Different strokes for different folks

Topic: Political Frames in America

Source: Fox News, Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, CNN, ABC, PBS, Various newspaper articles, and my AP government course last year.

Relation:

This particular topic relates to our anthropology class because the source behind people's different interpretations can be defined as a Frame, something we covered this week as a conceptual vantage point from where people perceive. This frame is directly related to the culture each individual lives in and their personal experiences. Frames are what allow two individuals to receive the same information and yet hear different things.

Commentary:

Politicians often use terms they know will incite more than the base definition of the word in order to coerce specific demographics of constituents into acting or thinking a certain way. The reason this works is because of an anthropological concept known as frames, a sort of mental structure that shapes the way each individual sees the world. Both ends of the political spectrum and all levels in between use frame-targeted terms, but because of the nature of frames, each sound byte from each view in the political spectrum approaches frames differently. For example, a right-wing conservative will use the term “tax cuts” and “raise taxes” in the same context and scenario as a left-wing liberal, and yet the two put very different meaning into the words than the other. The conservative uses “raising taxes” as an all-encompassing way of saying that whatever the proposed action is, it will only bring bad things, whereas the liberal expects people to think that he/she is proposing a momentary sacrifice. This can be observed practically every time congress meets, because each side proposes their bills with their own frame incorporated and arguments arise from the misunderstandings.