Further Reading: Chapter 3

Essential Texts

Lakoff, George. Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2004. (Updated edition, 2014.) Accessible and widely read. Lakoff's argument about conceptual metaphors and political framing is most clearly presented here. Read critically — Lakoff is a progressive political advocate as well as a linguist, and his analysis has an embedded normative argument that should be disaggregated from the descriptive claims.

Entman, Robert M. "Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm." Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51–58. The foundational academic definition of framing. Short (eight pages) and essential. Entman's four functions (problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, treatment recommendation) are the standard analytical framework in media framing research.

Luntz, Frank. Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear. New York: Hyperion, 2007. A practitioner's guide to strategic language choice. Read as primary source evidence of how professional communicators deliberately frame language for psychological effect. Luntz is candid about the gap between what words mean and what they make people feel.

On Classical Rhetoric

Aristotle. Rhetoric. (Multiple translations available; George Kennedy's translation, Oxford University Press, 2007, is particularly clear.) The foundational text. Books I and II are most relevant to this chapter. Not as dense as it sounds — Aristotle is a remarkably practical writer, and his observations about how different audiences respond to different kinds of argument remain accurate.

Corbett, Edward P.J., and Robert Connors. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. If Aristotle directly feels too distant, this textbook bridges classical rhetoric and contemporary application effectively.

On Media Framing Research

McCombs, Maxwell, and Donald Shaw. "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media." Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1972): 176–187. The original agenda-setting study. McCombs and Shaw compared issue salience in Chapel Hill voter interviews with newspaper content during the 1968 presidential election. The correlation between what the press covered and what voters considered important launched decades of agenda-setting research.

Iyengar, Shanto. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Experimental research on how "episodic" framing (individual stories) vs. "thematic" framing (contextual patterns) shapes attributions of responsibility for social problems. Essential for understanding how crime reporting, poverty coverage, and terrorism news shape public policy preferences.

Chong, Dennis, and James N. Druckman. "Framing Theory." Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 103–126. A comprehensive scholarly review of framing research. More technical than the above but provides a useful map of how the field has developed and where it is contested.

On Strategic Political Language

Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language." Horizon 13, no. 76 (April 1946). Still essential reading after seventy-five years. Orwell's diagnosis of political language as designed to "make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind" has not been improved upon as a brief critical account of political euphemism and obfuscation.

Luntz, Frank. "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America." Memo to Republican officials, 2003. Available via archived press coverage. Luntz's own primary source. Read alongside the chapter's primary source analysis.

Critical and Counter-Perspectives

Druckman, James N. "Political Preference Formation: Competition, Deliberation, and the (Ir)Relevance of Framing Effects." American Political Science Review 98, no. 4 (2004): 671–686. An important corrective to oversimplified accounts of framing effects. Druckman finds that framing effects are substantially reduced in deliberative settings where competing frames are present. This suggests that framing propaganda is most effective in media environments that present only one frame — and that exposure to competing frames is a partial countermeasure.