Framing

From RationalWiki

Framing is the public relations practice of simplifying and sugar-coating a complex issue to make it appeal to an assumed-intellectually-lazy constituency. A simple example is the common association of evolutionary theory and atheism to mass murder in places like the former Soviet Union.

While framing is widely practiced by Right wing demagogues, a fierce debate rages on the Left on the value of framing as a technique to reach the public, with opponents (many of them scientists) feeling it to be a form of inappropriate dumbing-down, and proponents believing it to be necessary to make esoteric issues of rationality and political matters that don't seem to affect the constituency more immediate to the public. The issue burns especially hotly in the skeptical community, where scientific rigor is sometimes perceived as intellectual snobbery to outsiders.

[edit] Framing in United States politics

Since the 1970s, conservative activists in the United States have led an extended effort to apply marketing and PR techniques to politics in an effort to sell a radical Conservative message as espoused by neoconservatives and the Religious Right to the American public. Republican activists such as Frank Luntz, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Newt Gingrich have been particularly closely associated with this movement, as well as media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.