READER SURVEY: Do You Want More Talking Points?
Tell me how I can best serve you.
Tell me how I can best serve you. Do you want help making sense of the firehose of news? Do you want talking points? Do you want help setting the agenda and choosing which stories to react to and which to ignore? Or all of the above? Help me decide how to move forward.
The Last Mile Delivery Problem
In 2014, I was talking to my mentor George Lakoff and he said, “Lots of people have read the book (Don’t Think of an Elephant), so why don’t people do what I told them to do?” My response was, “Because it’s HARD. I have read 14 of your books, and I still don’t know how to do what you are telling us to do.”
After twenty years of working in campaigns and communications, I had become frustrated with our community’s inability to express our beliefs to American voters. In 2011, I spent three months at UC Berkeley with Lakoff just to learn the neuroscience behind framing. I went back in 2014 to work with him for a full year in an attempt to close the gap between the wisdom in his discoveries and the ability of political communicators to apply it in their day-to-day work.
I figured out what it is about framing that communicators need to know and created a training program that would help people learn it easily and intuitively. That took me more than four years. Thousands of people have taken that training. I have spent more than four years writing Reframing America here on Substack about how brains work, how the public debate works, how to frame issues, and sometimes just what words to say. The greatest response by far has been to the posts where I just give people the words to say.
Figuring out how to frame what is happening in real time is hard. It’s very hard. Republicans can do it because they have invested billions and built entire industries around the sole purpose of manipulating how people see the world. I teach people how to frame in the hopes that they can figure out how to apply it in real time, but truth be told, I don’t even know if I can do it. And If I can’t do it with all of my training, how can I expect anyone else to?
I don’t know if I can handle trying to make sense of the firehose of news in any semblance of real time. If I try, I might not be able to do much other work which means that I will need a whole lot more paying subscribers. That’s not easy given that people are now being asked to subscribe separately to every columnist, author, podcaster and TV channel.
I want to use the time I have in the most effective way possible. I need to know how I can best close that gap, solve that “last-mile delivery problem,” between the window into the human mind provided by Lakoff and the field of cognitive linguistics and the never-ending problems of “what should I say right now” and “how can we get the American public to pay attention to what we believe to be important and to see it from our perspective?
So here is what I ask of you: tell me what you need.
Reader Survey
Which of the following would you find most useful?
How framing works. (Most of what you get now.) Cognitive science tells us important things about how language influences what people think and believe.
Taming the news. I divide the firehose into noise and news and sort the news into major through lines we can track and manage without being overwhelmed.
What to say. If I had one idea to plant into the public psyche or my neighbor’s ear today or this week, what would it be?
Framing the news. Everybody is talking about X. How do I talk about X to get people to think about X from our perspective so they will conclude that we are right about X?
Agenda setting. Given what is in the headlines, what should I respond to or boost and what should I ignore? What should I amplify because it isn’t in the headlines but should be?
Apparently only subscribers can take the surveys. You can subscribe here if you like!
Thank you so much! I will let you know how this all works out and what I decide to do. The Substack survey tool is very limited, so please feel free to elaborate in the comments!
In solidarity, always,
Thank you for reading Reframing America! My work is completely financed by subscribers like you! All content is free, but many people choose to become paying subscribers to help support this mission of improving how we communicate! Use this link to subscribe or upgrade!
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Contact me at antonia@antoniascatton.com or (202) 922-6647
You hit on a key issue here:
“…people are now being asked to subscribe separately to every columnist, author, podcaster and TV channel.”
The NON-mainstream media, independent journalists and other expert, content producers need a distribution solution/model that makes it easier for consumers of information to not deal with so many silos and costs. Substack also holds near monopoly control and when they allowed Nazis on their platform I moved to Beehiiv but most did not.
Too much of our approach across so many aspects of our society is zero sum vs growing the pie…
But thank you for creating this survey and for your invaluable posts—more people need to know about framing AND definitely more of us need to employ it.
It's so frustrating that dem campaigns don't use Lakoff's teaching in their canvassing and outreach materials. I made my own talking points outline for canvassing because the handouts for the 2024 election weren't even remotely close to the messaging we needed. How do we get better buy in from the teams who are writing up these materials? It would be helpful to get more action items but it's so hard to counter the coordinated talking points that get sent out around all of the right wing influencers.