Facts and frames

[BurtWorm]

Lakoff argues in Don't Think of an Elephant that facts are powerless, usually, when they contradict a frame. For example, you can bring Ken Starr out from behind a potted palm to personally tell a freeper you're arguing with that the Clintons were never found guilty of any wrong-doing whatsoever in Whitewater and that will have absolutely no effect on the freeper's belief that Whitewater was worse than Watergate in the annals of American political corruption. You can lay out every fact to refute the notion that Iraq had anything at all to do with 9/11, and every fact to refute that Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction, and wingers will continue to insist that the war in Iraq was a necessary and logical action in the war against terror.

So what frame is preventing so many people at DU from accepting that Jeff Gannon/Jamie D. Guckert is not going to bring down the Bush administration, despite so many facts pointing to his being a non-player?

[iamjoy]

1. Outrage

because we feel the Gannon scandal SHOULD bring down the White House.

But, nothing will ever bring down Dubya because the Republicans control Congress so they will never investigate their own. Bush could directly commit murder (as opposed to indirectly which he has already done) and they would not call it part of a liberal smear campaign if we called for an investigation.

[BurtWorm]

3. That's a very good answer.

I think Gannon rage is misdirected outrage against Bushism/Republicanism. Gannon is a target the left actually hit. I wish we could focus our outrage on the real bastards and bring them down.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. Oh gannon will not bring the administration down

it is just one more scandal to add to the list of scandals that point to a very corrupt administration... to put it midly.

It would have an effect IF the Republicans had any morals whatsoever and love of country, but the republicans in charge, more properly teh Neo Cons, don't believe in democracy or have any love of the same country I came to...

So yuo are right Gannon will not bring the administration down but boy when this is over Historians will have fun with him... on that you can count

[Igel]

4. Because people don't accept stray facts.

"Frame" is a nice buzzword. Never been into advocacy linguistics.

"Beliefs" is probably a better way of putting it. "Hopes", too.

Stray facts that don't fit into established belief systems, esp. when they're built on hopes, don't get accepted. Facts have to be relevant and consistent with previously accepted facts; how people construe relevance is not what Lakoff does. It's what Stalnaker and Roberts (and many others) do.

Frequently, when people construe relevance in a way that isn't consistent with facts that they don't yet know, it's difficult to get them to reject that construal when those facts become known. It's their insight, their conclusion, and they don't want to be wrong.

Moreover, it's also hard to get people to reject presupposition if they didn't reject it when they heard it. In "Have you stopped beating your wife?" questions (and many other kinds), there's an presupposition "you're beating your wife" that you have to make to understand the question. There's no assertion, there's no claim, there's no facts. Just presupposition. And we initially assume it's true, and then consciously have to deny it. If we miss the conscious denial part, we accept it as true, and it's hard to correct.