Tag Archives: narrative theory

Making Sense of it All

Too often political reporters are reluctant to use the kind of everyday language we might apply to people who have lost touch with reality.

American journalists covering this political campaign are facing the challenge of reporting on one of the candidates who repeats fictions that are sometimes so ludicrous that they probably should be reported as the ravings of a man who has lost touch. The problem is that strait journalism in the legacy press—sources ranging from CNN to the Associated Press—tends to grant rough equivalency between candidates running for office.  Does it violate journalistic rules to call out the one who no longer lives in the reality-based world?

Too often these days candidate Donald Trump does not feel tethered to even an approximation of the truth in the observations and accusations that show up in a typical stump speech. For example, he recently noted that his crowd size was up to 30 times larger than his competitor’s rallies. That implies numbers larger than would fit in a stadium for the Superbowl. In addition, he has asserted that the Harris campaign is using A.I. to make her crowds look bigger. As we all know, the former reality show star puts a lot of stock in audience sizes. Other recent fictions include the statement that thousands outside a half-empty hall were still trying to get in (not so, according to the Associated Press), or that he has spoken to the biggest audiences in American history, including those that crowded the national mall to hear Martin Luther King in 1963.

Trump is a fantasist. The lies stack up like so much cord wood at a lumber mill. But except for a few set pieces with the latest lists of “bizarre claims” most of his muddled thinking gets lost in routine synoptic coverage.

A Bias Toward Coherence

The problem here is an old one for those assigned to describe various sides of a dispute. As The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg has described it, journalism has a “bias toward coherence,” where reported events are cleaned up in the retelling. He recently noted that we get “careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines” that might better account for all the fantasies that get passed on as fact.

Trump escapes the full effects of fully revealing journalism by being protected by two norms of journalism: a bias for equivalency, and a second and natural norm to frame most events as stories, which curbs the impulse to let the actual incoherence of an event remain. This is partly Goldberg’s point.

The first norm of equivalency assumes two matched sides to a campaign or—for that matter—almost any event. Each side is presented in a seemingly neutral form to preserve the appearance of objectivity and neutrality. If one driver goes over the speed limit by 10 miles per hour, and a second has exceeded it by 70, both can be described as scofflaws. Recently a Vice Presidential candidate misspoke by describing carrying a gun in combat, which he later noted was not accurate. He carried guns in his military service that spanned more than two decades. But he did not see combat. So maybe it seems to even out the coverage at any point in time if the GOP campaign fudges the numbers on actual audience sizes. This is norm keeps audiences placated, but it is intellectually dishonest.

The second norm is to reorganize events into a story format with a framework of actors, action, purpose, and scenes. Campaigns are normalized by filling in the blanks to make each story a complete account of another day. Never mind that the contradictions represent incoherent acts. Few editors want to pass that incoherence on to their readers or viewers. You have maybe experienced the sensation of attending an ordinary event like a city council meeting– a meeting that was bewildering and aimless–that has since been transformed by the local press that into a more conventional narrative discussions followed by action.  Our instinct is almost always to make sense of it all, not to let the nonsense show through.

These are basic themes are played out in more detail in what is sometimes called “media frame analysis.”  But what it often reveals is that a person unfit to run for the highest office in the country is protected—as CNN demonstrably in 2016 —from an uglier and non-sensical process.

This problem of constrained journalistic norms is doubled by the fact that reporters are reluctant to use everyday language we routinely apply to people who seem less grounded in reality. Columnists may talk about the “delusional” and even “pathological” candidate. Goldberg uses the term “bonkers” to describe Trump’s ideas: an everyday term that hits the mark, but still sounds odd coming from a journalist. In fact, most reporters are reluctant to use terms that suggest the abnormal responses of a person barely able to adapt to their world.

 

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The Certainty of Narrative Form

We think and produce our thoughts, necessarily coming to terms with the requirements of the story format.

An academic rhetorician gets to be absolutely certain about very few things.  But there is one core concept of human communication that is mostly unchallengeable. Simply stated, it is that our world is mostly understood and communicated to others through the structure of narrative.  As the essayist Joan Didion once noted, “We tell stories in order to live.” We may have myriad theories of “ways of knowing,” but few can match the simple story structure as a representation of how we process events.  The story format is nothing less than our primary way to process nearly all human events.

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Building on the work of master critic Kenneth Burke, we can count on a story structure to generally have five parts that are either explicit or sometimes assumed but not said. His “pentad” formalized the structure. Narratives come with:

Agents—those engaged in an action—often verbal
Acts—what is actually attempted in a given situation
Agencies—the specific terms and locutions sources of narratives choose to use
Scenes—events or locations that give the action meaning
Purposes—known or assumed intentions of agents for their actions.

Name almost any human transaction and it is possible to spin out the stated or implied elements of the pentad. When the leader of North Atlantic Treaty Organization recently chose a public setting (scene) to announce Turkey’s agreement to allow the admission of Sweden to be a member, all of the pentadic elements were in their place. Every member must agree on new members, with Turkey holding out for a year. So, when they finally agreed, it was important to put on a show of unity (purpose). The NATO leader stood next to both presidents, in front of the three relevant flags on an otherwise sparse stage. And the announcement (act) used diplomatic language (agency) to emphasize the sought after unity that had been the goal of intense private negotiations. Burke would have noted that the expected elements of the pentad were all confirmed in the moment. The scene was as it needed to be to satisfy various international audiences. The three leaders were the necessary agents fulfill the act.  It also meant that one of the principals could not be absent. The addition of an American flag would have been out of place. And the President of Turkey kept his about reservations about Sweden mostly to himself.

This is all obvious. But that’s the point. This simple form is embedded in virtually any news reporting across all media. Narrative form requires how certain rhetorical acts will be played out. No element is missing or out of place. One could swap out any of these elements with different choices and the nominal unity of the moment would begin to unravel.

We read the components of narrative almost intuitively. And we reserve most of our criticisms for those acts that seem to be in tension with any other part of this pentad. We know how to behave at a wedding or funeral. We know how to be “diplomatic” around a person with a short fuse.  And we guess–endlessly–about the motives of others. In short, we study or produce rhetoric, coming to terms based on what Burke described as the normative “ratios” between the pentadic elements. This is usually life as we wish it to be. If an event is unsatisfying, we can look for a tension that may exist between any two of these five elements. In the unlikely event that we should we want comedy, then we can go ahead and misalign scene and act, agent and agency, or act and purpose. If a comedy of failed expectations does not follow, embarrassment surely will.

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