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It is widely accepted now that there are two kinds of news in circulation in the world: relatively accurate news, and fake news. A number of cable channels and Internet sites have chosen sides, and put out either all real or all fake news. The “real” news outlets — The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN etc. — and their adherents congratulate themselves constantly for their objectivity and neutrality.
But there is a third category of information driving all of this, on both sides of the real-vs-fake debate, and that is what I call the narrative. This is not the content of their broadcasts or articles, but the assumptions that underlie their decisions on what to cover and what emphasis to give it. Contrary to what many people outside the news business believe — that these decisions are handed down by corporate executives for the working stiffs to execute — the reality is more subtle than that.
Birds of a feather flock together. New hires that go to work for MSNBC or FOX know very well where they are going to work, and as everybody wants promotions and raises no one is going to be stridently conservative at MSNBC or liberal at FOX. Instead, the smart ones listen to the water-cooler chatter, the after-work-drinks chatter, the let’s have-another-meeting chatter, and thus absorb the Narrative: the way of looking at the news budget that is going to be in harmony with, and win the approval of, one’s colleagues.
One of the worst recent examples of a questionable narrative is raging among the mainstream and liberal media right now: the assumption that the Democrats are going to be trashed in the midterm elections. Everybody assumes it. Even most Democrats assume it. The basis for this narrative is the assertion that in every midterm election since World War II, the party holding the presidency has lost an average of 26 House seats and four Senate seats.
The error in this sillygism is contained in the word “average.” You know the old saying: if you have one foot in a pail of boiling water and the other foot in a pail of ice water, on average you are comfortable. As Jeff Greenfield writes in Politico (in a piece destroying the validity of this narrative) to talk about the “average” midterm result is “misleading in the same way it would be to put Bill Gates in a room with nine indigents and conclude that their average worth was $13 billion.”
In fact there have been many, many midterm elections in the last few decades in which neither party scored significant gains. And in two midterms — 1998 and 2002 — the party holding the presidency made solid gains. Thus history clearly shows us that the fact that it’s a midterm election is not what determines its outcome. It’s more complicated than that.
But that is the purpose of agreed-upon narratives: they simplify everything, for the journalist and for the consumer of news. No need to think about the complexities because we’ve already agreed on what’s going to happen.
“The pandemic is over;” “global warming will be a problem if we don’t act soon;” “Donald Trump is the leading contender for president in 2024;” “America is close to energy independence;” “the US electorate is equally divided between Republicans and Democrats.”
These are some of the flawed narratives that fertilize our news like — well, never mind. They are seldom stated directly but they guide the choices of the journalists. And unless we all keep that in mind, all the time, we are being seriously misled. By some of our favorite people.
Sorry, none of the people delivering the “news” (right or left) are my favorite people any more.
If you want a closer version of any truth you have to look outside of the U.S. mainstream news/media environment.
I personally look to various voices in the rest of the world (India, S. America, Africa, Asia). Even then one has to question what the underlying motives/assumptions of the person reporting are, and how they might shade the facts.
A lot more work than sitting back and having the narrative fed to you.
True. But it is still possible, I think, to identify reliable publishers and professional practitioners among the rabble. Work, yes, but worth doing, no?
It’s worse than that. It’s rotten to the core & goes beyond US politics.
Related
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2022/04/each-of-us-is-striving-to-process-the-truth-of-the-disaster-in-ukraine/
When I was a teen, the History of Western Civilization texts were chock full of the deeds and misdeeds of powerful white men – and little else. I don’t remember anyone questioning the validity or objectivity of this literary approach.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Hebrew Bible (OT) is rife with factual accounts of goings-on in the ancient Middle East. But, the narrative viewpoint proved wholly unacceptable to certain educated individuals of the Enlightenment, such as David Hume, so they systematically replaced God as the general manager of the universe with – you guessed it – powerful white men!
Viewing the Bible as a collection of old stories, myths and fairy tales, these bright fellows proceeded to throw out the baby with the bath water. As newly ordained Deists, they replaced ‘dat ole’ time religion’ with something akin to ‘intelligent design’ – you know, the ‘music of the spheres’ and whatnot.
Thank God Charlie Darwin came along and kicked their collective asses. Of course, Darwin died a dejected and depressed old man; as a trained Christian cleric, he had no narrative to replace the religious one which he had embraced all his life – the cold light of Natural Selection offers little fodder with which to construct a rosy narrative..
I guess we need narratives to lend us contexts which allow us to make some sense of an otherwise bewildering existence. And narratives that gain broad acceptance become, over time, mythic in nature; they constitute our collective soul, though we are largely unaware of this process. The twilight of the gods begins when a society’s material circumstances can no longer support its mythic template.