Of Larger Significance

I recently finished Michael Connelly’s marvelous novel, “The Narrows”, and I was struck by one passage in particular:

The article was nicely drawn with the Times’s signature method of finding larger significance to a story than the story itself…it reminded me of a time I was working a case in which a man who owned an auto garage cut the hydraulic lines on a lift and a seven-thousand-pound Cadillac came down and crushed his longtime partner beneath it. A Times reporter called me up for the details for a story and then asked if the killing was symptomatic of the tightening economy in which money woes turned partners against partners. I said, no, I thought it was symptomatic of one guy not liking his partner screwing his wife.

Connelly, whose bio lists him as a former journalist, was no doubt just having a bit of fun with his former industry here, but he also hit upon one of the biggest problems in the legacy media today: this business of finding “larger significance to a story than the story itself”.

The first problem with this is – or should be – obvious. Some stories don’t have a larger significance, or if they do, as Connelly suggests in the excerpt above, the larger significance is a lot more prosaic and down to earth than the media would like. By itself, this is not a big issue. All it does is reflect a desire – shared by most people – to make what they do seem important, or at least more important that what it really is. If you’re a reporter, which would you rather have on your resume: a simple story of murder and infidelity or a complex one on how the “tightening economy” is driving businessmen to desperate measures?

The second problem is more insidious and more important; it goes to the heart of what I believe is wrong with the news industry. Again, in the excerpt above, you’ll notice that the reporter isn’t asking whether there is a larger significance or not, he’s asking (Connelly’s character) Harry Bosch to confirm the larger significance that he – the reporter – has already decided upon. This is called “framing the narrative”. The reporter has already decided why the story is important – he just wants Bosch to confirm it.

As long as the media continues to decide what we should see and read (Cartoons, anyone?) and then deign to tell us what it means, I think more and more people will take the attitude of the President himself:

(Ken Auletta of the New Yorker), for example, can describe Bush at a barbeque for the press in August, where a reporter says to the president: is it really true you don’t read us, don’t even watch the news? Bush confirms it.
And the reporter then said: Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking? And Bush, without missing a beat said: You’re making a powerful assumption, young man. You’re assuming that you represent the public. I don’t accept that. (h/t Ed Driscoll)