it for years is that people on the right in the Republican Party tend to come from business or business school, where you learn about marketing, you learn about advertising. You're learning about those things, you're learning about brain science and how the brain communicates and how the brain works, whereas the more liberal mindset is one more rooted in the humanities, where enlightenment reason is the mode of thought and give people facts and figures, they will reason themselves to the right conclusion. So, there's been a big gulf where you have a lot of people on the Democratic side of the spectrum, not all, but a large number who view framing as manipulation. And we shouldn't manipulate people. We should just tell people the facts. Whereas on the Republican side, there is absolutely no problem. Even if you do consider it manipulation, that's how it works. That's how you get people to believe something, to do something, to be in support of something. And if you look at business, what are we surrounded by all the time, everywhere we go? Advertising. Coca-Cola never stops advertising Coca-Cola, and they somehow been able to make a billion-dollar business out of Brown sugar water. And if you look at the ads, it's the Christmas memories, it's the polar bears, it's whatever new hip thing they think of. They understand that they have to be constantly activating their product in people's minds. Well, politics and policy is very much the same. You have to activate it in people's minds. And I think that with the rise of Trump and the situation we're in now in this country politically, Democrats should definitely learn a big lesson about the fact that that stuff works so much so that a reality TV star used Twitter to become president twice now. So, there's something going on here that is not working according to the rules of enlightenment and reason and humanities, it's something different. And I think there has to be a reckoning on the Democratic side and in the media with the fact that we've missed an entire part of something that's happening here that's been taking place in a sort of a scientific way. And we have to be aware of that in order to be more aligned with what reality is in the 21st century.
Matt Jordan: In terms of framing, we could talk about individual stories, but there are some kind of trends in framing. Jay Rosen at NYU, was looking at the kind of frames that tend to dominate in the media ecosystem. The study found that 35% of all lead stories about politics in the United States are framed as a horse race, some kind of competition framing. So, an example of that might be pick your headlines and it would be, “In a Win for Democrats, Court Blocks Trump's Bold Plan.” What would a framing like that do in terms of the way that we understand things? Kind of, the zero-sum game of politics, idea of Democratic deliberation?
Gil Duran: Yeah, I think that that's a good point that Rosen makes. In many ways, there's a sports metaphor that's been imposed on our politics. But this isn't a game, really, is it? It's not a game where somebody wins, somebody loses, and we just play again. The stakes have gotten pretty high. And I think that the press has struggled to communicate that. I've complained out loud a bit that you can't really cover something like fascism or authoritarianism objectively as a journalist because you don't get to exist in the world where those things prevail. So, there's a real question about the definition of objective. And when you see headlines like the one you mentioned, when Trump's plan is bold, or a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece that The Times kept using this metaphor of muscular to describe what Trump was doing. Well, what was he doing? Things that erode and attack and defile the Constitution, according to experts. So how is that a strength metaphor? It should be a metaphor, at the very least, of weakening the country. That would give people a better understanding of the stakes. It's more direct. But there's been this desire to go along with this strength framing with Trump, and that is very much what he wants. He wants to be seen as strong. He wants to be seen as the big authority, the strict father, to use Lakoffian terminology. And there's easily a reversal to that, which is that here's a guy who's playing golf while an unelected billionaire seems to be running the country. But there's this sort of vague haze or gauze that is being wrapped around the whole story right now. And that's a choice. That's a conscious choice. It's not an objective choice at all. It's a subjective choice to soften and to placate a certain side of the political spectrum. And I think that in most newsrooms, they're not reckoning with that. They don't even see it. And so, to your earlier point, they have framed the stakes of what politics is in some very bad metaphors. And I think newsrooms need to shift their metaphors of what's really going on here, which is sort of an existential fight over what kind of country. We're going to be. And perhaps the best way for journalists to change their brains, which is very hard to do, is to understand their diminished role in that new world. It's really going to suck to have to go from The New York Times to working at Starbucks. But that's the kind of thing that's going to be happening if we have an authoritarian government. And so, it's hard to shift those frames. And in a way, one of the hardest things to do has been framing for journalists and for Democrats and for others who don't understand it, is to understand how it works.
Cory Barker: If you're just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I’m Cory Barker.
Matt Jordan: And I’m Matt Jordan.
Cory Barker: We’re talking with Gil Duran, a journalist and writer of the FrameLab Newsletter, about the importance of framing in journalism. In your post about The New York Times coverage of Trump as muscular, you noted how the web version of the headline changed. And we've seen a lot of instances of this at the Times in other news publications, this kind of A, B testing essentially of different headlines, different URLs. How do you think that plays a role in the way that these stories get framed? Because it feels to me that oftentimes there's one version of the headline, and then maybe there's outcry or criticism of that headline online, and then they're just able to change it and act as if the original version wasn't there or there weren't any errors or mistakes in that first version of the headline. So how does that ability to immediately swap the headline sort of diffuse the framing in a way that's maybe unhelpful for readers?
Gil Duran: Yeah, well, I think it would be better for papers to understand this. On a more basic level. And they could avoid such mistakes by understanding what—asking themselves, what metaphor are we choosing? Is that a metaphor that is accurate? Is it subjective or objective? Does it make Trump seem strong when he can also be perceived as doing something weak? So, you have to really question the language. But I think there's a big obstacle to this, and I only learned about it once I returned to journalism because one of our main criticisms that George Lakoff and I had when we started writing FrameLab and doing a podcast was stop putting the lie in the headline. This happens a lot in journalism. There's some lie, and the lie has to be in the headline. For instance, if Trump were to say that the moon is made of green cheese, then the headline would be “Experts say moon, not green cheese.” And what I realized was that a big driver of putting the lie in the headline was search engine optimization SEO. Because if there's some phrase, even if it's a lie, that people are going to be interested in or searching for because it's been presented from a high-enough platform, the search engines are going to be looking for those words in a headline, in a summary, and in the text. So, there's this built-in algorithmic incentive to root your headline and your story in the lie if a big enough person frames the lie. And so, I think that's an important part of it. People are chasing after engagement, they are chasing after clicks, they are chasing after conversions and subscriptions. And I think those considerations take dominance over or predominant over the desire to accurately frame things in headlines. And that's just the state of modern journalism, and I learned that at The Sacramento Bee. It can be very hard to write a headline about something where somebody famous is lying without mentioning the lie, because don’t get into the SEO lottery, I call it and try to get your search terms aligned with what people will be searching for, I think that's a big, big problem in journalism right now.
Matt Jordan: Last week, or I don't know, all weeks seemed to be a year long now. But Trump posted, he who saves his country does not violate any law and baited everybody to take the king framing. So, it ended up dominating in the news media ecosystem. So, what are the dangers then of that? So, obviously, here's the framer-in-chief setting out this frame of himself as a monarchy, knowing very well that prodemocracy journalists are going to reinforce that framing. I mean, is that a conundrum? Do you see the use of that, he who saves his country part as the frame that he wanted to get out there? So even if the kicker is that I call myself king, that it still manages to reify and repeat the strongman framing?
Gil Duran: Well, I think a lot depends on how you characterize it. This is basically Trump threatening American democracy, Trump threatening the Constitution, threatening to redefine what our country is. And that's important and that has to be covered. But I think I saw a headline, again, not to pick on the Times, but they are the one that—they are the big one, that Trump prefers regal terms. That's not exactly getting at it. Oh, he just likes some regal nomenclature. That there's something deeper there. There's a deeper story, something more scary. So, I think people do need to know the president is trying to position himself as a dictator. This is somebody who is installing crazy people at the FBI, firing all the generals, and allowing Elon Musk to run amok on the government. There's something much deeper and more troubling going on here than just Trump preferring regal terminology. Another thing they've been doing lately, the Republicans, is referring to Trump as daddy. They're using all of this metaphorical framing, and what they're trying to do from their perspective is normalize these ideas, normalize the idea of this hierarchy or authority. Or if Trump—whatever Trump does, is OK because he's saving the country. But the subtext there is what we're talking about is authoritarianism. And that needs to be the headline.
Matt Jordan: So, where do you see the journalist as playing a role in this? So that you're just describing that we need to be reporting on the authoritarianism agreed. But at the same time, I wonder if using those terms ends up reifying or repeating that stern father frame as opposed to talking about something else.
Gil Duran: Yeah, well, I think there's a difference between being explanatory and helping people understand something and just subconsciously accepting it by describing Trump as muscular and strong and bold. The subconscious framing to me is more dangerous. If you were to tell people what's going on, look, there's a battle in this country right now over what the country would be. And on the Trump side, there are people who believe that this should be an authoritarian, hierarchical society, that elections don't matter as much as getting your way, and here are all the things they are doing in that direction. That's a way to tell people. You're evoking the frame, but you're evoking it to inform people and arm them with knowledge. The more pernicious thing is when we just accept their language and put it in the headline, but don't tell people what the moral importance is of that, what it actually means that they are using that language very deliberately. They're very deliberately doing things that are shocking, that challenge all of our everyone's idea of what this country is and how things have worked traditionally. So, I think, and this is the thing that comes up often, how do you explain what's happening without repeating the frames? But the repetition doesn't matter as much when you're explaining and you're trying to inform people.
Cory Barker: You mentioned this earlier, but you write a lot about appealing to the audience's moral values in the framing. Do you think news organizations generally stay away from explicitly stating the moral stakes because they view that as a broach of objectivity?
Gil Duran: They do, unless they're writing about Republicans, and they seem to have no problem, including all that moral framing in there. I think another way in which the media has implicitly accepted very conservative frameworks is this idea of centrism or moderate. Now, there are political moderates, people who are progressive or conservative depending on the issue. But there is no ideology of the middle. There's no one thing that's like the moderate ideology or the moderate platform. And so, when we say that people are going toward the middle, what are we really saying? The middle of what? It's not like you just draw a line between the Republican and Democratic parties, and there's the middle. Often, what it seems like the middle means it's a Democrat going to the right. Not a Republican going toward the left or the Democratic side. And so, you already have this sort of unfair game. And if you think about it, there's really no disputing the fact that there's no middle ideology, or else there would be a moderate party that would have a lot of people in it. But the media never questions that, never challenges it, and is constantly talking about centrist and moderate politicians without explaining the complexity there, which is that you have to decide what issue—what issues they're moderate on, and which ones they're not. You know?
Matt Jordan: What you're describing is a long-term problem. I know Lakoff has described this in relation to triangulation. Say the Clinton administration adopting the frames of Republicans to get their agenda passed. Triangulating is what they called it. So, you would say, we're going to do welfare reform. And so, you're adopting the frame where you're saying that welfare is bad, that the social safety net is a bad thing, and that neoliberal individual freedom is good. So even if you're doing policies that are nominally good for more people, like, I think, Clinton was trying to do, by adopting the framing of the conservatives where welfare is bad, you end up ceding ground to them and in a way, planting the seeds of your own destruction.
Gil Duran: There are short-term strategies with long-term consequences. And I understand. I mean, I was in politics, I understand why people do these kinds of things because you're just focused on the next election or the next vote and you really need to get it done, and that's the easiest way to do it. But we have now triangulated our way into what on the Democratic side? In California, there was an era of criminal justice reform 10 years ago, which happened to coincide with a major drop in crime, especially violent crime in California. But the right-wing framed homelessness and drug addiction as some kind of massive criminal carnival in California, and Democrats all started saying, we're going to crack down. Now, we've repealed the major reforms that were working, and no one ever talked about the fact that crime rates are higher in red states, and that drug overdose rates are higher in Republican states. They just completely accepted the frame, including Governor Gavin Newsom, who was the main guy driving the reform that got repealed. And, well, people repealed the reform because you convinced them that strong, mean, cruel punishment is what's needed, when all of the research that led to the reforms showed that prisons are crime schools, and that California's mass incarceration experiment had created more crime, and it was not disputable. And so now we've undone all of that work because Democrats do not know how to frame the case even when they have a success. You look at the crime rates, they had gone way, way, way down. Historical lows. And instead, we had a crime crisis and had to repeal the reforms.
Matt Jordan: Yeah. I wanted to ask you another long-term question, if you could. So, I'll take the current frame and the current news cycle around this, which is the Department of Government Efficiency.
Gil Duran: Mmhmm.
Matt Jordan: Where did we get to that working? And where does it—where do the various things that go along with that as a framework for understanding what Elon Musk and the wrecking crew are doing under—where does it come from, that notion of efficiency as a maximizing principle that things should be run by?
Gil Duran: Yeah, well, tech and Republicans have something in common, which is this idea that government should be run like a business, and that somehow business is efficient, although I think we could argue that plenty of businesses are not efficient. Twitter $44 billion and is now worth a lot less and it's sort of falling apart under Musk's rule. Not efficient. And not to mention the fact that most of Musk's wealth comes from government contracts and subsidies. And he's really built his entire fortune and career off of government's back. So, this idea of efficiency is one that's always argued about in politics. I don't know anybody who runs for office and doesn't promise to cut red tape or streamline the bureaucracy. I've been in some campaigns like that myself. Now, the thing about the efficiency frame here that is not what is happening. What is happening is more like a butchering, a destruction, a dismantling. And so, efficiency is what we would call Orwellian language, when you call something the opposite of what it really means. And that's what we get out of the efficiency frame. The other part of that, that's Orwellian, is the Department frame, because it's actually not a department of government. It is just a thing Elon Musk made up and we're calling it a department. And so that is problematic as well. Not to mention the fact that it's also the name of a crypto meme coin that has benefited greatly from Elon Musk and is being used to juice this crypto product at the same time. So, you have three layers there of Orwellian falsehood, corruption, and just outright ridiculous propaganda.
Cory Barker: In your assessment, how do you feel like the news media is doing in Trump 2 versus how they did in Trump 1, framing his policies, his actions? Is it better or is it worse? Is it just different?
Gil Duran: I would say it's different and it's worse. I think there's a sort of a defeatism, a sense, I read the papers, and it doesn't seem to really match what's really going on in the country. I think there are some exceptions to that. There always are some exceptions to everything. But, in general, I think that they're being slow to really explain fully on a daily basis what's happening, this is a story potentially about the demise of American democracy. This is a story that could be the biggest story in American history, how our country was collapsed and stopped being a democracy, potentially. And this isn't coming from me. This is like what they're saying, what they're doing, what they're making very obvious. And I feel like the media thinks its role is to keep things calm and to keep things seeming very normal and sober. And it's not a big deal. And I think that that's the wrong approach. And I think looking back, there are going to be a lot of editors who are going to burn with shame at their role in not being more alarmed and more overt with the American people about what's happening right now.
Matt Jordan: Well, Gil, thanks so much for being willing to talk to us today and explain how frames work and make people more aware of the frames that they're interacting with.
Gil Duran: Thank you.
Matt Jordan: Well, that got me thinking a lot, Corey. I have a couple of things percolating, but I'm wondering what your thoughts are about what we just heard.
Matt Jordan: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Gil Duran, a journalist and writer of the FrameLab newsletter. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan.
Cory Barker: And I'm Cory Barker.
Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
