Call me Daddy: The Danger of Strongman Framing

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. One study that I saw, 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, how would you say a frame like, “In a Win for Democrats, Courts Block Trump's Bold Plan”?

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: 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” or Trump says the moon is made of 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 you're going to miss out on 5,000 people who might click because of Google if you do not include those terms. If you 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: So, they end up repeating the framing just because of the desire for clicks and engagements and chasing metrics, basically.

Gil Duran: Yeah, definitely. If you can insert your false frame from a high-enough level like the presidency or a big political perch, then the algorithm will do a lot of the work for you. And I think that we need to be aware of this sort of algorithmic warfare that's being waged, and how we can fall into traps and sort of betray the cause of journalism by focusing on the wrong incentive.

Matt Jordan: So, here's a question. So 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. But again, the story tends to get softened or debated philosophically, but a lot is dependent on how the media frames the moral consequences. Now we come to the moral part of it, of what that means. What does that mean? Not that Trump prefers to have gold-plated toilets and kingly trappings. 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. And so, I think it's a matter of being able to get to the essence of that and tell people what's the most important thing that they need to know about this particular situation. And, unfortunately, again, to the Times thing, there tends to be a bit of a superficial narrative imposed. You get a little bit of depth sometimes in the columns and the op-ed page, but if you—another thing they've been doing lately, the Republicans, is referring to Trump as daddy. I think Tucker Carlson said, daddy. It's like daddy's coming home and he's going to spank the kids because they've been bad. 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 because I think if the more people know that the more, they'll be able to be rooted in reality and make a choice of whether that's what they want to go along with or whether that is something to be challenged and resisted. If we keep them in the dark and keep it light and superficial, people aren't going to know the stakes, and there could come a moment when it's too late to tell them.

Matt Jordan: George Lakoff has set the—split the world into two basic error frames, and you mentioned these before, the stern or strong father versus the nurturing parent. And so, a lot of this could also be seen as just animating that frame that is so appealing to people who believe in spare the rod, spoil the child view of everything. That everything can be boiled down to it. 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. It's more that subconscious acceptance of these things. And one thing I would say there, that's one of my favorite phrases, spare the rod, spoil the child. But I think in the original meaning of that, the rod is the shepherd's crook that he uses to gently guide the sheep when they go astray. It's not the rod—it's been reinterpreted in modern times to mean the beating rod. I wrote a whole column about five years ago about corporal punishment for children, and that was one of the things I came across, which is that spare the rod means guide the children, not beat the children.

Cory Barker: You mentioned this earlier, but you write a lot about appealing to the audience's moral values in the framing. Can you talk a little bit about why you think that's an important way to approach improving framing?

Gil Duran: Sure. Well, all politics is moral. That's another line from Dr. Lakoff. When we talk about politics, we're talking about people's deepest held beliefs and moral values, and we see it all the time popping up. For example, the Republicans often use the word freedom to describe everything they're doing. Everything is a matter of freedom. Well, freedom is the main thing we're all debating in politics, but you don't see Democrats framing in that way as much. They talk about the policy, they talk about the contained bureaucratic language of it, what the benefits might be, the data and statistics. But that moral framing is very important, and I think we've gotten to a position—it was changing a little bit in the last few years, but where everyone implicitly correlates the idea of freedom framing with the conservative side, with the Republican side. Now, during the Biden campaign and the Kamala campaign, they made a concerted effort to change that. And there was some news stories that said oh, Democrats try to make their thing about freedom, which is traditionally a conservative value. Well, no, it's a general value that we all have. But one side has been laying claim to it, and so it's important to explain to people that moral underlying value that's at stake. And it happens all the time. It's not something that's completely unknown. The Republicans get to talk about their moral values all the time. So, we have to talk about what's happening and what it means for freedom. Is there more freedom or less freedom if we no longer have a government that answers to the people? If we no longer are entitled to things like facts and truth but must accept anything that gets said as being possibly true, even if we know it's not. So, I think that's another part that the media misses or doesn't consider to be its business, but it is its business. And if you look at any newspaper, any political story, you'll see plenty of moral framing, and it's usually only coming from one side. Now, this is also the fault of Democrats for not framing the case in moral terms themselves. And this is something that they, again, for reasons stated earlier, tend to have a hard time doing because that's not the way they're used to looking at the world.

Cory Barker: 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. Those are what Dr. Lakoff calls by conceptual. We often know them as swing voters. 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. So, these are the more subconscious frames that are there, but that are not objective, that are really helping one side.

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: Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot lately. 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 so, we've taught people because you want to look strong in the moment. I'm going to send in the National Guard, which is a Republican argument. We're going to send the National Guard into California cities because Democrats can't run anything. Well, the governor ends up saying that, and they kind of sent in a few intelligence officers or whatever who didn't really—but it made it sound like we're sending in the military. 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. It's really amazing. And as someone who worked on some of those policies, extremely frustrating.

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.

Matt Jordan: So, I read Paul Krugman's newsletter, and today he was talking about trying to think of this as the reframing it by saying that DOGE was the Theranos of government reform. Essentially looking at this as being part of the Silicon Valley narrative capitalism game that they just you spin up vaporware, and you sell it to the public as efficiency for the consumer. So how much do you think of this language that we're now seeing to talk about government reform, just coming right out of the Silicon Valley and the decades of reporting on silicon valley?

Gil Duran: Oh, well, this is the subject I mainly writing on these days is what I call tech fascism. And yeah, we've got an ideology that has come out of Silicon Valley and made it with the Republican Party, which is that CEOs and billionaires should be in charge of the world, and we're smarter than everybody, we're richer than everybody, and we're going to do as we please from now on. And this is rooted in a lot of thinking that has gone back about three decades. There was a book in 1997 called The Sovereign Individual that predicted the rise of cyber currencies, the fall of nation states and technology, making violence no longer just the imperative of the state, and the rise of a cognitive elite who would rule the world in the 21st century and beyond. I know that all sounds feverish and apocalyptic and crazy, but it had a major effect on a guy named Peter Thiel, who in 2020, when the book was reissued, wrote the foreword for this book called The Sovereign Individual. And so, there's a lot of thinking that's gone into what's going on right now. And I think the other part that's not really being understood or spoken is the degree to which AI is being unleashed inside of our federal government, and the way in which that's going to create a sort of information weapon that is going to give these guys major and permanent power, potentially. And so, this talk of efficiency is really about replacing people with AI systems to make decisions, but by allowing AI access to all of this data, you're also creating a highly—a very powerful information weapon. Imagine an AI system that has all the information of the United States government inside of it because the United States government doesn't just know about the USA, it also knows about the entire world. And so that's another way in which the whole DOGE thing is pernicious and is not really being fully fledged out with this cartoonish language. I was also going to say Andrew Revkin wrote an interesting blog post about people who are refusing to call it DOGE, which is a very strange pronunciation. We don't use that DOGE, the soft G anywhere else, and some people have taken to calling it DOGE, which is a little more of a frame of dodging, evasion, up to no good. And so even the pronunciations of words can have meaning. I believe in linguistics it's called sound symbolism. For instance, Dr. Lakoff likes to point out Trump sounds strong for all these linguistic reasons, the consonants, the power, the shortness. But his original name Drumpf doesn't sound as strong. Would Donald Drumpf have been able to get to where he got? Maybe not. So, there's all these other—I used to think that was silly, but the more I've had experience, the more I've realized that even the way something sounds can have a subconscious impact.

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. This is not a normal story. It doesn't matter if you win the Pulitzer for something you did. The future is going to get very dangerous. And in five years, these guys might have the Pulitzer organization be handing out Pulitzers to Michael Shellenberger for Best disinformation campaign of the year. This is the kind of thinking they are doing. Look at the Kennedy Center. They're claiming—look at The Washington Post, The LA Times. Everything's shifting on the margins there, and this is very much bled into I think what we see from the big papers as well, this effort to keep calm and carry on. But I don't think that's the right move right now. At the very least, make space for people who want to raise the alarms and go a little harder. But if you've ever tried to write for one of these big papers, they will completely take the fangs out of your writing and find a way to orient you back towards some calm, bland, vague middle for the most part, I think.

Matt Jordan: The framing that tends to dominate then from legacy media, which I think we should say because there's a lot of independent media that is calling the alarms. I mean, I like to think of this as the return of the muckrakers from the old Gilded Age 1.0, which is that there are independent press that are like yourself that are sounding an alarm. But do you think the dominant frame for legacy media is a kind of liberal consensus, where the institutions will keep this thing under control and that that's what they think that they want to promote? I mean, is this just to keep markets from freaking out that they're essentially adopting that frame?

Gil Duran: I've increasingly come to think that that's the case, that it's just about keeping the markets intact and not spooking them. So, I guess if the market stays strong, it's OK to go toward authoritarianism. But I'm not sure that people have fully thought out what that means. But it is strange to me that there is this sort of lackadaisical approach for the most part. I think this is the time—this is the time we've all been warned about that we've all been waiting for. I thought for a long time when I was in my 20s, well, everything's boring now. All the big fights of history have been had already. Now we're just going to sit here making money and being on the computer and just going to have a boring life. And no, it turned out to be a very interesting time we were going to live in. This is a massive challenge, and I wish all this wasn't happening. I wish that Lakoff and that I had been wrong in our assessment and Kamala won, the Democrats did a fine job of framing the case, and nobody's threatening the democracy. We still have plenty of problems and dissatisfaction with our political system. But what we're seeing now is a massive attempt at a revolution to overthrow the meaning of the country and make it into something else. Some people might think that's better, but at the very least, we have to tell people what the stakes are and what's going on and what it will mean for our day-to-day lives. So, I think that's very much—last Friday the markets took a dive. And I think there's going to continue to be gyrations because, I mean, Elon Musk said a few years ago that we needed a good recession or something along those lines. Well, you don't want to say those kind of things in politics, let me tell you, because that's there are certain things that'll really bring you down. And I think if the market starts to go down, people will be more upset and there will be more political consequences. The question is whether those consequences will matter as much as they did in the past.

Matt Jordan: Because I think, again, since—as we're talking about this, the frames tend to win the day, that in the end, the story may change. But if the frame doesn't change, the thinking continues along the same roads. And I'm just looking at some New York Times headlines that are framing Trump as the disrupter-in-chief or swiftly breaching traditional boundaries of presidential power from the Associated Press, or impervious to traditional rules, norms or even laws, Axios or testing the limits of presidential power from ABC. So, this is a disruptive dynamism to use the business term for it, and good things come from that. We've been told for years of framing business reporting that when people shake up the markets, that's a sign of good leadership.

Gil Duran: Yeah, well, government is not a business. Government is not a market. Government is about millions and millions of Americans and public institutions that have concrete and very important jobs. And so, I think they're going to learn that the hard way. They kind of already are. You cut some department, planes crash, or people don't get their medical care or their incomes. This is more serious than that. It's not about, oh, just go get another job. You can't just go get another country, yet they have a plan for that too, but yeah, using that business metaphor has been very, very harmful because the business that the government is being run by right now is not IBM or some icon of efficiency. It's Twitter. It's being run like Twitter when Musk took over, and literally Musk is running. And I knew these tech guys were going to have their fingers around the throat of government if Trump won. I did not think that Musk would personally be overseeing the project. I thought that was a joke Trump was telling. And this is so extreme and so far beyond anything we've ever experienced. Can you imagine if a Democratic president just allowed some billionaire to start doing this in the government? The media would be on it nonstop. It would a crisis. They'd be attacking and bringing that person down. But they use kid gloves on the right. And I think in a way, it's because the right has done a better job of normalizing their abuses of the system. It's not considered news that Republicans want a dictatorship, and that's a problem.

Cory Barker: One of the things we talk a lot about on this show is people who don't trust institutions, don't trust the news. Do you think there's an opportunity for news organizations to frame these stories better, and also capture the trust or build back the trust of people who may be distrustful of institutions? Is there a way to use framing to help solve this other issue related to distrust and mistrust?

Gil Duran: I think there is. I think there's been some research into that, but I think one of the problems, again, that we confront is that for a lot of news outlets, legacy news outlets, regaining trust means putting on right wingers who will lie. That's what it's come to mean, getting rid of left or liberal voices and moving toward, again, the so-called center. For example, The LA Times editor, Scott Jennings, to its editorial board, and now he's a big voice on CNN. So, you have to make sure we have a MAGA voice yelling on the TV or in the newspaper. And that means more people will trust us. At the same time, that causes your base core audience to distrust you. So, figuring out the math in a way, to go back to that linear metaphor, there's not just some middle where, oh, if we just put a few more right-wing people in here to lie, that will somehow make us moderate. No, it's a much more deliberate and careful calculus that you have to make. And I think you also have to understand who your base is, who is your core audience. If The New York Times were to become more like Fox News, they might have a lot more right wing—they might have a lot more of an audience with the Fox people. But you would no longer be The New York Times. And I do think we're seeing these subtle attempts to shift, for instance, Patrick Soon-Shiong at The LA Times whose editorial board was supportive of Black Lives Matter and police reform, and he's now gone full MAGA clown. And that's not going to work in California. The LA Times readers are not going to—they don't want a MAGA newspaper. This is one person having this idea that that's how to fix it, and we've seen a lot of billionaires come into journalism with no idea what they're doing and cause a lot of damage. And so there at The LA Times, you see this very cartoonish idea of how we can make this a moderate newspaper by having some MAGA voices. In fact, I read a couple of weeks ago I think in Oliver Darcy's newsletter status, which is an amazing resource that The LA Times is now going to develop this stable of right wing MAGA influencers for YouTube. So, this is Patrick Soon-Shiong's idea, the publisher of The LA Times. His idea of how to make the paper more appealing, which is to just develop a whole stream that is counter reality and counter democracy, apparently. That's not going to work because what that does is destroy the brand of The LA Times. And so, I think you have to build on an audience of people who want news, who value journalism, and can be recruited into something that's truthful and important, rather than go all the way and try to find some other audience, you're not going to compete with what's happening right now on YouTube and on Substack or on other newsletter sites. I think that's a permanent change we've had, and it saddens me. I always wanted to work for a newspaper, and I think it's important to have institutions where there are rules and where there are editors. But I'm going to make more this month than I ever made at a journalism job. And I don't even have a job. I have a newsletter, and I think that's the way it's going to go. If you have something to add, if you have something of value that people want, then why would you ever go and write for a newspaper where you're going to take a pay cut and have a bunch of rules and maybe have to go to an office? So, I think there's a permanent change that's happened, and that was created, though, by the media not paying close enough attention to what the trends were.

Matt Jordan: Well, for those who are finding their news now through Substack or through newsletters and whatnot, what are some of the pro-democracy framing things that you see out there that are hopeful in terms of that cognitive warfare that's going on a struggle to define the world to the American public?

Gil Duran: Well, I think there's a lot of people really—unfortunately, one of the ways that that's happening is people are critiquing the media pretty harshly and on a regular basis. You have a lot of newsletters, Margaret Sullivan, Jennifer Schultz, Jay Rosen, who are deconstructing the media. And I think that's putting pressure on the press to do a better job, I think, in some ways shaming them.

I do a little bit of that. I try to avoid it for the most part. I have other things I'm focused on, but it can certainly be very frustrating. And so that's an important thing. There used to be magazine, Brilz Content or something. There were magazines that critiqued the press. I think there's still the Columbia Journalism Review. But they're doing it on a more regular basis. And I think the newsletter economy has made space for more voices to be heard, and for people to be a little more direct in their criticisms without having to be filtered through the East Coast Ivy League editorial algorithm, what's allowed to be said. You can go super viral with something, and no editor approved it, and I think that's in some ways it has democratized the conversation because if you look at the space in your average op-ed page, it's like the same few elite people with access. And those pages, the pool is shrinking and shrinking. When I was at The Sacramento Bee, we had two pages of opinion every day and four—no, six on Sunday. By the time I left, we had one page of opinion every day in like four. It's just shrinking and shrinking how many voices you get in there. And so, I think it's really democratized that conversation and allowed people to go a little more directly at what's happening, to deconstruct things in real time in a way that can catch on and then help frame the story in the news. There's the danger, though, that some people are using unverified stuff. There's conspiracy theory, more so on the right, but also on the left because that's a great way to get clicks, a great way to get followers, keeping people in this sort of doom narrative based on all these supposed clues, like the QAnon-type of thing. You see that happening because some people are desperate for the audience but don't have the skill set to deliver a quality product, and that doesn't always matter online. So, while I'm excited about the development, and while it's personally created an option for me to stay in journalism, I also see the danger of some sort of brainless person on YouTube who has no ideas or thoughts, but it just figures out a way to frame some information in a way that attracts a large audience to keep it going. Like, why did Kamala Harris have to beg Joe Rogan for an interview? He's a former MMA fighter who smokes dope on his three, four-hour long podcast. How is that the arbiter of our reality now? But that's what it's coming to, unfortunately. Those types of influencers have a massive power in our society.

Matt Jordan: One of the things I think you talked about in one of your newsletters is the need for pro-empathy framing. So, say, for example, instead of talking about the savings that DOGE is making or the funds that have been frozen, what would be a way of framing that story so that it would be pro-empathy?

Gil Duran: Well, you got to put people first and show what the impact and the effect is, and not accept the framing that oh, it's cuts and cuts are always good. That's another thing that Democrats have helped Republicans to do, is always show cuts as a good thing. One of the good examples is tax relief, a phrase that almost everybody uses now. Well, that says taxes are an affliction instead of describing it as taxes or something that makes our roads and our electricity and our system go. Taxes are what give us our civilization. So, I think putting people first, and we've seen some of that in some of these—I've seen a few stories. I think it was The Washington Post did a story about Air Force veteran who had a job training bomb detection dogs for the federal government. He hadn't done a year yet, and so he was summarily let go with a note that said that he hadn't performed, proven his necessity and was gone, even though he had had glowing assessments up to then. But it really talked about this guy's life and how he'd spent his whole life serving his country, had become an expert on how to train these dogs to do a very important job of keeping people safe, and how no thought went into this boilerplate laying off of him. So, I think we're going to see more and more stories like that. We tend to get more empathy stories when there's a disaster, when we see people suffering, when we see the consequences of things, people tune in. Even the media wants to tell those stories. And I think we're going to see—unfortunately, we are in the middle of a disaster, and we're going to see more stories about how people are impacted. Not just the people losing their jobs, but the secondary economic effects of the federal government being destroyed and all of the other people whose livelihoods depend on that. We've seen this in San Francisco with the pandemic and the shift to remote work, a lot of businesses that were downtown selling sandwiches and lunches to workers, they're done. Those people are gone now. So, there are these secondary and tertiary impacts to these kinds of decisions that will affect real people. And I think we'll be seeing more of those stories. And ultimately, it's all about people and what people are going through. And humans are interested in stories of what's happening to other people. So, we can't just make it about the cut or the policy or the win or the loss in Washington. It has to really come down to what it means to people. And the Democrats need to do a much better job of that as well.

Cory Barker: On the other side of that, we've also talked quite a bit about people avoiding the news entirely. Do you think that the framing issues that the mainstream news media may have, does it contribute to that news avoidance? Do you think that people see certain types of headlines or certain types of framing over and over again, and that's one of the reasons that they have decided to not subscribe or just opt out of news altogether?

Gil Duran: I think there's an effect on some people. I think right now we are in a moment where people are kind of exhausted and they know a lot of bad stuff is happening. They may not have an appetite to agonize over every detail. But I also think a lot of people are getting their news constantly in other ways, either through social media streams or through videos or through text messages from friends. So, I do think there's this whole other economy of how people get information now that is also detracting from the role that newspapers used to play. There was a time when the newspaper comes to everybody's doorstep in the morning or the afternoon, everybody's reading the same thing, and that becomes a ritual. Now I probably have 1,000 newspapers somehow on my iPad here. And I have three different social media streams, and I have people who signal and text me, oh, did you see this? Did you see that? And I have my newsletter subscription. So, I think we've seen a fracturing of how people get their news. And so, I'm not sure that people are tuning out as much as they are overwhelmed and showing up less in the places where they traditionally showed up to get their news. Like, cable TV, for instance, when I was working in politics 10 years ago, it was the ultimate thing to get on cable. Now, not so much. That audience is shrinking too. I was having a conversation with an older friend, and he was like, well, MSNBC needs to do this and that. I'm like, well, MSNBC isn't really what matters anymore. You got to get some like 25-year-old kid with two million YouTube followers to tell the story, and then people will hear it, or you got to get a TikToker on it. And, again, there's an opportunity there, but there's also a danger because those things can be manipulated and there's not a depth. There are some people who are doing some really smart stuff on social media. I myself have been forced to start doing these five-minute videos explaining some of the things I'm writing about, and I was very hesitant to do that. I don't like the idea of doing that, looking in the camera and explaining a thing. But I saw some research recently, and that is very much what you have to do now. And my first video got like 25,000 views and I was like, what? And there's people who get their news that way and they're not going to go and read a 2000-word piece I wrote or a 6,000-word series I wrote. But a five-minute video is just their type of information, and that's just where things are going.

Cory Barker: And that way, then to some extent, people are going to find frames that align with what they are interested in or believe, right? I mean, you're going to find people, whether it's a YouTuber or a podcaster or whatever, who are maybe framing the stories in ways that appeal to you. And there's positives to that, but there are potential challenges with that as well.

Gil Duran: Yeah, the algorithmic sorting, the fracturing of reality really because you can go and find someone saying the opposite. I mean, once you get—a reason I was hesitant on YouTube is because when I look at YouTube or Facebook, often the things that you see at pitching people are really scary and weird sometimes, like, what is that? And how does that have three million views? Some person you've never heard of before, telling some scarily framed story, or something that's obviously based on a falsehood, with a bunch of ads about some scammy medical product that clearly doesn't work if you Google it. There's a lot of different stuff out there. And, again, this fracturing means that I think nefarious forces will have a lot more power to affect minds. And we haven't solved the question yet of how we engage truthfully with people in this fractured environment in a way that encourages people to seek out truth, reality, facts, legitimacy, as opposed to entertaining narratives that lead them down a rabbit hole to anti-government conspiracy theory, anti-vaccine, beliefs, et cetera. We saw during COVID, a lot of—during the lockdowns, a lot of this stuff start to shift. A lot of yoga teachers, I noticed, went fascist. There's a book coming out called fascist yoga, right? And well, this whole health and wellness space turns out to have been prime pickings for conspiracy theorists. And it's really interesting how that happened. So, if you're using YouTube a lot, I'd say, go in there every once in a while, erase your data and start over. Don't get dragged down a rabbit hole. Be aware of what it's showing you because it'll show you stuff you like, but occasionally it'll throw in something that is like, why is that in my feed? Well, it's a hook. It's a bait where you come into this rabbit hole malware. So, it is a bit more dangerous because at the very least, for all the criticism I've doled out of editors, they are very careful to try to cure, curate a certain reality and to be careful about it. And the algorithm is not so careful. All it wants to do is keep you engaged. All it wants to do is keep you scrolling. And whatever way it can do to get there, whether it's cooking videos or anti-government extremism, it'll go there.

Matt Jordan: Well, Gil, no matter where it is that people are getting their news right now, whether it's from YouTube or legacy media, they're going to be encountering frames. And 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, Cory. I have a couple of things percolating, but I'm wondering what your thoughts are about what we just heard.

Cory Barker: Well, one of the things that Gil shared with us that I think is important to remember is that there are sources out there, often independent ones, but ones that are out there that are framing the stakes of these stories better that some of our mainstream, long-term news sources may not be up to the job right now or struggling with how this works, but there are people out there like him that are making it a lot clearer about what's going on and why we should care.

Matt Jordan: Yeah, I think this reminds me too that behind every story framing is an understanding of the story that comes through, and that it gets me to think about reading a story in different ways beyond just the surface meaning as it were but to how the language animates a whole different way of thinking about it. And that, I think, is a good takeaway for everybody to have, for understanding how the news impacts the way we see reality. 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.

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