Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Conventional Narrative, 2004
The Associated Press came out with its list of the year's top stories yesterday, just in time to be widely disseminated over the holidays when there's little other news to report. And the list is symptomatic, it seems to me, of precisely what's wrong with mainstream media coverage of the world nowadays--it treats complicated stories as if they were simple.
Take Number One: "U.S. Election." The raw vote total on November 2 is one story, but only one, and not the only one that mattered. There was the influence of corporate cash on the electoral process; the Swift Boat Liars and how their story propagated; the vote-Bush-or-die scare tactics from prominent Republicans; the debates; the allegations of vote fraud by both parties; the exit-poll controversy; the Ohio recounts; and that's just off the top of my head. You could argue that the influence of the religious right and the way their views shaped the electorate and George W. Bush himself, is a story equally as important as Bush's victory itself. But the AP conveniently lumps it all under the heading of "U.S. Election."
The same is true of story Number Two, "Iraq." How many sub-stories are there beneath that umbrella? At least the AP editors had the sense to recognize that Abu Ghraib (checking in at Number Four) was a separate story, but there could have been lots of others--the continued insurgency, the handover of power, the battle of Fallujah, or Rumsfeld's dance around the soldier's question about armor. All of these stories shaped the meaning of "Iraq" in 2004, some more significantly than others.
So it's no wonder that the biggest news stories are dimly understood. Following the broad narrative is like skimming a literary novel to get the plot. At the end, you'll understand some of it, but you will have missed much of what the author put in for you to get. So it is with news coverage. If all you take in are the broad outlines of the big story--the election or Iraq--without trying to grasp the other elements of the story, you will have missed much of the story's meaning. If you do that with a novel, well, no harm is done. Do it with a major news story, however, and bad consequences can ensue. Like, for example, reelecting the worst president in American history.
The trouble with stories like Iraq and the election is that they're ongoing stories, which are fabulously hard for the mainstream media to tell effectively. When you have 45 seconds for a story, there's no time for context, and in ongoing stories, context is the whole ballgame. Where the AP list succeeds, however, is where the mainstream media still excels: at spot news stories, discrete events not part of a broader continuum--stories with a conventional narrative, beginning, middle, and end. The AP's list includes the Florida hurricanes, the deaths of Yasser Arafat and Ronald Reagan, the train bombings in Madrid, and the seizure of a school in Russia followed by the killing of over 300 hostages. The Boston Red Sox World Series victory even got one first-place vote in the AP editors' poll.
While all of those stories seem significant at this moment, they won't matter one whit a year from now. But some of the glossed-over sub-stories in the broader narratives about the 2004 election, Iraq, and the economy will still matter--and in some cases, remain matters of life and death, either metaphorically and literally.
When they're not being incompletely reported, the big stories are often underreported. If big umbrella titles like "U.S. Election" and "Iraq" were worthy of the AP's 2004 top ten, surely "the economy" should have made it, too. Like the election and Iraq, it's also a constellation of significant stories: the murky employment picture, the ballooning deficit, outsourcing--pick your favorite flavor. How basic pocketbook issues that affect every American every day could miss the list would seem mysterious if we hadn't already discussed the difficulty of covering big, ongoing stories comprehensively.
I'm not a journalist; I'm just a news consumer with an attitude. And since this is entirely my opinion, I could be wrong. But it seems to me that as a meta-commentary on what mattered most to the American media in 2004--and how they saw what mattered most--the AP top ten list is enlightening.
Quote of the Day: From Kid Oakland at Daily Kos, quoted by Ryan at The Higher Pie: "I've been reading some of the noxious media tripe about attempts all over, I guess, to put the 'Christ' back in 'Christmas'. . . . I'm sorry, but I'm still waiting for them to put the Christ back into Christianity." World O'Crap takes down more of the noxious media tripe here.
The Associated Press came out with its list of the year's top stories yesterday, just in time to be widely disseminated over the holidays when there's little other news to report. And the list is symptomatic, it seems to me, of precisely what's wrong with mainstream media coverage of the world nowadays--it treats complicated stories as if they were simple.
Take Number One: "U.S. Election." The raw vote total on November 2 is one story, but only one, and not the only one that mattered. There was the influence of corporate cash on the electoral process; the Swift Boat Liars and how their story propagated; the vote-Bush-or-die scare tactics from prominent Republicans; the debates; the allegations of vote fraud by both parties; the exit-poll controversy; the Ohio recounts; and that's just off the top of my head. You could argue that the influence of the religious right and the way their views shaped the electorate and George W. Bush himself, is a story equally as important as Bush's victory itself. But the AP conveniently lumps it all under the heading of "U.S. Election."
The same is true of story Number Two, "Iraq." How many sub-stories are there beneath that umbrella? At least the AP editors had the sense to recognize that Abu Ghraib (checking in at Number Four) was a separate story, but there could have been lots of others--the continued insurgency, the handover of power, the battle of Fallujah, or Rumsfeld's dance around the soldier's question about armor. All of these stories shaped the meaning of "Iraq" in 2004, some more significantly than others.
So it's no wonder that the biggest news stories are dimly understood. Following the broad narrative is like skimming a literary novel to get the plot. At the end, you'll understand some of it, but you will have missed much of what the author put in for you to get. So it is with news coverage. If all you take in are the broad outlines of the big story--the election or Iraq--without trying to grasp the other elements of the story, you will have missed much of the story's meaning. If you do that with a novel, well, no harm is done. Do it with a major news story, however, and bad consequences can ensue. Like, for example, reelecting the worst president in American history.
The trouble with stories like Iraq and the election is that they're ongoing stories, which are fabulously hard for the mainstream media to tell effectively. When you have 45 seconds for a story, there's no time for context, and in ongoing stories, context is the whole ballgame. Where the AP list succeeds, however, is where the mainstream media still excels: at spot news stories, discrete events not part of a broader continuum--stories with a conventional narrative, beginning, middle, and end. The AP's list includes the Florida hurricanes, the deaths of Yasser Arafat and Ronald Reagan, the train bombings in Madrid, and the seizure of a school in Russia followed by the killing of over 300 hostages. The Boston Red Sox World Series victory even got one first-place vote in the AP editors' poll.
While all of those stories seem significant at this moment, they won't matter one whit a year from now. But some of the glossed-over sub-stories in the broader narratives about the 2004 election, Iraq, and the economy will still matter--and in some cases, remain matters of life and death, either metaphorically and literally.
When they're not being incompletely reported, the big stories are often underreported. If big umbrella titles like "U.S. Election" and "Iraq" were worthy of the AP's 2004 top ten, surely "the economy" should have made it, too. Like the election and Iraq, it's also a constellation of significant stories: the murky employment picture, the ballooning deficit, outsourcing--pick your favorite flavor. How basic pocketbook issues that affect every American every day could miss the list would seem mysterious if we hadn't already discussed the difficulty of covering big, ongoing stories comprehensively.
I'm not a journalist; I'm just a news consumer with an attitude. And since this is entirely my opinion, I could be wrong. But it seems to me that as a meta-commentary on what mattered most to the American media in 2004--and how they saw what mattered most--the AP top ten list is enlightening.
Quote of the Day: From Kid Oakland at Daily Kos, quoted by Ryan at The Higher Pie: "I've been reading some of the noxious media tripe about attempts all over, I guess, to put the 'Christ' back in 'Christmas'. . . . I'm sorry, but I'm still waiting for them to put the Christ back into Christianity." World O'Crap takes down more of the noxious media tripe here.
