Stories: The Foundation of Media

“Stories matter, and matter deeply, because they are the best way to save our lives.”

FRANK MCCONNELL, STORYTELLING AND MYTHMAKING, 1979

The stories that circulate in the media can shape a society’s perceptions and attitudes. Throughout the twentieth century and during the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance, courageous professional journalists covered armed conflicts, telling stories that helped the public comprehend the magnitude and tragedy of such events. In the 1950s and 1960s, network television news stories on the Civil Rights movement led to crucial legislation that transformed the way many white people viewed the grievances and aspirations of African Americans. In the late 1960s to early 1970s, the persistent media coverage of the Vietnam War ultimately led to a loss of public support for the war. In the late 1990s, news and tabloid magazine stories about the President Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair sparked heated debates over private codes of behavior and public abuses of authority. In each of these instances, the stories told through a variety of media outlets played a key role in changing individual awareness, cultural attitudes, and public perception.

VideoCentral Mass Communication bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture

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Agenda Setting and Gatekeeping

Experts discuss how the media exert influence over public discourse.

Discussion: How might the rise of the Internet cancel out or reduce the agenda-setting effect in media?

While we continue to look to the media for narratives today, the kinds of stories we seek and tell are changing in the digital era. During Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s, as many as ninety million people each week went to the movies on Saturday to take in a professionally produced double feature and a newsreel about the week’s main events. In the 1980s, during TV’s Network Era, most of us sat down at night to watch the polished evening news or the scripted sitcoms and dramas written by paid writers and performed by seasoned actors. But in the digital age, where reality TV and social media now seem to dominate storytelling, many of the performances are enacted by “ordinary” people. Audiences are fascinated by the stories of finding love, relationships gone bad, and backstabbing friends on such shows as Jersey Shore, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and the Real Housewives series. Other reality shows like Pawn Stars, The Deadliest Catch, and Duck Dynasty give us glimpses into the lives and careers of everyday people, while amateurs entertain us in singing, dancing, and cooking shows like The Voice, Dancing with the Stars, and Top Chef. While these shows are all professionally produced, the performers are almost all ordinary people (or celebrities and professionals performing alongside amateurs), which is part of the appeal of reality TV—we are better able to relate to the characters, or compare our lives against theirs, because they seem just like us.

Online, many of us are entertaining each other with videos of our pets, Facebook posts about our achievements or relationship issues, photos of a good meal, or tweets about a funny thing that happened at work. This cultural blending of old and new ways of telling stories—told both by professionals and amateurs—is just another form of convergence that has disrupted and altered the media landscape in the digital era. More than ever, ordinary citizens are able to participate in, and have an effect on, the stories being told in the media. For example, in 2011 and 2012, professional news reports and amateur tweets and blog posts about the Occupy Wall Street protests across the United States and the world led to important debates over income disparity, capitalism and power, government, and modern democracy. In fact, without the videos, tweets, and blog posts from ordinary people, the Occupy Wall Street movement might not have gotten the news media coverage that it did.

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Our varied media institutions and outlets are basically in the narrative—or storytelling—business. Media stories put events in context, helping us to better understand both our daily lives and the larger world. As psychologist Jerome Bruner argues, we are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us. In his book Making Stories, he says, “Stories, finally, provide models of the world.”10 The common denominator, in fact, between our entertainment and information cultures is the narrative. It is the media’s main cultural currency—whether it’s Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, a post on a gossip blog, a Fox News “exclusive,” a New York Times article, a tweet about a bad breakfast, or a funny TV commercial. The point is that the popular narratives of our culture are complex and varied. Roger Rosenblatt, writing in Time magazine during the 2000 presidential election, made this observation about the importance of stories: “We are a narrative species. We exist by storytelling—by relating our situations—and the test of our evolution may lie in getting the story right.”11