Merchants of Narrative
As a WSJ correspondent, I found out what journalism really is
In my years as a foreign correspondent at the Wall Street Journal, there was one overarching narrative that snaked through almost everything we did: globalization. This was in 2007–2010, through the frenzied peak of globalization and the beginning of the hangover.
The narrative of a globalizing world – and that being a good thing – began long before I took up the job. I learned about it at Stanford, where we traced its history to World War II. It was always in an assumption of inevitability, as if this is the way progress has to go.
The book that best captured this end-of-history optimism was The World Is Flat, by Tom Friedman. In a pithy, anecdotal style, he told about a world where Americans, China and India could compete with everyone else, where the best people win in fair competition, and together, through the Invisible Hand of a global free market, all our lives would improve indefinitely. They made us read this at Stanford.
Globalization is the culmination of an ideology of progress as a straight arrow, that dates back to the Industrial Revolution. From the late 19th century into the 20th century, something very strange happened in the trajectory of human history. Growth went exponential. Our modern living conditions dramatically improved, along in decades which historically took centuries for humanity to achieve.
This growth inspired an idea of Progress as some unstoppable force. We had unlocked the secret to sustained improvement in our civilization, the belief went, and this was the practice of science combined with the freedoms of democracy and the rewards of the free market. Free markets and free elections allowed free inquiry, and as long as we kept inquiring, we’d find answers, we’d uncover secrets of how the world works, which we could in turn use to build a better future.
It was a heady idea, because it was so simple and had been borne out by decades of history. If this wasn’t the way things were supposed to go, why had they? It hadn’t been easy for science to emerge. It wasn’t easy to develop the institutions and ideas that led to industrialized capitalism. The West could have lost the Cold War. And yet, at every step of the way, the world had moved closer to a globalized dream. It had won out time and time again, because it was right. Or so the story went.
By the time I became a foreign correspondent in 2007, it seemed like we were at the climax of this grand project. The idea that it was a good thing was a foregone conclusion. In fact, it had achieved the status of a holy mission, told to us by generation after generation of leaders and thinkers.
No one was a bigger cheerleader of the truth and power of globalization than the media. Most of the stories I wrote fell into one of two camps: how globalization was playing out to grow the Indian economy, and its rough edges. The rough edges of globalization, which we referred to within the bureau as “India Rising,” was the perfect balance: it was far enough from the cliché of The World Is Flat without directly attacking the overarching narrative.
Those were the two stories I was not allowed to write: how globalization was working seamlessly and perfectly, and how it was failing systematically. Globalization working was a foregone conclusion. Our job was to point out the glitches, the rough edges, that could be improved.
What made this angle work was that it struck the balance between boring, redundant stories and a jarring confrontation with the narrative. What most people want is a story about something they didn’t know before. What they want is to be mildly surprised – just enough that they feel they’ve learned something new. Not enough to overturn their world and scare them.
We didn’t maintain this balance because we wanted to be nice We did it because it was the only way to maintain their trust. If we kept telling them the same little things over and over, they’d lose interest. If we told them a truth that was very different from others we’d been telling them, that was tantamount to admitting we didn’t know what was really going on. Neither is an acceptable outcome for a business built on confidence.
Being a journalist is one of those jobs that has a very specific image attached to it in the popular imagination, that is almost as far away from the real thing as you can get and still be on the same planet. When I used to tell people I was a journalist, and that too for the Wall Street Journal, the image they’d have in their head was that of a seeker of the truth, a digger for answers, who would leave no stone unturned in their quest for what really happened and why. Something like a detective, but armed with a pen instead of a gun.
I don’t blame them. I had the same idea when I got into it. The idea was fanned by the summer I worked for Tim at the Valley Mirror. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was the exception, not the rule. There was a reason he got all the awards – what he did, what he stood for, was not the same as everyone else who donned the title of “reporter.”
People have a habit of building notions in their head from anecdotes. They take a few stories, the juiciest ones they can remember, and they blow them up into how everything must work. There are some legendary reportage in the history of journalism. Watergate. The Pentagon Papers. Updike’s The Jungle. They made movies out of these – All the President’s Men won the Oscars, so did that one about the Boston Globe and its dogged investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
These are all real examples, and they are amazing. They demonstrate the importance and power of the press in its best moments. This is why it’s the only industry to have its freedom enshrined in the Constitution. On its best days, journalism is a powerful check on the exigencies of power. On its best days, it is the shining knight everyone takes it to be — riding in to save the day, to put truth to power, and win.
The thing is, those moments define the image of journalism, to both outsiders as well as its practitioners, but it is not an accurate description of the day-to-day life of being a journalist. And it’s the day-to-day life, the pressures you wake up to and go to sleep with, that shape what happens, more than the random rare moments of glory you dream about in between.
The truth about the media is that they are merchants selling a good. This good is a narrative that explains what is going on in the world, and why. To be a successful merchant in this business, it is very important that people want what you’re selling – i.e., they want the narrative you’re telling.
News value sounds like information. You might think it means “how important is this information?” and at a glance, you might be right. But that question can only be answered if you ask another one first, and that’s “who’s asking?” There’s a reason the front pages of U.S. newspapers look very different from the front pages of newspapers from India or Japan on the same day. What’s news value in one place may not be news value somewhere else.
This is obvious when it comes to countries, but it doesn’t stop there. For the longest time, the Wall Street Journal had a very different mix of stories on its front page than The New York Times. What was newsworthy to the Times – national politics – was different than what was newsworthy to the Journal – business news. This wasn’t because they thought one was more important than the other, or had more intrinsic news value, but because the editors sitting in their respective meeting rooms thought about different audiences when they were trying to figure out how much news value a story has.
News value is as much a matter of the audience and its expectations as it is of some objective importance of a certain event. When editors sit in their meeting, they aren’t asking “how important is this for people to know?”. They’re asking “how important is this to the expectations our readers have from us?”. While this sounds like a subtle difference, it creates a profoundly different type of media industry than what most people conjure up in their heads when they think of journalism.
What you have to understand is where these expectations come from. If you ask most readers of the Journal, you’d get a lot of people telling you they expect the truth. That’s what they think they expect, but it’s not what they really mean.
What most people expect is a narrative about the world that makes sense. This is different than the truth. I can tell you multiple stories that are true, but they won’t add up to a narrative that makes sense. I can tell you about a man struggling to provide for his family, who loves his wife and children, who truly loves his neighborhood and community, who spends all his free time trying to make it better. And then I can tell you a story about a nihilistic extremist, some lone wolf, who strapped a bomb to his chest and blew up a bus of innocent people. In isolation, each of those stories makes sense. But what happens when I tell you they’re about the same person?
There is part of us that is able to bridge the two. If we peer hard enough, we can see how it could make sense. This part of our brain is able to hold disparate images together, and stretch to make them fit. But this is not the part of our brain that is the audience for a narrative.
What if I kept telling you stories, all true but all contradictory in some ways? A group of people trying to make the world safer by eliminating the economic ups and downs of the cycle – vs. a group of bankers trying to get rich by selling the very thing, the financial equivalent of snake oil. Or how about the miracles of modern medicine, and the growth in human lifespan created by cutting-edge research, vs. a story of stagnation in an industry encumbered with over-regulation and bad economics.
The list goes on. If I kept doing this, telling you stories that are each individually true but don’t add up to anything, you’d eventually stop listening. If you are at all like the vast majority of people, you probably get your news from stories that all conform to some overarching direction. Like leaves following a current, they all reinforce, in one way or another, some overarching story.
This current is a narrative. It’s what binds multiple stories together into a cohesive whole. What are some examples? Here’s one – “Western values are good, because they work.” The stories that fit this narrative would detail the terrible things that happen under military dictatorships, they’d chronicle the unspeakable horrors of human rights abuses, they may even tell the story of migrants finding a better life in the West. What about the opposite one? “Western values make people selfish and destroy the social fabric that civilization has rested on for millennia.” The stories here would talk about the effects of high divorce rates, drug abuse, climate change, and the debauchery that happens on yachts owned by millionaires. All these stories are true, but very, very few people regularly listen to all of them. What they want to hear are the stories that conform to the narrative they already hold.