In journalism they speak in reverent tones about the importance of THE STORY; i.e. weaving facts together into a compelling narrative.
Similarly, in PR circles we talk about storytelling as a way to make client news comprehensible and interesting. At Social Fluency, we are experimenting with new ways of doing this (see today’s post there).
However there is a dark side to looking for the ideal story in a set of facts: the scenario you have lovingly crafted can be, well, just an all-too-convenient story – perhaps even a fictional one.
I was thinking about these things as I followed two courtroom dramas that have drawn us in and provided a tense and suspenseful backdrop to the start of the summer.
Yesterday morning, before hearing the surprising Not Guilty verdict later in the day, I heard some talking heads on TV discussing the merits of the prosiecution’s case against Casey Anthony. One said, more or less, that she prefers a case that is built on circumstantial evidence, because of the power of a good story; physical evidence can be questioned, witnesses can seem unreliable.
The jury apparently did not agree, and we all experienced a “WTF letdown” upon hearing news of the verdict, after hearing countless news reports that seemed to echo the prosecution’s narrative.
Similarly, in the the Dominique Strauss Kahn case, there was a rush to judgment by the media, and their audiences all too eagerly jumped on board. Bret Stephens wrote a great op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about this yesterday: The DSK Lesson. Here are some exceprts:
Let me confess: I was pretty much delighted by the way L’Affaire DSK seemed to be playing out…Not that I ever took any joy in the thought that a presumably vulnerable woman had apparently been raped by a man with a reputation for promiscuous and predatory appetites.
But I did enjoy the thought of this mandarin of the tax-exemptocracy being pulled from the comfort of his first-class Air France seat and dispatched to Riker’s Island without regard to status or dignity. And I admired the humble immigrant who would risk so much for the sake of justice.
I doubt I was alone in feeling this: People generally, and columnists especially, want news that has the qualities of a parable—the surprise that turns out to be no surprise at all. With a story like DSK’s, the temptation of a tidy moral tends to overwhelm whatever doubts might be cast upon it by a countervailing point of data.
…the media (broadly speaking) has too often been guilty of looking only for the evidence that fits a pre-existing story line. It doesn’t help that in journalism you can usually find the story you’re looking for..
But anecdotes are not data—which happens to be the world’s most easily neglected truism. …And the journalists who most deserve to earn their keep are those who understand that the line of any story is likely to be crooked.
Which is not to say that jurys or judges can’t sometimes get it wrong, or that these people are innocent – just that we can reach different conclusions given the same set of facts, and that it is sometimes easier to believe the logical and compelling storyline.
