New Media, Political Campaigning 
1 Comment Framing the Health Care Reform Debate.
I’ve written a paper about how framing shapes the health care reform debate in the U.S. I think it shows the tip of the iceberg, from what is possible with ‘Digital Methods’, a very interesting approach, that uses software to research society. It also includes some ‘old-fashion’ opinion polls from Harris, with quiet disturbing results. Did know for example that 37 percent of adult Americans believe that “the proposed reforms would create panels that would decide who should live and who should die”?
Abstract
After a widely applauded presidential campaign, enabled by grassroots and rhetoric, Barack Obama finds himself in a less comfortable position in the ongoing debate around the American health care reform. Linguist George Lakoff (2009a) argues that the decline of support on this issue is caused by an elaborate framing campaign of conservatives, and the lack of framing by the Obama administration. With the help of special software, I examined three spheres, the Web sphere, blogosphere and newssphere. This (limited) research mainly confirms Lakoff’s theories, but also show that Obama’s counter-frame is becoming more effective, which arguably led to mystification and misinformation (Castells, 2009).
You can find my paper here, or click on the read more button (I encountered some trouble with the layout in wordpress, there seems to be a big difference in some browsers)
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