THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE

From the New York Times via the Houston Chronicle, Paul Krugman on media "scripts" and how they distort the news:

I've been finding The Daily Howler's concept of a media "script," a story line that shapes coverage, often in the teeth of the evidence, particularly helpful in understanding cable news.

For example, last summer, when growth briefly broke into a gallop, cable news decided that the economy was booming. The gallop soon slowed to a trot, and then to a walk. But judging from the mail I recently got after writing about the slowing economy, the script never changed; many readers angrily insisted that my numbers disagreed with everything they had seen on TV.

If you really want to see cable news scripts in action, look at the coverage of the Democratic convention. Commercial broadcast TV covered only one hour a night. We'll see whether the GOP gets equal treatment. C-Span, on the other hand, provided commentary-free, comprehensive coverage. But many people watched the convention on cable news channels, and what they saw was shaped by a script portraying Democrats as angry Bush-haters who disdain the military.

If that sounds like a script written by the Republicans, it is. As the movie Outfoxed makes clear, Fox News is for all practical purposes a GOP propaganda agency. A now-famous poll showed that Fox viewers were more likely than those who get their news elsewhere to believe that evidence of Saddam-Qaida links has been found, that WMD had been located and that most of the world supported the Iraq war.

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As Krugman says, this analysis is particularly poignant with television news. In the documentary film Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky makes the point that, given the limited amount of time between commercials, all commentary and debate must take place within an understood framework, a dominant narrative about the way things are. Anyone who makes an assertion outside of that framework sounds like a space alien from Venus. The film then cuts into a montage of shots showing Chomsky making a series of true statements that defy the conventional news media wisdom: "the Bible is the most genocidal book in human history;" "public school is a system of imposed ignorance." Though true, such statments are blasphemy within the dominant narrative and take a hell of a lot of explaining in order to justify, much more than can fit between the commercial breaks of the Sunday morning political shows. So, even if you're right, the nature of television news makes it virtually impossible to be persuasive.

As I've said before, thank god for the internet.

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