Having done a stint in BBC local radio and been on the other side also of interviews by local and national media, I found this quite interesting. It chimes with my experience of seeing how questions a reporter asked and then the way that the story is edited worked out against the background of knowing the real story intimately. It is clear that in many cases if the story hasn't already been written [clue: the reporter asks you questions like; "Would you say that ...?" which are then attributed to you as if you had said them directly and unprompted] then it is written up according to a pre-set storyline. In the case of 'religious' stories it was either 'fuddy duddy church people attempt to look trendy' or 'don't you love it when religious people argue?', or the old chestnut of the 'naughty vicar' or a variant on that allowing the reader to feel smug in charging the institution with hypocrisy. So I reckon that this critique is spot on:
Isn't there already too much narrative cliche clogging up our relationship to experience; the Brown/Blair tiff is packaged in advance as a three act drama with deferred climax; Global Warming as a set of progressive complications yielding the mother of all climaxes. We can't blame McKee for his influence, but story's looking increasingly like another patent, branding random experience into manipulable commodity.
What's needed is to train journalists to extract a real story from the raw data and not fall back on lazy narrative stereotyping.
Narrative nailed dead | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited: Filed in:
narrative,
story,
news,
packaging,
media
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