Lazy Person's Guide to Framing: Decoding the News Media

From Futura Pocketbooks, a Lazy Person s Guide to media framing, which explains how headlines and news stories can be decoded using the latest know-how from the cognitive sciences. Find out how media narratives and political spin are unravelled and deciphered by frame semantics an essential part of what has been labelled, The Cognitive Revolution . This is a fun and highly readable guide, written especially for the layperson, which, in the tradition of George Lakoff (author of Don t Think of an Elephant), popularises the new linguistic field in a way that makes it accessible and deeply relevant for anyone concerned by the power wielded by those who frame the message in media and politics.

As the book shows, framing is far more than just a respectable form of spin or wordplay. Frames are mental structures which shape our worldviews. They structure the way we reason, and define what we take to be common sense yet our use of frames is largely unconscious and reflexive. This has a huge bearing on politics and media. The book investigates many examples of political and news frames, from so-called benefit tourists and flatlined economy , to the moral framing of war, crime and responsibility , etc.

Author, Brian Dean, has previously written regular columns for The Guardian newspaper, The Idler and Sleaze magazines, among others. He is the creator of the counterculture magazine and website, Anxiety Culture (which was praised by the Guardian, BBC online and the likes of Robert Anton Wilson) and has, for several years, written a popular blog on the topic of news and political framing.