Estimated reading time: 7 mins : 12 secs
[I've name phrases like 'The Master Narrative' as nuclear pearls because they accrete around an irritation and contain a massive amount of power/information. Jay Rosen reminds me (D'oh!) that there already is a name for these things ie 'term of art'. Ho hum. Anyway, they're interesting and that's why I've started a collection here - it's all part of my 'Is there a Moore's Law for human speech?' thing, which I haven't posted yet.]
The Master Narrative of the Noughties?
Jay Rosen, as part of his PressThink Basics:
Press think has terms of art, and one of them is “master narrative,” borrowed from literary critics. I use it to describe a part of the press that too easily eludes attention: the big story, sometimes the back story, often a fragment of a narrative, that generates all the other stories, which are smaller pieces.
Individual reports we can summarize, index, and criticize, especially today with the explosion of citizen critics on the Web. But there is no reliable index to replicating patterns in news coverage. Your local newscaster may tell you, “here’s a list of stories we’re working on for NewsFour at 11:00,” but there is nowhere listed the story forms from which this repetitive content flows. A given work of journalism will have an author’s byline, but in some measure the author is always “journalism” itself and its peculiar habits of mind. You can’t interview that guy.
In standard coverage of political campaigns, where one goal is always to appear nonpartisan and above the fray, the master narrative has for a long time been winning— who’s going to win, who seems to be winning, what the candidates are doing to win, how much money it takes to win, how the primary in South Carolina is critical to winning and so on. Reporters call this the horse race, one of the rare occasions on which they have aptly named their own master narrative and recognized it as a story machine— almost an appliance for cooking news….
Most people who pay attention to politics know that candidates who cannot win are safely ignored by the press until they threaten to affect the outcome. Then they become part of the story because they fit its terms. Winning, then, is the story that produces all (or almost all) the other stories; and when you figure in it you are likely to become news. This is a relatively non-partisan, apparently neutral, sometimes technical and of course reusable device, easily operated, and it maintains an agreed-upon narrative, which then maintains the press tribe as one tribe. In this way, master narratives resembles myths as anthropologists understand them.
Were “winning” to somehow get removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend.
I suppose it would be easy to see the Master Narrative as evidence of patriarchal/colonial/hegemonic/whatever structures attempting to coerce blah blah blah. But it’s as easy to see the Master Narrative as archetypal/oceanic/mythical too. I suspect it’s a combination of these, and other, elements.
As I said above, it’d be easy to see the ‘master narrative’ as being about blah blah. Here’s a commenter on Jay Rosen’s piece:
I believe the word “Master” in “Master Narrative” is quite telling. It evokes images of colonialism and slavery. Whether one formulates a master narrative, critiques one or denies its existence; whether one applauds the virtues of existing in the postmodern condition, rails against it, or denounces it as a hoax seems to me irrelevant. So long as those in the educated middle class focus their lens on debate rather than direct action, or rather stop at the door of debate and refuse to pass through the unchartered passageway of political and social engagement, they are benefactors of this narrative, i.e., they are masters owing to the fact that they have chosen to spend their time deliberating such abstractions and not entering the trenches. Or as Woody Allen put it, “Those porno movies are really digusting, and they are so poorly lit.”
But, as Jay Rosen points out, there are good reasons for choosing/using a master narrative. On why ‘winning’ is the master narrative for stories about elections:
Yet I repeat: to choose winning as master narrative is a defensible move, non sinister. Its logic has over time settled, the way sediments settle and become earth. Journalists walk that earth. But they are not the only ones— candidates, contributors, consultants, pollsters join them. That’s significant since these people tend to be regular sources for journalists— and one way you negotiate with sources is by agreeing on a common narrative, (W for Winning) the way musicians might settle on the key of F.
The master narrative as boundary object makes non-sinister sense.
Here’s an interesting take on the idea of the Master Narrative from wikileaks:
Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled “NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative”, details the “story” NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.
Post-script:
What is ‘news’?
All of these definitions come from the first page of returns on a Google search (November 18, 2009) for the question, “What is news?”
Some definitions:
“Current or recent events broadcasted over a distribution medium or word of mouth. “
Wiki-answers
“News is stuff someone doesn’t want you to write. The rest is advertising”
What is “news” and what is “unethical”? Ted Neward’s blog
News informs, editorials seek to convince. News value is calculated by weighing news determinants and they are timeliness (“news is perishable”), prominence (“important people are more newsworthy than others”), proximity, consequence (“that which directly affects the reader has more news value”), Human Interest ie oddity, conflict, emotion “Notice! Exaggerating or distorting information based upon these factors is sensationalism”
The Gully What is news?
“When people think of news, they usually think of the stories and photographs which will appear on today’s newspaper front-pages – a significant occurrence which is ongoing or recent. News is often new to people… This crash on the highway to Abu Dhabi probably won’t be of much interest to a visitor or newspaper editor in Vienna. But to an Emirati, perhaps one of the thousands who regularly uses this road, this would be interesting news… This photograph of a blind woman in Uganda was uploaded as part of a story about life with sight-problems in the country. It prompts viewers to consider an aspect of African life that they may have not previously considered… Another example, this time from Milan, is photography from a tattoo convention. They are striking images, and provide a fascinated insight into an industry few people have contact with.”
What is news? Demotix
“Stories that are not time-sensitive but that focus on significant issues are often called “news features.” A story about one community’s struggle to deal with AIDS, for example, is a news feature. A story about a new treatment option for AIDS patients would be hard news.”
What is news? America.gov
“News has two priorities: it must be current, and it must mean something to people. A story about the environment and a story about the Oscars can both be newsworthy, for different reasons. On the surface at least, the objective of news is to inform the audience. It’s the job of all the news media to tell people what’s going on in their community – locally, nationally or globally. In this sense, the news media provide a valuable public service.”
What is News? Media Awareness Network
“News is something people WANT to know (interest) or NEED to know (public service).”
Lesson 1: Finding News BBC News educational website
“How do journalists decide what is news and what is not? How do they distinguish between a big news story and a small one? The answer is that they do it in exactly the same way as everybody else. Everybody makes those same judgments whenever they decide to talk about one event rather than another”
What is news? The News Manual
(Some more quotes on the question of ‘What is news?’ from The News Manual.)
It’s interesting to apply a master-narrative lens to these quotes. Like I say, it’s a useful Boundary Object.
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