The Anatomy of Blame: What the Media Missed and Why It Mattered

What Constitutes Blame in Political Discourse?

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Blame is more than a reaction to failure; it is a form of meaning-making that attributes responsibility for a perceived wrong. As Christopher Hood (2011) defines it in The Blame Game, “blame is taken to mean the act of attributing something considered to be bad or wrong to some person or entity” (p. 6). But blame, properly understood, is not merely an emotional discharge or a political weapon—it is a conceptual structure that depends on two precise conditions being met: the perception of avoidable harm and the attribution of agency.

The first condition, Perceived Avoidable Harm (PAH), refers to the belief that an event or outcome was not only negative, but also preventable. Hood describes this as “some element of perceived and avoidable harm or loss—something is seen as being worse for some person or group than it could have been if matters had been handled differently” (2011, p. 6). This perception does not require that the harm be objectively verifiable. What matters is that it is understood as such by someone—that is, the public, the media, or a political actor.

The second condition is Perceived Responsibility (PR)—the belief that a specific actor had the agency, capacity, or duty to prevent that harm and failed to do so. As Hood puts it, blame also involves “some attribution of agency—that harm was avoidable because it was caused by acts of omission or commission by some identifiable individual or organization” (2011, p. 6). This can apply to a named individual, a government body, a private institution, or even an abstract system.

But what transforms these elements into a fully-fledged act of blame is their convergence in a single moment of perception—what Hood labels time t₁. The perception of both harm and responsibility must be contemporaneous. This is not about retroactive analysis or speculative foresight; it is about the coincidence of perceived damage and the naming of a responsible agent in the present.

This three-part structure—PAH, PR, and t₁—offers a precise diagnostic tool for identifying blame in language. It enables analysts to distinguish between dissatisfaction, criticism, and true acts of blame. What follows in this article applies Hood’s PAH–PR framework to a politically charged op-ed published in Blaze Media in November 2024. The goal is not simply to extract critical remarks but to isolate moments in the article where blame, as a formal structure, is activated—where harm is perceived as preventable and someone is named as responsible in the same breath.

Such moments matter. In political discourse, blame is never a neutral gesture. It reshapes public memory, reframes accountability, and redirects narratives of failure. By attending closely to how blame emerges in specific language choices, we can better understand not just what went wrong, but who gets held responsible—and why.