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I would argue that narrative-building isn't necessarily wrong or insidious, as that's how some people understand their relationship to the world around them. T
by InitialLastName 5y ago
I would argue that narrative-building isn't necessarily wrong or insidious, as that's how some people understand their relationship to the world around them.
The fundamental premise of journalism as "writing the first draft of history" (in the best-faith interpretation) is that most significant things that happen are a confluence of conflicting claims, motivations, and understandings of circumstance and context. The work of the journalist is to piece those conflicts into a coherent essay such that a reader outside of the context of an event can piece together a mental model for actionable decisions relative to the event.
- whatshisface 5y agoThere's also a place for journalists who leave the assembly to the critical-thinking reader and future historians, knowing that if they tried too much analysis, it would leave a permanent imprint on the record and potentially frustrate later work.
- otterley 5y ago> if they tried too much analysis, it would leave a permanent imprint on the record and potentially frustrate later work. That's interesting. Can you elaborate on this?
- whatshisface 5y agoLet's say contemporary journalists are considering three separate stories that could tie together the facts, with each story tying together a random subset, about half of the facts each. If the journalists decide on one story, and ignore the half that it doesn't tie together as irrelevant, a large number of things that could actually be important would go unrecorded - if they were wrong to focus on that one story out of the ones they were considering, which may not even have included the real trend driving it all. It's also worth nothing that false claims made by important people are historically significant, but a paper that's trying to build a cohesive narrative but lacked the ability to outright quote something and call it false (for cultural reasons, stating the author's position on a quote is considered too aggressively opinionated for something published in the news section of a paper), would probably choose not to report the quotes.
- InitialLastName 5y agoFor sure, that's why it's also healthy to have a broad and diversified news media covering important issues. It's also why I worry about the centralization and collapse of local journalism; it's the boots on the ground who are best able to contextualize a story when it goes from local to national.
- whatshisface 5y agoHistory shows us that sometimes the real story was entirely inaccessible to the culture of the time; even diverse editorializing could still hide facts nobody thought were relevant.
- a_conservative 5y agoA hypothesis: We are all narrative building, all of the time. It's what humans do. I can't really tell if that is 100% true, but I think it might be. I think confirmation bias could be looked at through this lens. We have an internal story that makes sense to us, and we tend to give more weight to data that fits our internal story (narrative) and discard the rest. I don't know really, I'm more thinking out loud here than trying to present The Truth.
- jollybean 5y agoThat's nice, and rational, but 'Narratives' I believe are more often than not misleading and are used to contextualize towards advocacy instead of journalism. I factually believe Lindell is a hustling liar, but just because that's true in general, doesn't mean that everything he says or presents is fabricated. Part of a scheme to misrepresent? Almost assuredly, but however unlikely, it's possible he might have uncovered some legit China attempt to interfere in something, after all, we know they do that. So it's a matter of perspective and context. A little bit of historical context is really important, but I think we need to be careful about it. This article in particular is very confusing and poorly written sadly.