"Framing" is a term used often by Lakoff and others and if you want a nice example of circularity and a word trap start with that word. There is only one really good way to deal with the word framing and it is not easy. Some people have criticized Lakoff's use of the word and if you listen to their criticism you see that they are fighting certain straw men because they have never understood the basis for the word's use which is actually quite complex.
It is easy to see how this happens because Lakoff is trying to do the tough job of making complex reality seem simple enough so that his audience will stay with him. If one gets into the science behind these ideas one needs to study more than a little bit.
So we have some real irony here in that Lakoff is often the victim of the way his term "framing" has been framed in the minds of others. Such complexity and circularity is my cup of tea so read on below and I will unscramble the omelette as well as I am able.
More irony consistent with the academic world is that one of the best explanations of the way framing works has never been addressed by Lakoff. It is one of the things about the academic world I watched change during my time there (1953-2001).
When I entered the "business" way back in the 1950s there were publishing standards and standards that students had to meet if they were to get anything they wrote accepted. One clear "sin" was to omit references to others who had published similar work before you. Every paper had to have a reasonably complete historical reference chain going back to the beginnings of the chain of thought being developed. This is no longer possible because of a number of reasons not the least of which is the information glut.
The work I am referring to is that of Robert Rosen and in particular his book 1985, Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical and Methodological Foundations. Pergamon Press. This book has been republished not too long ago.
In this book Rosen deals with the core issue behind framing even thought it was Lakoff who gave the concept its wings. Rosen's concern was the way anticipatory systems worked and the human mind was but one of those systems. His point was that in order to anticipate a system had to contain a model of its "world".
In the case of the Human mind he took things a little further. He pointed out with great rigor that sensory input is useless without a framework for interpreting it. He formulated a relation called the "modelling relation" as a model for how we make these models. Once again like all complex real world systems the inbuilt circularity is inescapable.
The modeling relation has a formal representation which abstracts the complex aspects of the real system.we can visualize the relation as a real world system that udergoes change. A -----> A' . Our mind can receive sensory information that first there was A then later it became A'. The "reason" A became A' is not there, just the raw data. What he mind uses is an explanation which entails some formal system it already understands B---------->B'. So formally we encode A into B and after we manipulate the formal system to produce B' we decode back to A' and see how good the match is. If it is a good match we say we have a model of the real world in the formal system B.
This is the best we can do. It is how science works, for example. There are dangers galore here which is why science is a process of throwing away old models and replacing them with better ones. Most humans have not been trained as scientists and even many scientists are not as good as they should be at this.
This is where framing comes in. As a word it simply acknowledges this modeling relation. Sensory input "A" elicits a formal system in our memory "B" which allows us to give an interpretation to the information received. With work and training we can bring most of this to the conscious level, but as Lakoff has pointed out some high percentage of the time we operate unconsciously.
In our polarized world we know the results of this. Words like "freedom" , for example, have totally different and often opposite meanings depending on the system "B" used to model them.
For the purpose of this stage of the discussion this is enough to make my point. Lakoff is victim of the same reality he is trying to overcome and responses by very intelligent people here have made that clear.
You can not dismiss what I have briefly outlined above as mere "propagandizing"". If that were so all learning would be propaganda assimilation and we need to make finer distinctions. Teaching people to use certain formal systems to model their world is what education is all about. That is, if the reality of what is being done is an integral part of what is being taught.
There's the rub. Authoritarian systems erase that fundamental checking of how good the model is and the periodic replacement of it with a better one. Such systems exist in all aspects of life and especially in politics. They teach the model and it becomes superimposed on the real system A as if it were reality. The idea that one works with a model is lost. Guess what folks. Most of science is this way! And you expect political discourse to be better?
What has happened to Lakoff is like what happened to Marx and so many others. Their ideas are talked about around the coke machine or at the bar and soon words like "framing" mean something totally different that what they were intended to mean.
Words are a trap and you can lead a horse to water but having the critter drink is another issue. Scholarship is a nasty word in our culture. As the information glut progresses and people get their models from the media, the situation worsens exponentially.
I hope this discussion helps you reevaluate your own models. That's what our real purpose in being on this site should be.