Making the News

Every story is told through transformation; storytelling changes stories. It’s perhaps a truism that stories change people; I often encounter theatre students who tell me of seeing one show that changed their lives forever. People can easily change stories, without even meaning to; anyone who’s ever played “Telephone” understands how quickly and drastically a message can be changed by its repeated transmission. But such changes are not simply interference; the complete process of telling a story involves several steps, each of which requires transformation in order to function.

A storyteller hears or gathers the material for her story; even her imagination is made of memories and familiar patterns. Taking in any information at all requires relating that information to previous experience; because the storyteller’s experience is uniquely her own, she perceives the raw material of her story in an absolutely individual way. Then she shapes the story – perhaps in different ways for different audiences. The story is changed to fit the specific occasion or purpose. And then the story is told – it is fundamentally shaped by the moment of its performance, or in the case of written stories, both the form of its publication and how it is ultimately read.

Telling stories of any kind demands changing the story – even if only changing the teller and the told. Why, then, does modern journalism cling to the notion that a storyteller can and should be passive in relation to the story? It is a peculiar – and perhaps suspicious – medium that tries to render itself completely invisible; it’s odd for a storyteller to exert the power of telling a story, but claim to be passively and dispassionately transmitting reality.

David Mindich notes as much in his book Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (NY: NYU Press, 1998), where he traces the development of current journalistic “objectivity” in the 19th century press. He objects to “the idea that somehow journalism is an ‘objective’ craft and that journalists are engaged in a basically passive endeavor. … journalists, the story goes, are not active constructors of a story. Even when more active verbs are used to describe reportage, as when journalists ‘gather’ the facts or ‘uncover’ the story, they are still basically observers, poking their noses into an area where others have not yet gone. … One of the reasons no one has written a history of ‘objectivity’ is that it’s difficult to discuss an ethic that is defined by its practitioners’ lack of perspective, bias, and even action” (7).

He continues: “But journalists do do things. … To say that journalists make the news does not mean that they fake the news. Nor is it to say, as some sociologists have suggested, that the news never reflects the outside world. It simply means that journalists do and must construct stories, because of their membership in the world of humanity” (8). Mindich certainly doesn’t make the error of presuming that his own perspective, and his own voice, doesn’t exist; the story he tells seems historically accurate, but also quite clearly his own. It seems that an almost Brechtian perspective must be brought to bear in the news: a distinct and critical awareness, in both the audience and the storytellers, that a transformative transaction is taking place through the intoxicating power of narrative.