Confessions of a BBC liberal - Times Online There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more punitive penal policy.

This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the producer/writer was a member of BBC staff. Can you imagine a BBC staff member slanting a programme towards the case for a stricter penal policy?

There’s a more generic case for agreement or disagreement with the general point of Antony Jay’s argument about the nature of the BBC’s liberal bias but he also presents arguments that point to the dual nature of many of the schematic narrative frames applied to judgments about public policy and its administration. First, his use of ‘reasonable case’ reveals an interesting duality behind the folk theory of rationality. On the one hand, ‘reasonable’ is that that conforms to strictures of Aristotelian logic (such, as the excluded middle). By this account, a ‘reasonable case’ can be made for only one of the penal policies. However, there is another use of reasonable, i.e. such that can be agreed upon in a polite society. ‘Reasonable people’ are those who do not go to extremes at the expense of local  collective harmony. What is important for the study of framing is that this polysemy is underdetermined.

There is another case of framing: imaging a BBC employee to support conservative penal policy. This, in many ways, is the nature of the liberal media bias in the UK and US. It is difficult to observe it in fact but on the other hand it is difficult to imagine a member of the media supporting a conservative position. (Stephen Colbert unwittingly if wittily summarized this with his “truth has a well-known liberal bias” jibe. He in many ways reflected the impossibility of the liberal media imagining themselves in the wrong.)

So how did we get from there to here? Unless we understand that, we shall never get inside the media liberal mind. And the starting point is the realisation that there have always been two principal ways of misunderstanding a society: by looking down on it from above and by looking up at it from below. In other words, by identifying with institutions or by identifying with individuals.

To look down on society from above, from the point of view of the ruling groups, the institutions, is to see the dangers of the organism splitting apart – the individual components shooting off in different directions until everything dissolves into anarchy.

To look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed, is to see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny.

… The reason for the popularity of these misunderstandings is that both views are correct as far as they go and both sets of dangers are real, but there is no “rightâ€? point of view.

The most you can ever say is that sometimes society is in danger from too much authority and uniformity and sometimes from too much freedom and variety.

Here’s another case of a discourse participant intuitively reflecting on the contrasting nature of two seemingly contradictory frames that are both available in the framing inventory to the speaker/conceptualizer. The last two paragraphs outline a view of public rationality that is strangely reminiscent of Lakoff’s in Moral Politics. Perhaps, neither places enough emphasis on the negotiated nature of these ‘framings’ but both describe the same conceptual phenomena that individuals have to deal with when they enter public (high-stakes) discourse (whether as observers - who rarely remain passive, anyway - or participants).

The second factor that shaped our media liberal attitudes was a sense of exclusion. We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas about how the country should be run. Being naive in the way institutions actually work, we were convinced that Britain’s problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge of the country.

What he says here has broader consequence for the understanding of the discourse nature of group identity. Quite obviously this example of exegetic framing (a rather common trope) is explicating some of the principles underlying the social psychology but also the social discursivity of group cohesion and group identity.

[A personal note: As an occasional journalist-commentator who has been asked to critique administrations and an educational-administrator who has perpetrated organizational structure upon others, I can definitely relate to this description of a situation. However, it doesn’t apply to exclusively to journalism but rather to any public discourse dealing with organizational configuration. Even those who ‘know’ how institutions work are only too keen to criticize other institutions on ‘rationalistic’ grounds.]