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 November
20-22
2002|
Washington DC |
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Sparks Go to >
Susan Bales Susan
Bales Obviously there are to ways to come to international education. One is through the education frame, one is through the international frame. I'm going to talk about the international door, which is where I've done quite a bit of research over the past three years about how Americans think about international issues. For those of you who are not communicators, who do not eat, live, and breathe communications, and who think this is yet another thing that you have to add to your list of things to do, I just want to step back and say why it is important to communicate. Often people just say couldn't we just go directly and get legislation passed, couldn't we just figure out a way to get this done more efficiently. So I think it is important to look at what is communications and what does it do. First, it's really important to understand that the media sets the public agenda, which in turn sets the policy agenda. If the issue isn't in the news, it is unlikely to be acted upon. But being in the news is not sufficient, because the way issues are framed in the news determines public understanding. So if issues are framed as issues of personal choice, as day care, child care, etc., they tend not to make on the national policy agenda. Policymakers tend to read news as the proxy for public opinion, and in fact its amusing that groups like The Washington Post advertise "if it's important to you, it's important to us." In fact that's not the case, what is covered in the news is not necessarily what is important to us. But if you're not in the news, policymakers will tend to see that there's a disconnect, they tend inadvertently sometimes to read what's in the media as being top of the mind concerns. Also news constrains and inspires policymakers, so it's important to have issues framed as public policy issues in the news media. When advocates fail to understand communications they tend to limit their constituency, they tend to talk only to themselves. You get this development of expert jargon, and we tend to only to want to talk to people who understand it and not to think about really broadening the constituency to other people who really are with us, but don't really speak our language. When policy gets too far in front of public opinion, you're vulnerable to opposition (I need only say: welfare, to make this point). Bad communications can derail, distract and redirect strongly held public values. I think this is a really important point. People tend to want to go out and educate the public. Often the public is already with you on many of these issues. But the way we frame issues and the way that newsmedia frame issues, tend to distract them and to prevent them from acting upon strongly held values-that is indeed the case with international issues as we'll see. So what do we need to know to communicate effectively: First we need to know about how Americans think about being in the world, I intentionally didn't say international. Not just about the relationships between nations, but what does it mean to be an American in the world. How do we think about that? What is the world view that we bring to that? Are there dominant frames that appear almost automatically? When we say 'being in the world' are there things that just pop into mind? Highly vivid pictures of what it means, that then prevent us from going further? How do these affect our policy choices? How do our policy preferences then spin out of our worldview? How are these dominant frames reinforced? How would we contest the ones that prevent people from understanding progressive policies? How can issues be reframed so that people can see things that you as experts know would make a difference in international education? I'm going to answer some of these questions by drawing on the work we've done for the Global Interdependence Initiative, with funding from Carnegie and Rockefeller Brothers fund among others. If you want to look at the full body of research its posted on our website, frameworksinstitute.org in the section on global interdependence. And theirs a series of about twelve very comprehensive studies that I'm quickly tell the findings from. So here's the good news and the bad news: The public strongly favors humanitarian assistance, international engagement, cooperation and involvement, but before September 11, the rest of the world was largely invisible to Americans. They believe that the US is doing it all and they have little understanding of cause and effect, responsibility, prevention or solution. So they can't figure out what we should be doing in the world, which is largely invisible to them. So let's look at the good new first. One of the biggest problems we have is that public opinion polling tends to be either about international issues or about domestic issues. So you'll get a long survey, and there's finally tacked on this notion of "would you rather be securer at home, or securer in the world" and people say securer at home, and people interpret that as meaning that there isn't a real interest in international issues. In the few national surveys before September 11, and this is all pre-9/11 data that I'm reporting on, when you were able to rank international issues among domestic issues, you strong support for international issues, disease and hunger in other countries up between health care and government spending, as a top of the mind concern. And I would refer people to the work of Steven Cull at the University of Maryland, who's really written comprehensively about this. That Americans really do prioritize international issues. They also have very altruistic goals for foreign assistance. As you'll see at the top of the list relieving human suffering brought about by civil war and natural disasters, protecting the global environment. At the bottom of the list: giving military support to governments friendly to us. So there really is a strong sense of moral value that comes into play. However, they believe we spend too much on foreign aid. We contribute more of our GNP than others. They believe that 20% of the budget is foreign aid, and you can't argue them out of these positions. So the notion of telling people that's its just one percent, if we could just get to one percent, that would be a great place to be for foreign assistance. People will say "oh, that's so interesting" or "is it really less than one percent?" Five minutes later they'll be back reasoning on the basis of this strongly held frame, "We do more in the world than anyone else. Why is it always us?" This is a real problem, an impasse in the communication. With regard to the belief that we should work in concert with others, they want to share leadership. We shouldn't respond alone to crises. Strong support for UN, NATO and for our allies. This theme persists after 9/11. I was looking at the latest Greenberg-Rozner poll. This is an outtake of voters in the 2002 election. On the left-hand side a strong internationalist, multilateral view, beats the "we should never tie our hands, we need to do whatever is necessary to prevent terrorism." Margin of error is about 2% in this poll. So you'll see there really is a strong orientation towards being a part of the world, and I would say that that goes beyond this rather superficial language, people don't want to be the world's "policeman," they don't want to be the world's "bully," they really want to work in the world community. So what is the problem here, where are they getting this communications disconnect, where are they not being able to see the world, where are they not being able to see what we should do in the world? One of the answers is that the major educators of American worldviews on international affairs is newsmedia, and especially local newsmedia. So when you look at pre-9/11 coverage of international issues, for the most part we saw being involved in the world as a negative proposition. Two-thirds of the coverage: negative implications if we're involved. The dominant frame is global mayhem; it essentially international issues as weather. Bad things happen; not preventable; no notion of history, diplomacy; it's simply a random universe where strange things happen. It shuts off any sense that we could be doing things that are long-term engagement, that move towards preventing disaster, and for your purposes, it cuts off the notion of culture. Acts of nature and human error are the causes of global problems in most of the coverage. Problems are short-term, hence our orientation towards crisis intervention makes sense to us: send a check to the people of X country who have been decimated by Y occurrence. My personal favorite: no foreign country made the top 20 list of stories on local television news, except Mexico when it had an earthquake. You see this episodic, sporadic view of what is happening in the world, conditioned by the media. This is the poster boy of news coverage [image] a tight frame around a mother and child, disaster crisis frame, which lets you only think that you could send a check to relieve this particular situation. This kind of coverage you rarely see [image2], both related to the earthquake in India. At least this kind of frame begins to get some notion that buildings kill people, that maybe there's something that could have been done in this country, maybe something went awry, maybe foreign assistance should have looked at zoning and other sorts of ways of preventing these kinds of things. But this kind of coverage is almost invisible. After 9/11 people are paying more attention to world issues. They're more enthusiastic about and intrigued by solution stories. There is more willingness to pitch in and help. The priorities are safety at home, not somewhere else. And the frame of homeland security is in fact a problem. Those who are now looking at content analysis of news media, say that we had a blip, where we had highly contextualized news coverage for a while, and then we lost it. Now it's all about making Sacramento safe from terrorism, which is not a view on the world, and our priorities are Afghanistan and Iraq. This is what we're up against: a public strongly in favor of multilateral engagement, policymakers don't believe it because they never see it in the media, they never hear it from the people who call them, squeaky wheels tend to be those who are calling to keep us out of the UN, not in the UN. There's a public misperception that America is doing it all, but they still want to be supportive, even if we're doing more than our share it doesn't erode public support. They can't assign any responsibility to actors. These two things are caused by these media frames. They are learned ways of looking at the world. Interestingly while the news media fails to educate Americans about causes and consequences, it doesn't erode support, support for engaging remains strong in spite of these things. I think that tells you the deep values that Americans have about being in the world. The media is dependent on a small number of sources for news, which signals to people that this is an elite province. This is something that only Henry Kissinger and five other people will understand, not Joe Blow. It shuts off the public discourse and tends to make people think that they would have to know a lot more to express an opinion. Finally, the good news: there are ways to get people engaged in these issues and that's what I'm going to talk about, ways to engage them. The first thing we have to do to change the conversation is get rid of these misperceptions that seem to be almost conventional wisdom. These are the ones that I think are the most pernicious:
So this is what our reframing research suggests. You have to establish interconnectedness to get people interested in international issues. You have to explain values, not simply situations in little episodic stories, to connect to people's core concerns. You have to give the United States a new persona. There's a metaphor for mapping that goes on for people that countries are people. You need to give us a new way to think of Uncle Sam in the global universe. One that then allows us to hold him accountable as he ventures forth. Finally, you have to surface solutions, establish efficacy immediately to combat people's notions that problems are insurmountable. There are two strong primes, two ways of thinking or worldviews that help us do this (and we tested the heck out of both of these): One is global interdependence; the world is a system that relies on all parts working together. The very notion of interdependence gets people to erase the boundaries in their mind. Second, global engagement is about doing what is right to the world a better place. How do you do this? The first think you do, is to try to show people pictures like this [photo of the globe]. You try to show them the globe without all the countries mapped out on it. You want to show them air and oceans that interdependent systems, so that they begin to understant that we are all on it planet together. And ironically the global environmental prime is the way to do this. It's to talk about environmental issues, not to get to environmental policies, but to get people to erase the borders in their mind. The second one is to use this moral norms prime; since people think of international relations as interpersonal relations, is to build a better persona for us to be in the world. This moral person, the decent person to be in the global community has lots of different manifestations, some of the ones that could be very powerful are community builder, example setter, mentor, especially a team player. We want to be part of teams of engagement that are international. If we were thinking of notes to do an interview for a reporter, what we would want to make sure we got into our discussion in order to pull these values along that we know people hold, are these kinds of statements:
This is the way that you would do this as a message platform. Just to show you that you can hold something in front of you that you could use repeatedly, this is the way that you could introduce a speech that would connect to people's deeper values and help them understand whatever issue you were putting forward. It is this kind of message platform that is most likely to connect to these profound values that people have and to open up the conversation to the kinds of issues that you all want to put forward. Phil
Sparks She and the FrameWorks Institute present incredible materials for media operators such as myself, to then proceed down the tracks. I'm going to be very operational in terms of what I talk about this morning, in a brief moment. I'll talk to you about how to deliver messages within your states and to particular target audiences. Let me start the discussion in two ways. First, in any political dialogue, in political discussion using the media as a megaphone in which to deliver your messages, there are two challenges: are you trying to mobilize public opinion and public will that's already there, to a particular action that you are advocating? Or are you trying to change public opinion in a public education campaign, before they can move to a particular action in your state. I would suggest based on Susan's data that actually there is a public will generically for many of the things that you're talking about here at this conference today. But the challenge then within a public will-building campaign and a media campaign in order to encourage dialogue on these issues, is to encourage some kind of action and who do you want to do that amongst. Another informator of communications campaign, is that people make up their minds on at least two bases: one is certainly information, this is all of us in the room-we read a report and we form an opinion, wouldn't you like for everybody to be like we are. We lightly wade through 60-page reports and think we've had a great day when we get to page 59 or 60. That may be not how the rest of the world operates. Also, people make up their minds based on values. Values that they already have. Susan touched on that. And often, this value trumps information. I want to concentrate on three ways of delivering the message.
Susan Bales is President of FrameWorks Institute. Phil Sparks is Vice President of Communications Consortium Media Center. Links The FrameWorks Institute work on global interdependence The Communications Consortium Media Center (CCMC) helps nonprofit organizations use media and new telecommunications technologies as tools for public education and policy change.
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