If the festive season is any indication, storytelling would seem to play an important part in our lives. In keeping with tradition, Christmas Day was, for many, a time for reflection on a mythical story of humankind. A story of outlandish characters and unlikely happenings. Of vice, virtue, struggle and hope. A tale cherished by many, rejected by others. A story of events some feel are too fictitious and flawed to warrant serious consideration. Indeed, the Eastenders Christmas Special stole the day’s ratings for the third consecutive year; the daily mundanities of London’s mythical urbanites spilled out from the cathode-tube glow of nearly 10 million television sets and into the living-room pews of congregating, turkey-stuffed worshippers.
Storytelling, it would seem, is a part of who we are – and it is all around us. The street preacher points the megaphone to the sky and testifies. The anchorman and his digital newsroom are scrambled into broadcast signals and transmitted from satellites into our homes. Taxi drivers philosophise. Barflys rant. The printed press spins yarns of celebrity secrets drawn from hacked phones, conjecture and consenting PR.
History, they say, is a story written by the victors – while the story of the future lives in the hopes and dreams of us all; tamed by futurologists, economists, town planners and the environment perpetuating our very existence. But what about the story of the present?
Anthropologists of the future may look to the resolution-centric narrative of Hollywood as a defining feature of the stories told by humankind today, but dwindling cinema ratings have seen television trump cinema as the conduit of choice for the popular storyteller. In recent years, a flood of stay-at-home boxsets has altered our home-viewing habits in the consumption of stories. But framed on either side of televised and cinematic fiction and occupying many minds during the commuting space of the daily grind – whilst also rolling on the 24-hour channels – is another form of storytelling grasping the largest audience of the twenty-first century: the news.
So, what’s the story?
In the UK, news storytelling finds its way into the hearts and minds of the masses from the broadcast and printed-press powerhouses of an extreme minority. In print, the News Corporation-owned tabloid The Sun dominates the daily press in terms of circulation, with other wide-reaching tabloids including The Mirror and The Daily Mail. On television, the BBC, ITV, Sky News and Channel 4 are all big players. In the ever-expanding and dominant online space of mass media, big UK players include the BBC, The Guardian and the Daily Mail.
The news from these storytellers, we must hope, is a factual account of the most important events of our world; told, in some sense, with a view to providing citizens with the knowledge to be able to engage as well-informed, democratic participants in society. One glance at these dominant storytellers, however, and their proficiency at fulfilling this task falls into doubt.
Consider the Daily Mail. Described by investigative journalist Nick Davies in 2009 as the most powerful newspaper in Britain – but tipped by some former senior Labour politicians to be a rag running an editorial line built on ‘absolute and unaccountable power’. DM editor Paul Dacre, it has been asserted, is ‘accountable to no one’. With such power of information, we would hope that this staple of storytelling is a trustworthy source – but facts of the paper’s output would suggest otherwise. During a recent ten-year window, the Daily Mail received PCC complaints at just over three times the rate of other national titles, highlighting the failure of the title to publish sound and trustworthy journalism.
The Daily Mail, however, is not alone in its failings. The problems of distortion, falsehood and so-called Flat Earth News (where, it is said, the story is until our observation proves otherwise; like the ‘flat earth’ theories of our ancestors) are rife in the printed press medium which has been facing increasing pressures to shift copies as advertising subsidies fall in line with a preference for visual media, and news habits have undergone a tectonic shift, giving preference to television and online. Some commentators have tipped these commercial concerns of news storytellers as a prominent factor behind the failure of the wider media to tell the story with accuracy.
Media Lens founders David Edwards and David Cromwell suggest the corporate interests of mass media players subverts the interests of honest reporting, resulting in an active crafting of media output – beyond the facts at the heart of stories. Their qualms echo the concerns raised decades earlier by George Orwell, who, writing in the early years of the second world war, questioned the commercial interests of the press and the implication here for the potential distortion of information. These concerns were further cemented with research undertaken by Professor Noam Chomsky and economist Edward S. Herman, who famously presented the propaganda model of corporate mass media; demonstrating through a series of tests that corporate news reportage is consequential of profit motives. With market forces compelling storytellers to retain profit margins and out-do rivals, how much accuracy can we expect from the media?
‘The story’, it would seem, is far less a trustworthy staple of a supposedly democratic society, and far more a series of distorted paintings of the world for sale – with the commercial interests of the ‘artists’ at heart. The audience of news (‘the 99%’) are subject to the questionable storytelling practices of an extreme minority. It is as though we wander forwards like the many children hypnotised by the lone Pied Piper, with his hypnotic tune beneath our feet lulling us away from the facts of our world – on the environment, foreign policy and political concerns. As passive spectators we are drawn towards the particular interests of the piper’s tune; a lullaby with an escapist vibe reminiscent of the comfort of Louis Armstrong’s words: we have all the time in the world.
So, what’s the solution?
It has long been asserted that the media audience of today must grasp a sense of intellectual self-defence in order to construe the facts beneath the stories of news media – a weary, but necessary, task. Coupled with this, there is a growing sense that a discerning audience need not maintain the role of mere passive spectators, but become active participants in storytelling. Technological developments in social media in recent years serve to underscore the fact that a hands-on approach to news storytelling is within our grasp. Whereas once we could only spectate, today we can participate. The tools of storytelling and the alternative press are at the fingertips of the 99%: online, in broadcast and in print. The task now is to reclaim the story from the pre-occupation of minority powerhouses of storytelling and occupy media with the voices of the many: subvert, testify, poeticise, tell, occupy.
So, what’s the story? You tell me.