Tag Archives: George Lakoff

‘Now is not the time to put the environment in the back seat’ – some framing lessons for Janez Potočnik

Yet more EU politics reflections via Twitter today – I saw this from Janez Potočnik, Environment Commissioner:

'Now is not the time to put the environment in the back seat'. My speech to Greek parliamentary committees today http://tinyurl.com/3gjm5cl
07.04.2011 13:51 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@JanezPotocnikEU
Janez Potočnik

The link leads through to a speech he gave in Athens today – full text here.

The key message – that the worst of the financial crisis is over for Greece and now is the time to focus once more on environmental matters – is fair enough, but my problem is with the framing of the title of the speech. I had to read it a couple of times before I understood the point. Not for the first time in an EU comms matter, the framing is all wrong – it’s the words ‘put the environment in the back seat’ that stick in mind, while Potočnik actually wants us to do the opposite.

Anyway, to give Potočnik his due he (or one of his staff) replied to my tweet to him, and as a result I’m going to send him a copy of George Lakoff’s excellent Don’t Think of an Elephant.

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The marketing sense of an elephant – Commission Representation to Belgium

Advert at Gare du Luxembourg, Brussels

Advert at Gare du Luxembourg, Brussels

One of my favourite political books – mentioned on this blog before – is Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff. The idea behind the title is to show what happens when the wrong words are used. You read that title and of course you think of an elephant.

So yesterday I was disturbed to see the advert shown above at Gare du Luxembourg, the railway station next to the European Parliament in Brussels. It’s a large ad, perhaps 5 metres long, illuminated, and paid for by the Commission’s representation in Belgium.

I dread to think of how much the ad cost to make and to display and it gets the messages all wrong.

“Everything is Europe’s fault” starts by making the viewer think everything is Europe’s fault – a catastrophic framing error. Then the four images are just weird. Do people think that social exclusion or the financial crisis are actually the fault of the EU? Perhaps the EU did not do enough in response, but do people think the EU is to blame? Then if you follow the web link – eu4be.eu – you get to a bland institutional website of the Commission Representation that bears no resemblance to the advert.

Hopeless. Which firm gets the contracts for rubbish like this?

[UPDATE - 28.6.2010]
Gare du Midi is covered with EU posters just now – pink faces also linking to eu4be.eu, and horribly bland posters about the Belgian Presidency of the EU. OK, there is no Belgian government just now, so maybe something interesting was not possible?

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Framing the debate: Future of the BBC

BBC - CC / Flickr

BBC - CC / Flickr

There’s something deeply wrong with the ‘debate’ currently going on about the future of the BBC, and I think it boils down to the essential question: what is the value of public service broadcasting?

Two themes dominate the debate at the moment. The first is a kind of cost-benefit analysis, do license fee payers get value for money from the BBC, and should the license fee even be cut? The second is a kind of backward looking analysis, getting the BBC back to some halcyon days that probably never actually existed, all evoked by the oft-cited phrase “Putting quality first” (implying that at the moment this has not been done).

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