Stories

Atrios over at Eschaton offers a rare piece of extended commentary:

News, current events, whatever, is an ongoing story about the state of reality. It's an ongoing story with a cast of characters, a set of plotlines, a backstory. It's story told by thousands of different unreliable narrators, and every individual hears some combination of these narrators and then roughly synthethsizes it all into a basic narrative about what's going on. For a long time conservatives have had a very large and loud narrative generation machine, which has for its viewers and listeners been able create the narrative by emphasizing certain facts (true or not), by creating bad guys and good guy, by determining what the important stories of the day were, by inserting certain basic assumptions into the debate, etc. In other words, to write the story. And, this machine has been loud enough to have a big impact on how the less partisan media told their story, too.

Click here for the rest.

I hit on this subject only last month myself. The point, for me, is that, while most mainstream journalists honestly believe that they are trying to report objective reality, the truth is that they are only contributing to an overall narrative that is constructed, shaped, and molded by numerous influences, conservatives being one of the stongest, but reporters do their fair share as well, skewing factual events toward their own subjective understanding of that overall narrative. This idea isn't at all a new one; it's been understood in academia for a couple of decades at least. Strangely, well educated journalists either just don't get it or purposely ignore it--I'm not sure which. As long as journalists stay away from consideration of this sense of constructed narrative and how it is used in political debate, as long as they pretend that what they report doesn't play a part in this game, they're pawns of opinion manipulators. That screws America. Bigtime.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$