Political Framing In Recent Bush Proclamation
By: Natan Pakman
On May 23, 2006, President Bush proclaimed June 2006 as Great Outdoors Month. Effectively, this was a call “On all Americans to observe this month with appropriate programs and activities and to spend time enjoying the outdoors.” I have just summed up the basic nature of Great Outdoors Month, and yet the White House released a 379 word proclamation to the press.
Political Framing is about word connotations, and those words need only appear near each other to qualify as pertaining to the same frame, which one could say is what an audience “feels” when a politician speaks. I’ll here present two sentences from the proclamation and the words and terms intended to create a positive frame:
1. “Our Nation’s varied landscapes include sandy beaches, expansive forests, emerald waters, and towering mountains.” Varied recalls diversity, expansive evokes the large amount of space, emerald connotes cleanliness, and towering implies strength.
2. “To ensure that our natural heritage remains a source of pride for all our citizens, my Administration is committed to conserving America’s public lands and natural resources and pursuing environmentally responsible initiatives.”
Natural heritage is an interesting merger of terms, natural referring to the environment and heritage referring to tradition. Pride is a typical Bush Adminstration term, and committed implies time-honored allegiance. However, the combination of the terms conserve, natural, and environmentally responsible begs the question, why doesn’t the President, instead of releasing drawn-out examples of positive frames that show little knowledge of the actual environmental problems at hand, discuss how to pursue environmentally responsible policies, especially since he himself claimed the US was “addicted to oil,” not to mention the increasing scientific evidence for global warming?
Natan Pakman
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