Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [97]
Each of these interpretations represents what sociologist Erving Goffman called a frame. Frames are the principles of organization according to which people make sense of particular experiences.3 They offer the backstories that make those experiences meaningful. Applying different frames to the same experience can result in drastically different interpretations of the same event. For example, applying a comedy-routine frame to the cream pie video would suggest that the target was an actor who had consented to the pieing. Applying a political-protest frame to the same video would suggest that the target was a politician or celebrity unhappily surprised by receiving a cream pie in such a manner.
Often, people make mistakes by applying the wrong frame to a situation. Take the example of the New Mexico woman who discovered the image of Jesus in her breakfast tortilla in 1977 or any of the other people who subsequently found Jesus’s likeness in pancakes, toast, grilled cheese sandwiches, fish sticks, Cheetos, and a Kit Kat bar.4 The appropriate frame for making sense of Tortilla Jesus is basic chemistry. Frying a tortilla in hot oil produces chemical reactions that cause its surface to blacken, forming a random pattern. But the New Mexico woman and many of the 35,000 people who have visited her backyard Tortilla Jesus shrine applied a supernatural frame according to which the son of God prefers to reveal his presence in Americans’ breakfasts.
The scapegoating examples discussed in chapter 10 demonstrate more frame confusions. Medieval Europeans looked for a deliberate man-made source of the plague and found their answer in a fabricated Jewish plot. The correct frame for explaining the epidemic is biological science, of which the medieval Europeans knew little. Similarly, seventeenth-century American Puritans looked for a supernatural explanation for the disturbing behavior of some teenage girls and thus blamed witchcraft, whereas a more appropriate frame would have been human psychology.
Glenn Beck, the modern incarnation of yesteryear’s witch hunter, bases his rhetorical strategy on a related type of frame confusion. He is America’s most prominent advocate of what George Soros’s favorite philosopher, Karl Popper, called the conspiracy theory of society—the view that the explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who have planned and conspired to bring it about. Whenever Beck examines a political situation and inquires, “What is it that’s going on here?” the only explanations he entertains are secret plots by interested parties. In other words, he always employs a conspiracy frame to make sense of political events.
For example, he asked Lou Dobbs, “Why aren’t we doing anything about illegal immigration?” In his phrasing of the question, Beck had already set up the conspiracy frame. He did not consider the possibility that the U.S. government was unable to stop illegal immigration or even that it was trying to stop it. His question presumed that America’s leaders were deliberately allowing illegal immigration. As such, the only way to answer the question was to speculate about why the government had chosen to allow it and who was behind the decision. Given this frame, Beck’s theory of a corporate conspiracy to establish MexAmeriCanada was a fitting answer. Beck’s colleagues on the right also applied conspiracy frames to explain illegal immigration but came up with different answers. Pat Buchanan accused Mexico and the Ford Foundation of attempting to reconquer the Southwest. Bill O’Reilly accused racist minorities of trying to destroy the “white power structure” through population growth.
While O’Reilly and Buchanan apply the conspiracy frame on occasion when it suits their needs, Beck seems to be completely blinded by it. In virtually every program, he tries to solve some “puzzle” and always finds the answer in the conspiracy theory of society. From environmental