Breaking the Frame: Susan Nall Bales has a lesson for progressive groups: Message matters.

Susan Bales, president of the nonprofit FrameWorks Institute, lets environmental groups know that "they can't fix government policies until they first fix themselves." And according to the author, Bales suggests that groups "must become acutely conscious of the stories that they're telling and the hidden chains of reasoning their narratives can set off in the public mind."

Susan Bales applies over forty years of social-science research toward an approach called "strategic frame analysis" designed to "help progressive groups understand public prejudices and thereby better advance their objectives." Bales sees that people have "deeply held preconceptions or "frames" that render their views almost impervious to new, contradictory information." "It's not enough to present evidence," Bales says. "You have to change the frame."

"One premise of FrameWorks is that Americans overwhelmingly get their information about public affairs from the news media, which in turn establishes persistent frames." FrameWorks staff carry out surveys and analyze past media coverage of an issue to come up with patterns. They use methods such as cognitive interviewing, polling and focus groups in an attempt to find "hidden reasoning" behind the way people respond to a particular issue.

The author, Chris Mooney, refers to a running theme in Bales work which is that the "media's penchant for anecdotal or human-interest stories distracts from a more systemic presentation of social problems. In fact, such coverage places implicit blame on individuals, rather than government or society, for hardships and is thus inherently hostile to liberal policy solutions."

Bales worked for twenty years in communications and was involved with women's and civil-rights issues. Her work led her to a place where she "began to doubt whether the news coverage she was getting was actually advancing the issues she cared about." At this time she came across a theorist Shanto Iyengar who made reference to how most media coverage uses "episodic," rather than "thematic" frames. After learning more about this Bales concluded that "advocacy groups and the foundations that fund them weren't integrating this knowledge of how the mass media affects political debate into their public-relations practices. No wonder they were getting burned."

This led Bales to a 1995 Brandeis University conference that she organised called Media Matters: The Institute on News and Social Problems. She told the audience about a need to "rethink media" by individuals describing, analyzing, and intervening in social issues. Her paper suggested to foundations that they re-examine the stance of "we don't fund media" paradigm, and suggested that "more media coverage wasn't necessarily better." In the end "by putting out ill-conceived messages and reinforcing stereotypes that hurt their ultimate objectives, liberal groups were engaged in nothing less than "the media equivalent of friendly fire."

According to Mooney, "the people at FrameWorks characterize themselves as serious social scientists who happen to be progressives but won't work for either political party. They believe that if liberals and conservatives had equal access to resources and state-of-the-art techniques for getting their messages out, liberals would win more battles than they currently do. Strategic frame analysis, says UCLA's Gilliam, is "totally nonpartisan." "We can't control who asks us to apply it to their problems. We could do tobacco if we wanted to. We haven't," he quickly adds, "and we probably wouldn't."

There are some who might suggest that the methodology used by FrameWorks contributes to an "ever-escalating public-relations arms race." FrameWorks works under the premise of "enhancing democracy by opening minds that have been dulled by spin, or constantly forced into confrontational and partisan modes of thought.