Journalism’s Master Narrative
Jay Rosen‘s posted a brilliant piece on the role of the “master narrative” in political reporting. That’s a term borrowed from the Post Modernists and Rosen uses it to point out that the common themes of political reporting are social constructs, not natural. Politics gets reported as a horse race not because candidates are horses in a race but because that’s the narrative form we’ve created and accepted. As Jay says in another piece, ” Journalism schools don’t teach this, but it’s nonetheless true: Facts can’t tell you how they want to be framed.” (He should know; he’s chair of journalism studies at NYU.)
This is George Lakoff territory and it needs to be more fully explored.
There’s no escaping narratives, a mortal blow to objectivity’s dream of hegemony. Narratives area how we understand, not an obstacle to understanding. But it’s important to remember that events can be incorporated into many different narratives. (My Inner PoMo wants to blurt out that events are not atoms independent of the narratives that take them up.) And, it would be useful to cast politics into alternative master narratives.
For example, maybe the elections of 2004 could be reported not as a horse race but as a conversation. Or as a form of co-evolution. Or as the way in which a community forms its will. Or as how a nation makes up its mind. Or as the story of how many-ness becomes one.
Unfortunately, we have only a little control over which narratives master us. But it’d be worth trying…
Jay has just posted a piece on how you “cover” 133 candidates for governor that touches on some of the same issues.
hi. i’m iranian. your blog is so cool.
Context, context, context
David Weinberger writes and points to sources on how a dominant narrative perspective can influence how we see things. And thus, how changing this master narrative, might change reality. Ah, language as a reality maker…..Wittgenstein would smile!…
How is this possible? How can we have only a narrow set of narratives? Two different newspaper columnists seeing the same movie post different narratives, how much more diverse can it be when there is your country’s future at stake?
I would expect a cacophany of narratives, and if that is the reality, then your basic assumptions are true in the special case, but smear out over the large. I would also expect, as the film-reviewers prove, that you could ask a random sample of 20 Dean rally attendees for a review, and get twenty different perspectives, a roaratorio of narrative streams, and, I expect, Dean himself walks away with yet another.
The notion that narrative drives and taints perception is valid (Morita Shoma: “It is amazing how different the world looks when we have changed“), but this is not the propaganda machine, it’s the self-narrative (this is why NLP is effective therapy) the perspective of the perceiver interpreted within their language, set and setting.
Fox does not control you, nor does CNN. We take from each what we like so we can stand up in front of our peers and say “Fox said this” or “CNN says today …” but you and I as rational beings know full well that Fox and CNN say lots of things, even contradictory things, and we selectively snarf what we need to try to make our narrative click with our peers.
Seems to me, the affiliation comes first. We gravitate to the fan zines of the bands we like then extract what we need to support our own narrative. We don’t, so far as I know, walk by the music magazine rack and suddenly discover that we can no longer resist the allure of Madonna.
A master narrative is more fundamental than the individual narratives that it informs. Fox and CNN may have very different stories about who’s ahead or who won the debate, but they’re both talking about politics as a race. It seems to me that that has a major effect in shaping how we talk about and think about politics.
But, you’re right (i.e., I agree with you) that we are not simply putty in the hands of the media. We do affiliate to narratives. It would be impossible to over-complicate an explanation of our relationship to the media.
Nevertheless, don’t you agree that Jay Rosen’s point is important: Journalism is informed by a master narrative, that narrative is not the only way to mediate events, other narratives would be useful.
Well, to tell you the god-fearin’ truth, I don’t watch CNN or Fox, and while it seems you do, it doesn’t seem to have tainted your ability to see through it, so basically you’re just saying that their narrative affects everyone else except you?
Besides, I think the horse race metaphor is not being carried far enought because it would likely make for a better election.
Come to think of it, do we have any actual evidence that the campaign in any way affects the outcome of an election? Even if you had, as you do, the Rolling Stone telling one narrative while Mother Jones tells another and David Weinberger tells still another (and MrG tells one too) the electorate might have more metaphors in their arsenal, but would it actually affect outcomes?
I don’t know US politics, but the vast majority of Canada votes the same way time after time unless the high-profile leaders do something inexcusably stupid (in the local narrative) and then they switch. I’m not so sure anyone is really influenced by electioneering — my parents say that back in the 50’s they’d just vote for whoever gave them the best bottle of Rye Whiskey, but now that this practice is outlawed, there’s nothing much left but isolated non-sequiteur issues delivered in sound-bytes.
But I still like the Aussie method: If we allowed betting on candidates, maybe we’d see a few more SeaBuiscuits able to get some attention, and we’d definately see more public participation.
Sorry for the short bursts; putting the kids to bed and getting spare thoughts falling out all over the place. Let me know if you need a glass of water too
There’s another possible reason for the common narrative across your mainstream media: Common language.
To a casual outside unobservant observer, when communicating to their countrymen across the entire nation, Americans inevitably describe everything in terms of Football. The election is a race for the pennant and Afghanistan was somehow not about raining death but about kicking butt, nightly reports from Vietnam of so many yards, so many downs, so many goals, even US economics is played on the grid.
Could it be your cause is really an effect? Could it be the mass (national) media anneal to speak about the leadership ‘race’ because it’s the universal language of Football?
Be honest now, if they started talking about it in terms of cornflower pollination or the mutation of tau-neutrinos, you wouldn’t have the foggiest what they were saying.
Thus, and my casual scan of the web bears this out, if you want different narratives, switch to local special-interest-group news sources. Doctors may use medical narratives to cure the economy of its ills, geologists may be prospecting for gems they can pull out above ground, goths will be talking about god only knows what, but I’ll bet it’s wearing black.
last one. promise …
Jay Rosen’s thesis, is similar to a problem in cosmology that says, “How can the universe be the same in all directions when early universe expanded so fast, particles on one side cannot communicate to particles on the other side?”
I propose that Jay is looking at it backwards. The field forms the journalists, the journalists do not shape the field. The proof is their similarity, because there is no mechanism by which they could communicate this common activity among themselves, but the field (the audience) surrounds them all. Thus I’d start looking for whether they say “Football” because they get a positive reaction, and the genetic-algorithm natural-selection by market share anneals them quickly to be speaking in the national idiom.
Scary, eh? To think that CNN and Fox just might be the Voice of America? :)
I’m liking Mr G’s train of thought here.
Football is, after all, a metaphor for war. Which to an outsider seems perfectly apt. That the US is at war with itself. The Yanks versus the Confederates. And as a fully actualized body politic, I suppose, the US, as one, will be at war, with the rest of the world. Soon. Next Monday Night. On ABC.
The elections? The Pro Bowl. The NFC vs the AFC. Which, as a game, is a wank.
I like that. Baseball is no longer the American pasttime. It’s pro football. Which is only a front for gambling anyway. Which is really the master narrative for the stock market.
I once suggested that Mike Tyson was the perfect symbol for America. A once great but fallen fighter. Corrupt. A little crazy.
But perhaps John Madden is a better fit. Loud. Fat. Funny. Engagng. Entertaining. And afraid to fly.
Gary, I hardly know where to begin. Maybe with the first in your new sequence of posts.
I’m hardly saying that the master narrative affects everyone but me. The fact that political reports are so often in the form of sports reports (horse racing often but not only) isn’t some breakthrough insight that’s new in the universe. Rosen’s article only has force insofar as we see the horse racing master narrative at play. That is, the article is premised on the idea that we can all see the truth of saying that horse racing forms the MN of political reporting.
As to which comes first, the MN or the perception or the events, this is exactly what PoMo at its best cares about. It seems to me to be a really complicated relationship in which neither comes first; rather they affect each other. So, sure, the fact that we Amurkins view lots of life in terms of competitive sports makes it easy for political reporting to be put in sporting terms. But surely the fact that we’re told over and over again that politics is a competitive sport has some effect on our understanding.
So, I think your question oversimplifies it. The field and the media form one another. (As for reporters not having any way of affecting one another directly: reporters also read newspapers.)
Finally, whether or not campaigns affect elections (boy, they sure seem to, but I’m willing to be skeptical) and whether reporting affects elections (again: do you really doubt it?), our general framework for understanding elections affects how we understand ourselves as citizens local and global.
In other words, you’d better hope we stop thinking about politics as sports because otherwise we’re going to cream you in an away game because We’re Number 1! We’re Number 1! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!
How do you like them narratives, pal!
: )
Them’s some pretty fine narratives, so let’s turn that around again and ask what would be the practical application of knowing this?
My view says, “Change your narratives and your audience will move to where the narrative fits the model they want.” and as my proof, I offer Miles Davis going electric, Bob Dylan going spiritual and Joni Mitchell going out with Jaco Pastorius.
Can you cite episodes where there has been a shift in the presiding metaphors that has then shown a substantial shift in audience perceptions? That would seem to me to be pretty compelling disproof of my audience-driven assumption.
The cynic in me thinks that it’s cognitive dissonance: You know you are powerless to stop the juggernaut of the current administration’s foreign policy, so to ease the heartstrings, those who do not face the enemy rifle-sights imagine that it’s just a game, and the youth who sign up to go “kick butt” latch onto that “it’s just a game” right up until the moment the Daisy Cutter goes off overhead. This seemed to be the pattern in WWI and WWII, and I personally witnessed this same pattern in those I saw go off to Vietnam. It is only after they’ve seen the carnage of their toys up close that they opt to leave the killingplaying field and help the was-enemy to market their coffee.
The Sports metaphor is therefore comforting because we do use war-metaphors in sports (and in most entertainment we set out to “slay” or “kill” the audience) yet no one really gets hurt — perhaps it’s like the strains of humour where the protagonist gets hit with an Acme anvil — but we can live with that image because “it’s just a game” or “it’s just TV” or whatever.
Likewise with the sports metaphor for the presidency: It is just a game to a lot of people, only to take that metaphor in the other direction, winning the pennant rarely means you will be rewarded with $90B in reconstruction contracts.
Hmmmm … reconstruction contracts … someone should investigate influence peddling in English soccer.
As a partial aside, I found an alternate universe where the WWF writes the political rhetoric for the Ontario electioneering”
Gary, I think your argument is getting a little weird. Accepting musical forms as narratives for the moment, are you saying that when Dylan went electric, audiences swarmed to him because they had already internally invented folk rock and were waiting for a performer to perform it?
I’m not arguing the opposite of what you say. I’m arguing that neither the chicken nor the egg came first. There’s a hugely complex dance going on, so that if Dylan had invented noise-rock instead of folk-rock, I don’t think he would have been flocked to, yet he also was doing something genuinely new.
If you want to see examples of how changes in metaphor or narrative affect understanding and policy, read Foucault’s “On Discipline” or just about anything else by him. He has a short book (that I’ve written a little about) about the subtle transformations in the meaning of the Greek word for “fearless speech” (the title of his book) that does an astounding job of showing the non-chicken-v-egg way that concepts morph. I think you’d like it. I did.
I’ll check it out (Foucault that is) but I was hoping for a contemporary example. People flocked both away from and to Dylan when he joined The Band, and if you listen to late night jazz radio, you’re far more likely to hear cool Miles than Bitches Brew; people go to what they like and it appears, from the entertainment examples, that a small minority actually follow a change in narrative.
Is there no contemporary example where the meaning of some word changed and that changed the popular consensus surrounding the issue? The closests I can think of is how the Cold War rhetoric has shifted and suddenly the ex-Soviets are our friends, but then, that’s not a change in narrative devices, it’s a change from showing them with guns pointed at us to having guns pointed at our enemies.
The primary issue I have with this generalization as applied to the media is that there is no “journalism” per se, there are only journalists working in an industry that is a gaggle of discreet journals. Each chooses it’s editorial policies, and then anneals to what will maximize their readership (within the limits of their own perceived integrity, otherwise they’d all become Hustler-ized) Some speak of politics as a race, some speak of politics as a conspiratorial hopelessness, and the population votes with their buying dollars as to which myth they would rather read.
Lloyd Robertson, long time anchor of CTV evening news, was asked if the media was censored over Gulf War I; he said there had been no vocal directive, but that the journalists did self-censor, toning down the ugliness of what they saw “so as not to upset the mothers and wives at home” … which may be condescending, but you get the gist of it: They phrase what they say according to their perception of what viewers want to hear.
Returning to the music industry, there is also the notion of hype: If it is seen as an exciting sports event, perhaps they hope the viewers won’t change channels when political news comes on. They hope to engage the interest and through that perhaps engage more active participation. Yearning for an ‘exciting’ metaphor, they stumbled upon the war/sports theme and it worked, so they stay with it. I can’t say for political journalism, but I have seen first hand from the inside that this is how advertising ends up saying such strange things; it’s a random walk by a blind watchmaker, fumbling in the dark until the ratings go up.
Remember that scene in Spiderman when Jamieson wants the ‘freak’ off his front page … until he gets the sales figures.
Keeping in mind that we were originally talking about narratives, not words and musical styles, nevertheless, here are a few words that have been purposefully hijacked in order to shift meanings and IMO have had an effect on how we think and talk: pirate, intellectual property, liberal, right to life, terrorism, queer, appeasement, homeland, liberation…etc. In fact, that’s exactly what Word Pirates is about; Dan Gillmor and I just launched it this morning.
Finally, I am NOT saying that a simple change in a word causes a change in culture. I’m saying that the relationship is far more complex than that. You keep arguing against a position I just don’t hold.
The dominant narrative perspective
Context, context, context .
Sorry, I thought you were saying “There’s no escaping narratives, a mortal blow to objectivity’s dream of hegemony.” and then, when challenged, you cop out (I mean that in a nice way) to say “It would be impossible to over-complicate an explanation of our relationship to the media.” and yet you keep returning to this notion of word-piracy, as you put it, and even found a website on it while already admitting that this piracy has not tainted your ability to see through it.
I’m just confused, that’s all. But for what its worth, I think we agree that poetry is power, and that the choice of words in any argument is the essence of poetry and pursuasion.
Rastafarians take this argument a bit farther, to say that “word sound power” has meanings that slant cognition, and thus they remove all negative syllables from their language.
Conversely, the art of the old Soviet Union shows repeatedly how, to remain in print, artists would speak using the accepted lexicon, but in such a way as to convey ideas these Orwellian word-piracies were meant to suppress, and we know in the aftermath of the Soviet word/thought police that they did not suppress dissidents, they only wall-papered over them.
So too today. I confess that it was me who moved Gilmor to accept that a “pirate” takes profits by brutal force whereas a “bootlegger” makes illegal copies for personal consumption and a bit of extra coin, and he told me he would endeavour to correct that distinction in his writings.
Perhaps what I am saying is not that word-piracies have no effect, but only that it is not a conspiracy of journalism — maybe it’s not so much to please their audience that they anneal to these rose-tinted metaphors but to please their sponsors.
but I’m almost certain they do it without any sinister intention. Rhetoric, on the other hand, and for example the Pirate/Bootleg rhetoric of the RIAA, is intended to bring in poetic baggage, it’s intended to cloud the discussion, and if you read Stephen Downes’ “Logical Fallacies” paper, one thing that is very striking is how, given an avoidance of that list of methods, it is impossible thereafter to find any political journalism.
The irony of your choice of slanted words in the title of “Word Pirates” is not lost on me either — these words you cite are not taken by force for exclusive profit, they are merely extended into the new meanings, bent a bit to fit the needs or the speaker’s objectives, but it’s not “piracy”, it’s more like taking a James Brown clip and making a new rap song out of it, it builds on the creative commons, it does not damage, remove or detract from the original.
While “socialist” has changed meanings in the past 60 years, it does not detract from the social-policy meaning of the original, although I will grant you that very few people remember the original meaning of “host”.
I’m failing to see the inconsistency in what I’ve written. We can’t escape narratives, but that doesn’t meant that narratives have one-sided power in shaping our thought. It’s more complicated than that.
And, yes, you can only pirate a word by extending or building on its meaning; it wouldn’t have worked for the hotel industry to start referring to its patrons as ears of corn or finishing nails. But that doesn’t change the fact that they knowingly and purposefully pirated the word.
So, I guess I’m not giving much ground this morning. (Oddly, giving ground is the only way to avoid deepening the hole you’re standing in. Put that in your fortune cookie and smoke it!)
you misunderstand the extension — using “guest” as a hotel patron adds meaning to the word, it does not steal the word away from the language; ergo, it is not piracy because piracy steals the booty for the lads and the lads alone.
using “guest” for a hotel is not “knowingly pirating a word” … it is a emphemism, plain and simple, but it doesn’t stop me from calling you a guest if I invite you to Sauble for a few beers and an all-out brawl to settle this thing once and for all. The original word is just as valuable as before, and the staff of the hotel, do you think they really think of the snotty tourist with big demands and soiled sheets as their guest? Hardly.
Many of the signs at the hotels I stay at do say “patron” however. “The patrons of this hotel” is a phrase I know I’ve seen. I’m not their patron in any sense like the way certain Baroneses were patrons of Ludwig von Beethoven, but that doesn’t dilute the word, it just extends it.
from dictionary.com …
guest (gst)
n.
1. One who is a recipient of hospitality at the home or table of another.
2. One to whom entertainment or hospitality has been extended by another in the role of host or hostess, as at a party.
3. One who pays for meals or accommodations at a restaurant, hotel, or other establishment; a patron.
4. A distinguished visitor to whom the hospitality of an institution, city, or government is extended.
5. A visiting performer, speaker, or contestant, as on a radio or television program.
6. Zoology A commensal organism, especially an insect that lives in the nest or burrow of another species.
Which of the six is the pirate?
My point, if I have one, is that language is not a fixed thing that is to be guarded and preserved in some official compendium. Language is the fluid process of sounds made to convey meaning so as to communicate, and yes, also influence. If she bats her eyes at me and lifts a skirt a bit, that’s langauge, and it’s pretty darn clear to me.
If a hotel calls me their cuttle-fish, yeah, I’ll be confused, but if they call me a scurvey land lubber, maybe that’s why I came there, who knows.
And then there’s the way the language changes because of the way people accept the meaning — May’s relatives (and May too) call me a Gweilo, but the dictionary meaning is hardly positive. I don’t take offence, all us whitey’s is called gweilo (or gweipo); like the Lenny Bruce routing about the president introducing his afro-american staff with the N-word 50 times, the words loose their sting in the reality of the circumstances.
So back to your journalists, they choose a euphemism for the droll drudgery of the primary by calling it a race, and then they get the giggles and start drawing in other puns. But tell me, if the viewer public really thought of the campaigns as a horse-race, then where are the bookies? Where are the forms? No one takes it seriously, yet give them a real horse race to watch, and they fill the movie theatres.