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August 27, 2003
Around the club-house turn...
Tim Porter finds an excellent example of a problem caused, I would argue, by the narrative bias of journalism. The San Francisco Chronicle lets a lead paragraph out-run the facts (or, at least, a reasonable interpretation). As Porter says:
Misrepresentative political writing occurs regularly during horse-race campaign coverage as reporters struggle to put dramatic leads on stories about ordinary events.
The press applies a narrative structure to ambiguous events in order to create a coherent, causal, and dramatic sense of events. Add a clause about persuasive purpose to that assertion and you have a workable theory of journalism that, I think, predicts journalistic behavior. I'm still working on the rhetoric--the purpose--part of the theory.
Posted by acline at August 27, 2003 2:45 PM | | Spotlight