No Peace for Obama: How the Prize Might Harm His Image
The Project on Race in Political Communication
The collective groan you heard Friday morning came from the West Wing of the White House. As it was announced that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, his advisers scrambled to figure out, ironically, how they could possibly spin the news to minimize the negative effects. For his part, the president was appropriately reserved, noting essentially that he did not deserve the award. That may be an accurate assessment, but what is more important than the decision of the prize committee are the potential negative political effects. In our assessment, President Obama is in deep trouble on this one.
We are certainly not unique in this assessment, of course. Several thoughtful ideas have been put forth in the past two days about the negative side of this honor (see here and here for just two examples). From our perspective, though, the trouble is not about whether the award was "deserved" or "earned," and it does not really stem from the attacks of folks like Rush Limbaugh or Michelle Malkin (both of whom thumped the president for his award on Friday). The trouble is not with the AM talk radio/Fox News crowd. There is no political ground to be lost to those folks because there is likely nothing that the president could do to win those folks over. David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel do not lose any sleep over the direct effect of what those folks think or say.
The trouble is with the indirect effects of such attacks, and the president's advisers know it. Specifically, there must be concern about the degree to which winning this award plays into the frame of Barack Obama as "other."
We have written about framing before (see here and here and here, for example). Along with agenda setting and priming, it is is one of the most notable theoretical advancement in media effects research in the past two decades. At its most basic level, framing involves putting information into context (and recognizing that information is processed contextually). And while much time has been spent arguing over what frames have been employed in given political contexts, one need not get hung up on the intent of persons to construct frames to understand their effects.
Even though dozens (hundreds?) of framing studies have been published in the last 25 years, perhaps the most clear examples of framing effects comes from one of the earlier studies. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman reported results of some framing studies in a 1981 issue of the journal Science. They presented alternate versions of a problem to participants who were randomly assigned to one of two the groups. The exact factual elements of the choices presented to participants was the same, but the way that the choices were framed differed. The results were striking (well beyond conventional levels of statistical significance).
Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:Nearly three-quarters of the participants who were presented with this program (72%) chose Program A.
If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
If Program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved.
Which of the two programs would you favor?
The other group got the problem with the same description, but the program response options were as follows:
If Program [A] is adopted 400 people will die.Participants who got this formulation had a near reversal of the other group: 22% of them chose Program A, while 78% chose program B.
If Program [B] is adopted, there is 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and 2/3 probability that 600 people will die.
The only difference between the options, of course, is the way that they were presented. For both, Program B is the riskier choice, so when folks first read that they can "save" 200 people (a positively framed certainty), they are more likely to avoid the risk, but when the first option is worded as a certain negative ("400 people will die"), there is a greater likelihood to gamble and try to save everyone, even if the odds are poor.
So what does this have to do with Barack Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize?
Much (certainly not all) of the persistent criticism of President Obama over the last two years (beginning in the Democratic primaries, lest you think Republicans invented this) has centered on his "otherness." As we have noted a number of times in our weekly blog over the years, this certainly cannot be considered to be race neutral. But even if the intent is rooted in bigotry or racial resentment, it is easier for Americans to accept a theme of "otherness" about a person of color or a White woman than a White man because of the way we were (and are) socialized.
So while Limbaugh, Beck and the rest of the president's most vocal opponents are largely irrelevant to the base of support that the president and his Democratic allies need to govern and win reelection, their language and imagery depicting Obama as "not one of us" has a great potential to take hold tacitly and shape the way that subsequent information about him is processed.
Because President George W. Bush was often depicted as not being very bright, every verbal gaffe, no matter how small, became exaggerated in the American imagination and served to reinforce that image of him in a way that such a mistake would not function with, for instance, this president, who is almost universally recognized as very bright, even by his opponents. Similar characteristics are true of other notable public figures: John Kerry as flip-flopper, Al Gore as boring, Bill Clinton as manipulative, John McCain as out-of-touch, etc. When Richard Nixon went to China in 1972, he was not widely criticized or suspected of pandering to the communists because there was no existing frame in place that would facilitate such a "reading" of the event. A president who was not such a staunch anti-communist would likely not have fared nearly as well.
So when Barack Obama is honored by "foreigners," particularly those rooted in democratic socialist nations like those in Scandinavia, it provides additional "evidence" of his otherness to those who are predisposed to believe that he "hates America" or, at least, is not proud to be American. While there are only a minority of Americans who consciously hold those attitudes, there is a real potential for the frame to take hold subconsciously because it is so often and persistently employed.
Worse for Obama and his supporters is the fact that the president is planning to go to the ceremony to accept the award in December. The video and still imagery that will emerge from that event also has the potential to contribute to the reinforcement of the "otherness" frame. Supporters of the president will understandably argue that this is not "fair," or that it is a function of an overly simplistic binary model of "patriotism" that holds that anything Europeans like must be bad for America. But the power of framing lies in the fact that it is not at all reliant upon "logic" or meaningful empirical evidence to function. Quite to the contrary -- frames may be developed intentionally, but their effects wholly rely on subconscious processing of information within their parameters.
Think about it this way: If Tversky and Kahneman would have presented participants with both types of response options, there would have been no framing effects. It is likely that the results would have been closer to 50% because then participants would reason through the more objective options (i.e., Is it worth taking a risk to try to save everyone, or should we go with the definite plan that saves 200, even though 400 will still die?). Since each participant was only presented with one pairing, though, the framing mattered (a lot).
Much like racist messages, when frames are exposed and brought to consciousness they lose much of their potential for effectiveness. But so long as the connections between the attacks on President Obama as having a fake birth certificate, refusing to wear a lapel pin, being a socialist (or fascist or Muslim or Black liberation theology Christian), preferring "czars," paling around with terrorists, etc. are not connected as being part of an "otherness" frame, seemingly benign or even positive events like receiving an international award for peace can very much work to reinforce and perpetuate negative attitudes about the president.
In this context, it is likely that the president would have preferred to have gotten out of bed Friday morning to find that he had to make a choice about possible responses to combat an unusual Asian disease.
Author's Website: www.RaceProject.org
Author's Bio: Stephen Maynard Caliendo is associate professor of political science at North Central College. Charlton McIlwain is associate professor of media, culture and communication at New York University. They are co-authors of the forthcoming book "Race Appeal: The Prevalence, Purposes, and Political Implications of Racial Discourse in U.S. Electoral Politics" (Temple University Press 2010) and co-editors of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Race & Ethnicity (Routledge 2010). Their work has been presented at numerous scholarly conferences and published in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics and the Journal of Black Studies. They have co-authored a number of articles in specialized encyclopedias. Stephen holds a Ph.D. in political science from Purdue University and focuses his research in the areas of political communication and political psychology. He is the author of "Teachers Matter: The Trouble with Leaving Political Education to the Coaches" (Praeger 2000), has presented his work at major conferences and has been published in The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics and The Journal of Research and Science Teaching. He has authored or co-authored numerous entries in specialized encyclopedias such as Polling in America, The Encyclopedia of Human Rights, and The Encyclopedia of Political Communication. He is a regular analyst for international, national, state and local media outlets. Charlton holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Oklahoma and focuses his research on the use of racial appeals in political communication, including the semiotic construction of racial appeals in language and visual images; the effects of racial appeals on public opinion and voting behavior; framing and priming effects of race in various media; and the experiences of minority political candidates. Other work has focused on issues of death and dying in everyday life and popular culture. He is also interested in the philosophy of communication and research methods. He is the author of "When Death Goes Pop" (Peter Lang 2004) and "Death in Black and White" (Hampton 2003). His work has also been published in journals such as Semiotica, TAMARA Journal of Critical Postmodern Organizational Science, American Behavioral Scientist, Communication Quarterly, and others. He is frequently asked to provide analysis for international, national, state and local media.
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