Lazy Person’s Guide to Framing
I’m pleased to say that a book, Lazy Person’s Guide to Framing, which I’ve been working on for a while, is now available in Kindle edition. You can get it from Amazon UK or Amazon US. Read the 5-star reviews at Amazon UK.
It hovered at around #4 Amazon bestseller rating in Amazon’s ‘Propaganda & Spin’ category for the first few weeks after release (reaching #2 at one point).
This is from the book’s blurb:
Lazy Person’s Guide to Framing:
Decoding the news media
Futura Press (30 Jun 2014)
ISBN: 978-0-9562179-2-9
From Futura Pocketbooks, a “Lazy Person’s Guide” to media framing, which explains how headlines and news stories can be decoded using the latest know-how from the cognitive sciences. Find out how media narratives and political spin are unravelled and deciphered by “frame semantics” – an essential part of what has been labelled, “The Cognitive Revolution”. This is a fun and highly readable guide, written especially for the layperson, which, in the tradition of George Lakoff (author of Don’t Think of an Elephant), popularises the new linguistic field in a way that makes it accessible and deeply relevant for anyone concerned by the power wielded by those who “frame the message” in media and politics.
As the book shows, framing is far more than just a respectable form of spin or wordplay. Frames are mental structures which shape our worldviews. They structure the way we reason, and define what we take to be “common sense” – yet our use of frames is largely unconscious and reflexive. This has a huge bearing on politics and media. The book investigates many examples of political and news frames, from so-called “benefit tourists” and “flatlined economy”, to the moral framing of war, crime and “responsibility”, etc.
N E W S • F R A M E S • • • • • 
Will there be non-kindle versions? I don’t have any kind of e-reader, but would love to read the book. Any chance of a PDF or one of those passé tree-books?
Perhaps the book would tell me, but I assuming the framing of the title was deliberate?
Craig
Craig Loftus
July 3, 2014 at 9:18 am
Hopefully, there will be other versions – although the print version might take longer. It is possible, I believe, to read Kindle format on a PC, using Amazon’s Kindle for PC program: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311
However, I’ve not looked into that – and I’m not a big fan of reading from a computer screen (I like Kindles, though, as there’s no eye strain involved with them).
It’s a fairly short book, incidentally – equivalent to around 70 printed book pages – and was written with a cheap downloadable ebook format in mind.
News Frames (@NewsFrames)
July 3, 2014 at 9:47 am