“Narrative frame” is one of those concepts that sounds like it comes straight out of the journalism school ivory tower. Working journalists can be forgiven for skepticism about the term.
When I interviewed a friend of mine who teaches at a j-school out east a few months ago, she quoted one of her colleagues shrugging off notions of “narrative frames.” In his view, the journalist’s job is a simple one: “Get the story. Assemble the facts. Give the appropriate parties a chance to respond. Write it clearly. Have a beer.”
But what really is the story? What are the relevant facts? Who are the appropriate parties?
How journalists answer every one of those questions builds the very “narrative frame” that we might prefer to pretend doesn’t exist.
I thought about that recently when perusing this thoughtful essay, written in the aftermath of last month’s massacre of 77 people in Norway by a right-wing extremist. Money quote:
Not only do media outlets set the agenda for discussion in society, they also dictate how people should feel about the subjects in question.
And with that, assorted other scraps that have crossed the Pressroom Buzz desk in recent weeks…
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Burning Bridges: Editors who have had their Howard Beale moments, rebelled against corporate and exited the newspaper business usually go fairly quietly, although there may be a tell-all book sometime after the fact. Not Lee Morris. The editor of North Dakota’s Valley City Times-Record offered his own version of “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” right in the pages [PDF] of the paper he quit. And got away with it – because he used a phony headline and byline to disguise the content, while signing his name at the bottom. The nearby Jamestown Sun explains what happened…
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Holding Out: Amid talk of spreading pay walls, the Washington Post is standing firm, for now. Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli said last week: “We are quite content being the largest free premium newspaper online” and that a paywall won’t be going up there anytime soon….
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The Stinger: It’s several weeks old now, but if you haven’t read The New York Times Magazine piece on the guy that Keith Olbermann calls “Boy Journalist James O’Keefe,” check it out now…
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And Finally… News organizations quite appropriately value and often try to stand up for their rights to free expression under the First Amendment. Yet I wonder if they would be as troubled an industry if they did more to stand up for those rights for everyone. With that in mind, I would hope more news organizations follow up this story at Alternet about the use of anti-eavesdropping laws to suppress citizens from exposing wrongdoing on the part of police…
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