… The narrative theory asserts that journalists apply a narrative structure to ambiguous events in order to create a coherent and causal sense of events.

The narrative theory is rather weak because we could apply it to nearly every discoursive practice. Isn’t this exactly what we do when we create myths, tell lies, and woo lovers? I think it’s certainly important to understand the role of story-telling in journalism, especially because so much of what goes wrong in journalism may be traced to the automatic, or uncritical, practice of telling stories.

[cross posted at PressThink]

I would offer a qualitative theme to your quantitative conundrum: ambiguity.

Ambiguity is the crack in the journalist’s armor and the underlying current that foments disagreement between ideological camps. Ambiguity is the propagandist’s wedge, dividing “Truth”, our perceptions of reality and giving birth to authoritative voices and their critics.

Philip L. Graham: “So let us drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never understand.”

Jay Rosen has let out a small wail of anguish: There’s too much happening. The public world is changing faster than we can invent terms for describing it. … What I really wanted to say to the BBC guy was:…

Jay Rosen ponders: What I really wanted to say to the BBC guy was: There’s too much reality rushing over us every day just now. And it’s pushing me to the limits of my own vocabulary. Can anyone help? Do you even know what I’m talking about? Hit the co…

Dale Amon, Editor, Samizdata.

I’m not an expert on rhetoric, but I thought I’d take an amatuer’s shot at applying the noetic field (see Cline) to the thread.

There are two striking lines of thought in this thread:

1. The Bush administration has plunged us into an enterprise that can only be described as Wilsonian and progressive. “Reality-based” was the domain of conservatives criticizing the etheral marketing claims of progressives and liberals. The ideal, perfection, utopia, where crime, poverty, racism and joblessness could be defeated with one more bureaucracy, one more government program, was not the domain of the “reality-based community”. Dreamers, yes. Reality-challenged, perhaps.

The Bush administration is engaged in an idealistic pursuit of democratization, globalization and capitalism. They are, like many administrations before them, marketing a war and a campaign personified by the President. FDR was not a member of the “reality-based community”. He was an entrepreneur, envisioning both the New Deal and WWII. Both containing major failures and successes.

This is the contribution of the Bush administration to a different noetic field made possible by a massive distrust in what was “known” as reality on 9/11/2001. The rhetoric of “everything changed” leaves much of what we understood and trusted about reality behind. But there is a more dynamic flow of information today, and more information available.

2. Some projects are reality challenged, and strain our ability to grasp the bounds of a noetic field. Has anyone ever been involved in a project where management, or perhaps marketing, were “reality-challenged”?

We have developed tools to map progress and productivity toward well-defined goals. An engineer takes the imagined and fictional and breaks it down into smaller, necessarily solvable problems. Each step is built upon something that came before, but may represent a leap from what was previously possible.

I can remember my grandfather laughing at the reality-challenged community that talked about rockets and space and the moon. He was a reality-based, hard working man with both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Again, the Bush administration has plunged us into a project which is “reality-challenged”. He did it in Afghanistan and in Iraq. But we, as a nation, are not working from the same milestones or risk assessments. We have different noetic fields with a smorgasbord of information available and a post-modern arrogance to see ourselves as Lippman’s “omnicompetent” citizen.

Bush is to blame for some of the dissonance, but not all of it. There are some who are now proclaiming membership in the “reality-based community” that are really dreaming of a different nonexistent reality than the one being pursued by this administration.