"There's Waldo!": The Problem with Framing

I am sure that everyone remembers picking up their favorite book from the elementary school library, Where's Waldo, and the disappointment they had when their know-it-all friend, Steven, would point out where Waldo was before you even made it to the southern hemisphere of the page!

Framing acts like your friend Steven. As you can see, I included a picture of a page from a Where's Waldo book where I have already circled Waldo.

Like framing, my circle draws your eye to where I want you to look, which makes your job of searching through look-alikes for a half hour way easier and less rewarding. Also, I may have even directed you to the wrong Waldo, you don't know, you can't see the picture very well!

From media, we get an indelible red circle around the points THEY want to emphasize in a story previously concocted to be dramatic enough to hold our attention and get our money.

Let's refer to the Waldo picture again: the look-alikes in the picture all point us in the right direction of Waldo, you get warmer and warmer by ruling each one out. If media were to give us the bare and useful bones of a story (the look-alikes), without the dramatic adjectives and hyperboles and the opinions drawn for us (the red circle), we would be able to rule out more and more (getting warmer and warmer by ruling out the look-alikes) until we come to the conclusion of what we believed on our own (finding Waldo for ourselves).

But instead, we get an already circled Where's Waldo picture, our minds are made up and we learned nothing.

Thanks Steven...