I have been hearing the word narrative thrown around a lot in the news and in counter-news articles.
umm, reality isn’t a storybook – so what does this even mean?
Note: I did a quick search about narrative first and found only [one relevant eli5](https://redd.it/b8utov), but I don’t understand it… so if we’re actually talking about the same thing then I need an ELI5 on their ELI5
In: Culture
Reporters chose the facts that they tell you about a story, and can manipulate those facts to completely change what appears to have happened.
Take the following factual situation: A woman has multiple warrants out for her arrest. A police officer recognizes her and approaches her to attempt an arrest. As the officer approaches her, she screams “I’m pregnant” and attacks the officer. After being attacked, the officer wrestles her to ground. While on the ground, she pulls the officer’s taser out of his holster and tries to tase the officer. The officer then shoots her with his firearm.
That fact pattern is a textbook justified shooting. But lets say that you’re a reporter who hates the police, and wants to paint them in as bad a light as possible. To paint the officer as a murderer, you write a headline “Woman tells officer she’s pregnant before being gunned down.”
That headline is factually correct. The woman did tell the officer that she was pregnant and the officer did gun her down. Nonetheless, that headline paints a story that is completely at odds with reality. By manipulating the facts of the story, the reporter has used their position to further their goal of generating hatred towards the police.
Reporters also get to choose what to report. Lets say that your lifetime risk of being shot by the police is 1/8000. Thats extremely rare – its half as likely as electrocuting yourself to death and twice as likely as choking to death. Nonetheless, in a country of 350 million people it means that 2-3 people get shot by the police every day.
If you’re a reporter whose goal is to generate hatred towards the police, you can report on each and every one of those 2.5 people who get shot each day while ignoring everything else going on in the country at the moment. That creates a sense that police shootings are extremely common and are a serious threat to people in their day to day lives when the reality is that they’re extremely rare. It also creates a sense that much more common occurrences, like being murdered by a criminal, are extremely rare.
By selectively reporting on police shootings over murders, a reporter is able to create a sense that police shootings are a much more serious threat, when the reality is that you are over 33 times more likely to be murdered by a criminal than shot by the police.
When you consider that most people get their news from a small handful of sources, the narrative that those sources decide to push frequently becomes the reality that their readers come to believe – regardless of what reality actually is.
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