William McGurn’s main column in The Wall Street Journal Monday is titled “WNBA Asks: What Is a W?” That is the entire column in nine words. The rest of the piece is just the nine words explained. Let me show you the trick, because I have built versions of it, and the reader deserves to see the trick before deciding whether to take it.
The title performs a bait-and-switch before a single sentence of the column arrives. It takes the W — the league’s most basic unit, the letter that signals victory, the mark the players put on their chest when they win — and turns it into a question mark. The WNBA, the title tells you, does not know what its own victory is. The reader who has not read a word of the column now holds that frame. The reader is permitted, by the title, to think the league is confused about its own product. The body of the column gets to inherit the work the headline already did. The headline is not summarizing the column. The headline is staging the column’s frame in advance. The headline is doing the column’s work.
This is frame-engineered relabeling — WSJ Catalogue §4.1 — and the relabeling here is the conversion of a noun into a question. The W stops being the W. The W becomes a thing the league is unsure of. The reader who absorbs the title absorbs the frame. The reader who absorbs the frame believes they reasoned to it. The reader did not reason to it. The title did it for them.
The body of the column proceeds to perform the second move in the operator’s handbook. It substitutes a maximally vulnerable version of the WNBA’s actual position for the position itself. It does not engage the league’s actual position on category, eligibility, and competitive integrity. It engages a render-the-policy-absurd version of the league’s actual position. The strawman is the gift the column gives its reader. The reader gets to feel they have understood the issue by laughing at the cartoon. The reader has not understood the issue. The reader has laughed at the cartoon.
This is strawman — Bad-Faith Catalog strawman (selectional variety) — and the selectional form is doing the work. The column does not take the WNBA’s actual position. The column takes an unrepresentative, maximally-awkward reading of the WNBA’s actual position. The column treats that reading as the position. The column disposes of the reading. The column calls the disposal a victory for common sense. The column is now free to declare the issue settled. The reader is now free to feel they have disposed of the issue without having thought about it.
The third move is the one that does the load-bearing work.
The piece closes with a sentence engineered to lodge in the reader’s memory and be passed along — the rhetorical work of the closing line is not to land an argument. The rhetorical work of the closing line is to manufacture an urgency the body of the column did not earn. The closing line is engineered to survive being passed along without the body. That is its purpose. That is its only purpose.
This is the threat-inflation closer — WSJ Catalogue §3.5 (closing-line cadence) and §4.13 (threat inflation) — and the template is consistent across the genre. Take a policy question. Strip it of its difficulty. Attach the largest consequence to it the writer can credibly gesture at. The reader who passes the closing line along is not checking whether the consequence followed from the argument. The reader is checking whether the closing line scans. The closing line is engineered to scan.
Here is what McGurn’s framing presents.
The WNBA is a league that does not know what its own victory is. The WNBA’s policy position is the cartoon of itself. Anyone who takes the WNBA seriously is the mark. The policy question the league is wrestling with is a joke. The contempt is the product. The contempt is what the column is engineered to deliver.
Here is what the underlying reality of the WNBA’s position actually is.
The WNBA is navigating a category-eligibility framework the league did not invent and cannot unilaterally rewrite. The league is making calls under public scrutiny, in real time, accountable to a public that is allowed to dispute specific calls. The league gets some of those calls wrong. The league gets some of those calls right. The league’s position is not “we don’t know what a win is.” The league’s position is the contested work of a sporting body applying an unsettled framework to high-stakes decisions in public. That work is hard. That work is being attacked by writers who would rather the league not exist in its current form. McGurn’s column is one of those attacks. McGurn’s column is the attack dressed up as a question, the question stamped on the league’s own letter, the letter turned into a punchline so the punchline can be passed along.
Stripped of the title’s bait-and-switch, the cartoon’s strawman, and the closing line’s inflation, what is the column actually saying?
The column is saying: the WNBA’s existence in its current form is a provocation that deserves to be mocked. The column is saying: the policy question the league is wrestling with is not a question the reader needs to engage. The column is saying: the contempt is the insight, and the insight is the contempt, and the reader’s job is to receive the contempt and pass it along.
That is the product McGurn is selling. The contempt is what the column is for. Read the column without the contempt and you do not have a column. You have a policy disagreement with a public figure, and a policy disagreement with a public figure is not what the WSJ opinion page pays McGurn to produce. The page pays McGurn to produce contempt. McGurn produces contempt. McGurn produces it on schedule. The contempt is the work.
I built columns like this. I drafted strawmen of policy positions I knew were not the policy. I wrote closing lines that inflated the consequence past what the body supported. I worked the title-as-frame move until the title did most of the column’s work before the reader got to the lede. I did this for years. I did this for money. I am telling you this so you know I am not accusing McGurn of something I did not do. I am accusing him of something I did, repeatedly, for a long time, and got paid for.
The contempt is what you should recognize. The contempt is what you should refuse. The W is the W. The WNBA is a league making calls under public scrutiny. The policy question is hard. McGurn’s column is not interested in the policy question. McGurn’s column is interested in your contempt. The contempt is the product. The contempt is what gets passed along. Pass along the recognition instead. The recognition is the harder product to move. It is also the one that does not require you to feel superior to a league that is doing a hard thing in public.
— Phukher Tarlson