How did frames after 9/11 bring about the muzzling of media?
Let me first begin with a personal experience which is the basis for the following analysis.
My mother died a year ago this past Christmas. I thought I was doing reasonably well, keeping my grief under control as I functioned for my family. After all, I didn't want to ruin Christmas for my children. So I fell into my personal frame for creating a great holiday for the kids. Other frames then followed.
Sixteen months later, I can say that I was temporarily insane. Grief counselors will tell you not to make any major financial decisions during the year following the death of a loved one. With good reason.
You see, while I was functioning "so well" I lost three ATM cards in the space of two months. I've never even lost one before. There were numerous other indications of my mental incapacity, but I won't bore you with them. All I was doing was functioning within a set of familiar frames, and where anything fell outside those frames I was lost. I failed to function properly.
After 9/11, the nation entered a state of shock and grief. We became incapacitated, as we would during any time of grief. Having nothing else to rely on in the face of such shockingly altered circumstances, we fell back on the frames of Patriotism and Strong Father. There was no other frame for the circumstance, so we seized on the ones we considered most powerful and followed them almost blindly. It was the only way we could function.
Anybody in a uniform became a strong father, a hero figure. Anyone who critiqued the government became unpatriotic. This framing still functions today in the "support the troops" meme among others.
This framing was so powerful and so enduring that Bush was able to take us to war with a country that had not attacked us at all, and did not offer any kind of threat. Any information that the media presented counter to the Bush Administration's claims of how to "make America safe" met with a deluge of angry hate mail and threats that the media were unpatriotic. We muzzled them.
They also muzzled themselves. Because, you see, reporters are human too. Dan Rather sat on the Letterman show crying and saying, "Mr. President, just tell me where to line up."
The "Patriot" frame totally quashed any contrary information, except among a small group of reporters, especially at Knight-Ridder. The nation didn't want to know they were being fed lies because "Daddy knows best."
It's taken a long time for us to begin to emerge from this state of incapacity, and begin to shake loose of the frames and return to any form of critical thinking. The Bush administration took advantage of our shock, grief and fear, playing to the frames of Patriotism and National Security, and today, as we shake loose of our clouded thinking, we discover we're in a pointless war after having sacrificed many of our civil liberties.
Now we want to blame someone for misleading and lying to us. But we also need to recognize the power of the frames we relied on that allowed this to happen. That encouraged this to happen. We need to recognize that we temporarily lost our minds, but now we need to reclaim them. The choice of frames we made on 9/11 needs to be changed to more effective frames.
Finding those frames will be the key to the lock of the future of this country. And as we are shaking out of national insanity, there is no better time to present better frames to the country.
What frames would you suggest?
Use of frames
I understand your criticism of my use of the term, and I thank you for it. I should have been more precise.
Yes there were people questioning. I was one of them. But there was a very good reason we didn't get on air or much news coverage and that was because of the frames the nation, by and large, chose in the wake of 9/11.
I think it's important to realize that given a unique event, we have a tendency to seek the security of established frames, especially ones we find strong and powerful.
They are the way we interpret life, and they are also guides to our future actions.
For most people, Patriotism was the first frame they grabbed onto.
Depends on who is getting covered
Yes I agree that people go to what they are familiar with, but again, you are assuming that most people actually are most familiar with strict father. I don't believe it to be the case. I believe most people never think of it and lean either NP or SF until someone else strongly suggests and provides social pressure to go a subscribed way. Most folks are not like me in decidedly taking a position on matters and go with the flow. They didn't really see that the media or government was suggesting that the national philosophy and temporary definition of patriotism was a blind obedience to a fascistic regime. They liked the idea of pulling together and wanted a leader to tell them what it looked like. Bush regime obliged and used their media presence to paint the picture that they liked.
Even as a proud liberal, there was a very recent time when I felt social pressure to keep my mouth shut. If I wore a shirt with a peace symbol on it to the grocery store I would get a comment about supporting the troops or something insulting. This social pressure absolutely had a chilling effect on those who leaned NP to start with. When you do not see your own views and realities reflected in the media, you begin to doubt that you have a legitimate point of view.
Part of my point
That was part of my point, Think4. While you, I and others think for ourselves, the vast majority of Americans sought familiar frames, ones they considered powerful, in the wake of 9/11.
Patriotism is a powerful frame. It includes compassion for our fellow Americans, yes, but it also leans us toward the "government must do something" idea that falls into line with SF frame. It leads us not to question.
You felt the effect of that when you wore your peace T-shirt to the store. That chilling effect was actually exercised against the media as well. If you don't think so, keep an eye out for the Bill Moyers report "Buying the War" on PBS.
Those who might have thought critically were largely silenced or ignored. Why? Because they were being unpatriotic.
Time to recognize the pit we fell into, and time to recognize that new frames can now be presented because the country is at last seeing the flaws in our initial reactions. More and more of us are no longer willing to accept the notion that the "Post 9/11 world" is all that different from the "Pre 9/11 world," another case of conservative framing we would do well to bury.
My thanks for your responses. It's always good to have more food for thought.
Not overused
Hi Think4,
I didn't think wordshop was misusing "frames." He/she seemed to be saying, rather eloquently, that 9/11 plunged the American people into a period of collective grief, and that collective grief is no less debilitating to collective decision-making than individual grief is to individual decision-making.
That is a powerful insight, and it ought to make us question the "swift and sure retaliation" responses given to Brian Williams' "two-city attack" hypothetical in the Democratic debates. Ms. Clinton seemed to say she'd pause for thought, saying she would retaliate "powerfully, and as quickly as was prudent."
But that promise of caution was more illusory than real. As wordshop correctly observes in his/her essay, we rarely make "prudent" decisions while grieving. There is a reason grief counselors caution against making ANY significant decisions for a few months after a traumatic event. Yet almost every candidate was promising to do exactly that.
Framing America's response to 9/11 in terms of grieving offers some intriguing and useful lessons. The American people were impatient for a major, visible response: almost all of us wanted to "strike back." Part of that impatience and desire was a grief reaction, and the truly prudent response would have been to table discussions of retaliation until we'd had a chance to work through our grief and come to terms with what had happened.
Yes, our elected officials and our media played on that grief, magnified it, even to the (now seemingly absurd!) point of issuing and dutifully broadcasting daily, color-coded "terror alerts," lest we forget how frightened we felt on that sunny September morning. They played the "fear card" again and again, because frightened, grieving people don't demand difficult questions about real evidence and intentions.
And yes, shame on them for doing so.
But shame on us all for not recognizing that we were grieving, and for that reason ALONE demanding that our government NOT rush through the USA PATRIOT Act, NOT rush off to war, NOT cast aside our entire history and try to reshape us for "a post-9/11 world." We all need to learn from that, so that the next time our hearts are broken we don't make the same mistakes.
Crissie
Thanks!
Crissie, you provided a much clearer version of my argument than I did. Thanks for the elucidation. Your answer is more compelling by far.
Fear, Revenge, and Grief all blinded us
- I think this is a good question, and further discussion will help distill this issue down to its core issues.
My thinking is that the attacks (whether you believe the official government/media account of what happened or not) put us into "pearl harbor" mode, for lack of a better analogy. There was grief, yes, as you say - but I don't know if "you shouldn't make major financial decisions while grieving" is a deep enough frame since it needs explaining.
If you combine the desire for revenge on the perpetrators (recall the swift declaration of guilt of Bin Laden that Bush made in a cathedral) and the fear that this would happen again any time soon blinded us.
Maybe that's a possible avenue to explore - blinded by fear, blinded by desire for revenge, and blinded by grieving. All of these caused us as a country - citizens, media, and lawmakers - to do some really stupid things. To accept the mythology that the Bush administration fed us within a matter of hours and to ignore the signs that contradicted that. (This is classic framing; you can't make your opponent see things you see if they are locked into an opposing frame). To allow Bush to quickly invade Afghanistan (in spite of the obvious follow-the-money justification that Michael Moore pointed out to us in Fahrenheit 9/11). To allow the "scenes of the crime" to be quickly swept up and not start a huge investigation right away. To accept that we should "go shopping" to revitalize the economy. To accept the swift passage of the USA PATRIOT act (Vocal opponents received Anthrax letters!)
So if we were blinded by fear, revenge, and grief, how long does it take for Americans to regain their site?
New! Overuse of 'frame'
Careful about how many instances you apply the term
frame. I would suggest that the personal descriptions may work using the termframebut they are different than what this website uses the term for. Overuse of the term dilutes and confuses for others trying to learn about progressive framing. What I mean is, we all have heard of the phraseframe of mindand I think that is the sense you are using it in your personal story. That is very different from the deeper political and societal frames that happen as described by the NP and SP ideas.I would strongly disagree that "Having nothing else to rely on in the face of such shockingly altered circumstances, we fell back on the frames of Patriotism and Strong Father." By qualifying the sentence with
having nothing else to rely on, you are basically buying into the fact that Strict Father is the only and original deep frame that we all fall back on when times are tough. It implies that the nurturant parent model is something that cannot exist within certain contexts. I strongly disagree.This progressive's response to 9/11 was devastation, shock at how the media drilled horrific imagery and exploited tragedy, love and compassion for all of the people affected, admiration for the COMMUNITY (progressive buzzword alert) that pulled together with no outside corporate organization overseeing the whole thing. The people of New York grew together as a community relying on their feelings of COMPASSION and EMPATHY. People assessed need and GAVE WILLINGLY OF THEIR TALENTS TO THE GREATER COMMUNITY. In other words, people took a responsibility for contributing to those in need. I was then shocked at Giulliani and Bush's opportunistic politics turned sabre rattling. Like a scorned lover, Bush was ready to send somebody out guns ablazin' instead of treat the even like the serious crime it was and prosecute the network responsible (has that been done to anyone's satisfaction).
Yes the nation did fall for the Strict Father bit and yes they did buy into the
shoot first ask questions latermentality, but make no mistake, there was a large contingent of folks asking plenty of questions as loudly as possible.They were not give a microphone, or a place in front of a mainstream media camera.