Does news tell a story?

  • I’ve been writ­ing an essay for Melinda for a while — she was kind enough to ask me to con­tribute to her series about Ortho­dox writ­ers, artists and com­posers — and I had a left­over thought about cul­ture that didn’t seem to fit any­where. And what else is a blog for if not to be the thrift shop of my remainders?

    For some rea­son, I found myself want­ing to define cul­ture in the essay, and it turned out to be harder than I thought. Cul­ture seemed to me to be us telling our story to each other and to God. (I would posit that even non-believers offer their story to God, but that might be some­thing for another post.) I think that we tell our­selves and each other what it means to be a human being. And for First World soci­eties like ours, we long to make that both both uni­ver­sal and per­sonal. We want the story we tell to be applic­a­ble to any­one and to tran­scend the geo­graphic, ide­o­log­i­cal and tem­po­ral bound­aries that limit us.

    And what does that? Cer­tainly, lit­er­a­ture and (capital-a) Art and other expres­sions of the old High Cul­ture make attempts at a larger nar­ra­tive. But does pho­tog­ra­phy? Do com­puter games and comic books? Do TV com­mer­cials and YouTube videos? Does (ugh!) anime?

    And the one that stumped me today was … does the news? The TV set in the fit­ness room was turned to CNN, and they were report­ing on the elec­tions in Tunisia, about a new biog­ra­phy about Steve Jobs, about sui­cide rates and about Michael Jackson’s doctor’s trial. Does all of that tell a story?

    The funny thing about it is that the “infor­ma­tion media” grew out of a need for us NOT to tell sto­ries, at least not at the expense of known and know­able facts. We real­ized that our spin could get in the way of a good and sen­si­ble out­come. We were all sup­posed to be more enlight­ened than our ances­tors by virtue of ris­ing above that impulse to draw con­clu­sions and come up with a con­ve­nient plot, iden­tify heroes and vil­lains, arrive at the moral to the story.

    I just won­der if we can rise above that all that eas­ily. Good­ness knows, the news media usu­ally don’t tell us any­thing about our human­ity that we care to think about for very long — more often, just the oppo­site. But isn’t it their hor­ror of telling a rec­og­niz­able story part of the rea­son that they get things wrong some­times? And why did the decision-makers at CNN pick those things to talk about? As soon as they did, they ele­vated their impor­tance to some­thing that is esteemed (at least by CNN) to be uni­ver­sal and timeless.

    This is all start­ing to sound like a point­less intel­lec­tual exer­cise, so I bet­ter wind it up before I show more of my igno­rance than is quite proper on a Mon­day morn­ing. I think all I’m say­ing is that telling a story is in our human nature. It takes more than just fore­bear­ance to accu­rately and only report facts; it also takes tremen­dous amounts of fac­tual knowl­edge. When I think of the sto­ry­tellers in our midst, I include jour­nal­ists and edi­tors, even though they would pre­fer to think of them­selves as mere tran­scribers. Tran­scrip­tion turns out to be very dif­fi­cult for us to do; sto­ry­telling, on the other hand, is nat­ural for us.

    Or so it seems to me. Maybe I just should’ve changed the chan­nel to Nick­elodeon or something.


    Related posts:

    1. Good news from the front
    2. News you won’t be reading
    3. Jonah and the end of the story
    4. The shame­ful story has a happy ending
    5. Evi­dence that sup­ports Bib­li­cal accounts is never news (apparently)

    October 24th, 2011 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Wendy 10.24.2011

    This may be totally off base, but here are my mean­der­ing thoughts: It seems that cul­ture should be a reflec­tion of a peo­ple, but more and more I think peo­ple have begun to reflect the cul­ture. In other words, a painter or musi­cian or writer is cre­at­ing some­thing from what they have seen, heard, or felt. But with the advent of tele­vi­sion, film, record­ing, and dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy, there seems to be more of a trend towards representation/transcription and yes, non-stop 24/7 news — than a cre­ation of cul­ture or sto­ries — which mod­ern con­sumers ingest and begin to reflect: images/recordings they are fed, what they believe and buy, and how they act or react.
    I love what Dr. John Mark Reynolds tells his stu­dents: to go out and cre­ate the music and lis­ten to it “live”; write a play and go to the the­atre; be the artist and visit muse­ums; tell sto­ries and read the clas­sics…!
    Have you heard or read him? You might like this: http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/illuminedheart/d… espe­cially start­ing at about 9:21.

  • Grace

    That’s really pro­found! I’m a sort of culture-watching junkie, and I’ve never thought of it that way. I cer­tainly see — as I think most Chris­tians do — that you can see the over­ar­ch­ing bat­tle between the King­dom of God and the king­dom of dark­ness being acted out in our cul­ture. And there are changes that have been hap­pen­ing in my life­time, par­tic­u­larly in the past cou­ple decades, that I just think we need to put our smart peo­ple onto.

    Dr. Reynolds cer­tainly rises to the top of that list. I had never heard him speak before I came to an event at St. Barn­abas some years ago, and I was totally hooked. I had never heard any­one talk about these 21st cen­tury cul­tural prob­lems the way that he did. I had been pes­ter­ing Greg for years with a lot of my own “the sky is falling!’ impres­sions about things that I saw, but hav­ing a seri­ous scholar get into it helped me sep­a­rate some of the wheat from the chaff (men­tally speaking).

    I didn’t know that he did an inter­view with Kevin Allen. I am SO going to give that a lis­ten. BTW, the link above wasn’t work­ing for me, but for the curi­ous you can find it HERE.

    And yeah, I’m prob­a­bly going to mull over what you said about peo­ple start­ing to reflect the cul­ture. I think that’s some big think­ing right there. I love stuff like that.

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