Beware of Storytelling!

Dramaturgical techniques should be kept to a minimum in the news.

Since I invented a storytelling tool that helps people and companies to tell better stories, it may seem odd that I should warn against storytelling techniques. Thing is, there’s a time and a place for everything …

If we’re watching a movie or reading a novel, we want a good story that reaches us on an emotional level. We demand to be excited, moved, aroused, even outraged or scared witless.

People enjoy the emotions that stories provoke. Emotional responses are the reason we succumb to stories, and storytellers deliberately try to elicit the “visceral” effect that powerful feelings engender. In order to root for the heroine, she must be placed in danger; in order to empathise with the hero, the audience must be able to identify with him and care about his fate. Writers and storytellers do a lot to engage the audience and keep them reading or viewing. The best techniques to maintain the audience’ attention are the ones that grab the audience emotionally. Stir them! Excite them! Make them feel! Boredom sets in when there is no increased heart rate, no sweaty palms, no rapt attention.

“Our top story tonight: …”

Newspapers and other news media such as television or online news portals know as well as novelists and moviemakers that the promise of emotion is what gets the audience’ attention in the first place and the delivery of emotion is what maintains it. Hence news media employ some similar techniques to fiction authors and screenwriters. Not for nothing is a news show or paper divided into “stories”.

Structurally, the big difference between a news item and a fiction story is that a fiction story will build up towards a big climax and resolution, whereas a news story will start strong and often gradually peter out. In print at least, this has a lot to do with the space that an editor can allocate to a journalist’s piece in a newspaper, where often shortening of the text will mainly cut later paragraphs. The beginning has to be strong and contain the most interesting information, but the tacit assumption is that readers jump off somewhere in the article, many not reaching the end. As a journalist, you might have a cute end line to a piece, but you don’t keep the best till last because you know that many readers won’t make it that far. Midpoint, symmetry and other structuring devices authors use to form their stories are not quite as vital for journalists.

But some techniques are common to both forms of storytelling, fiction and news. For instance, the attention-grabbing kick-off. The beginning of a book or news article must gain the audience’ attention quickly. (The same is true for YouTube or TikTok videos, etc.).

A good way for authors and filmmakers to achieve fast audience attention in novels or movies is by stirring a sense of unfairness or better yet, moral outrage. Will Storr pointed out this technique in The Science of Storytelling. Present a protagonist being treated unfairly or some obviously wrong or bad occurrence impacting an innocent character, like a crime or an act of cruelty or violence. What’s going on? What a terrible thing! Something needs to be done about this! The event constitutes a problem, a disturbance in the story world that will kickstart the narrative. The hero’s job will be to (re)act, to redress the balance, to re-establish order, to supply justice.

Moral outrage is also one of the journalist’s most effective tricks to gain readers’ attention. The headline will tease at the outrageousness of a new problem.

Let’s take a look at some recent headlines from the front pages of the UK press.

·      “China is flooding Britain with fake stamps” Daily Mail, April 11, 2024.

·      “Phone sales to under-16s may be banned” The Daily Telegraph, April 10, 2024

·      “Mr Bates vs the ‘thugs in suits’ – Hero tells of bid to discredit and silence him in his 23-year fight for justice” Daily Mirror, April 10, 2024

·      “’Bonkers’ ruling proves why UK should quit Euro court” Daily Express, April 10, 2024

Fake Chinese stamps? Outrageous! All of these typical headlines are designed to arouse a sense of moral outrage. They promise the reader that they will (once again) have something to tut about, shake their heads at in disbelief while actually confirming deep-seated beliefs and prejudices – the audacity of the Chinese, the ‘bonkers’-ness of EU law.

We have to leave aside here the political and social agendas of these newspapers. That is a can of worms simply too big for a single post. Let us concentrate on what the function of news actually might be.

Why is it important to read the newspaper?

Why do we even bother to keep abreast of current events?

For many people, obvious answers might be: in order to form an opinion; in order to understand the world; in order to be prepared if a current event has a direct impact on my life. To be informed is a value unto itself, perhaps a sign of being intelligent or educated. There is a significant amount of peer pressure involved too, because people might view you askance if you “haven’t heard” the latest news. And of course, the news provide talking points, topics for conversation, and thus fulfil a social function.

Jowan Mahmod in her article The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics points out the real reason for people’s addiction to news: “We watch news and consume information about world events and the present condition of society … motivated by the basic need for security. … Simply put, our brain is not there to make us happy; it’s there to keep us safe and make sure that we stay alive.”

There’s an instinct still inside all of us that seeks to protect us from approaching saber-toothed tigers, marauding Neanderthalers, or other threats to our survival. That is why we have a strong interest in knowing what is going on around us.

We also like to gossip, to tell the latest stories to each other about other people, as Will Storr also mentions. We are social animals who survive in herds, and a human herd sticks together by finding points of identification. By sharing information and value-judgements thereon, we establish the sense of belonging to the group. This makes us feel safe. Not belonging means feeling alienated, outside the group, alone. And being alone means getting eaten by that tiger.

It's complicated

The thing is, we are no longer hunter-gatherers. Our modern hi-tech globalized societies and the way we live together is completely different from the stone-age. We are, furthermore, way beyond the age of the printing press, of mass media, and even the computer age. We are now in the digital age in which information spreads faster than ever before and in ways we barely comprehend.

Our societies are complex. We live in “imagined communities”, with each of us in several “tribes”, bubbles, or target groups. Society, politics, the economy, globalization, digitalization – modern living is probably as complicated as never before in human history. Countless issues are pressing:

·      in a world context – climate crisis, threats to democracy and rise of autocracies the world over, wars, social inequality as well as polarisation, to name but a few

·      in a day-to-day context, where personal concerns may be just as huge – inflation and rising cost of living, job security, education, health, housing, to name but a few

And all of these issues along with hundreds of others are interrelated. There are no simple answers to any of these issues, no easy solutions to any of the world’s or your own personal problems.

Faced with saber-toothed tigers or marauding Neanderthalers, the options are relatively simple, as in fight or flight. Faced with any of the issues in the previous paragraph which threaten our perceived security, the options are much less clear cut.

First, we should point out the effect that Jowan Mahmod mentions too, namely that continued repetition of issues skews our perception of them, increasing our concern about them into a far greater fear than empirical reality warrants. Not everyone in a suit is a thug, not all EU regulation is bonkers. But if we are told enough times that EU regulation is bonkers, eventually we will believe there is some truth to the claim, however spurious it may be.

“Just the facts, ma’am”

The main point I want to make concerns not the repetition of the news stories that are influencing public opinion, but the stories themselves. Or rather, that news is told as stories.

In a world in which in reality nothing is simple, because everything is interconnected, and in an economy growing more entropic and unequal, in a technologically modern world getting more hi-tech and complex by the quantum second, in democracies under attack from non-democratic states as well as from destabilizing forces within – is it really so wise to feed the public with moral outrage?

Or looking at it from the other perspective: If you as a person want to stay informed and keep abreast of current affairs and the news, is it really in your interest to be morally outraged? Or would it be more effective to know the facts?

It is not likely that it will be made illegal for under-16 year-olds to buy a phone. This is just one of the ideas up for discussion, as becomes apparent in the Daily Telegraph’s article beneath the headline. Actually, nothing has been decided yet. There is really not much to report. No direct impact on your life, even if you are under sixteen. Not to mention that it is difficult anyway for an underage person to get a phone contract. But the striking claim turns this bit of fluff into headline news on the front page. Like clickbait, the wording of the headline has led you into spending a couple of minutes of your life reading a story which may give you something to get excited about, may open up a fear of not being allowed a phone (shudder), but really has little factual content at all.

Headlines promising moral outrage manipulate you. It’s fine to have your emotions manipulated when you’re in the cinema or reading a good novel. But do you really want a media corporation manipulating your feelings, and through these agitated feelings your understanding of and reactions to the world?

Storytelling in news is, frankly, dangerous. Dramaturgical devices proper to fiction cause factual information to be misrepresented. Techniques that heighten emotional impact cause knee-jerk reactions rather than measured, considered, thought-through, researched, nuanced, and balanced responses to complicated situations.

Furthermore, an agitated and fearful public is easily manipulated into opinions that are actually counter to its own interests. “Tiger at large! Strong fence imperative!” Repeat the message enough times and you have folk, formerly free to roam with open horizons, hemmed in and under control within the high fence.

Neutrality

When I was growing up in England, I was often told that it was important to read several newspapers or to check your information against other sources. And there was the understanding that news should be “neutral”. Especially the BBC. Everyone knew that news was not neutral, that it is impossible to be completely factual without some slant of opinion. But the guiding principle of news was to present the situation “from all sides”, without too much of an ideological bias. Neutrally.

Nowadays, nobody talks much about the desirability of neutrality in the representation of news. As a glance at the headlines of newspapers shows, there is not even the pretense of neutral, factual reporting. News has to grab attention. News has to be entertaining.

I think news should be boring. If news is entertaining, titillating, arousing, exciting, if news gets us worked up, angry, outraged, then something is wrong. Unless there is a tsunami bearing down on your house and you really need to run NOW, there is no need whatsoever for the news to spread panic, anger, outrage.

·      If the function of news is to keep you informed, then let it be informative – not sensational.

·      If the function of news is to enable you to form an opinion, let it present the salient information so that you can form your own opinion based on the facts – let it not manipulate you into following the agenda of the media mogul the news outlet belongs to.

·      If the function of news is to let you know what is going on in the world so that you understand the world better, let it explain the connections and ramifications of situations and events in a holistic, thorough, and unbiased manner – not give you tantalising soundbites out of context.

·      If the function of news is to help you be prepared for impacts on your life, then news should wait with the reporting of an event until enough facts are known about it and the potential consequences of the event become clear, rather than being the first to “break” the news of a situation going on right now, the cause, motivation, or outcome of which cannot yet be known.

Free Press

The free press has a function in a democracy. It is a check and potential corrective to abuses of power. Reporters need freedom to report on social injustices, political impropriety, and much more.

But the free press is part of the free market economy and therefore submits to ideas such as perpetual growth, economies of scale, shareholder value, advertising revenue, profit, and so on. Each news outlet is in competition for the attention of the consumers. Every medium must vie for the attention of the audience. Therefore, any means is acceptable as long as the show meets the ratings, the paper sells copies, the advertising revenue rolls in. Stories sell. Emotions sell. Outrage sells.

Possibly the way to stop the avalanche of attention-grabbing sensationalistic news, clickbait, the escalation of public outrage, and idiotic non-stories under fearmongering headlines is sector-wide standards for acceptable linguistic and dramaturgical techniques in news.

In most European countries, broadcasters must offer a share of their airtime to news. In Germany, radio and TV stations in order to get a license must, according to the terms of the Interstate Broadcasting Agreement (Rundfunkstaatsvertrag), have news blocks. The practice is well-established. Also well established in the film sector is the voluntary self-regulation of age ratings for films. The entire film industry adheres to standard practices, with each production and distribution company monitoring the others.

But the language with which news is presented is not subject to standards. In print in particular, in Germany, the UK, Italy and elsewhere, we see degeneration of media coverage of news into politically motivated slop. Had the front pages of Britain’s papers not for months before the Brexit vote carried headlines day after day featuring “Romanian rapists” and “Bulgarian burglars” and the like, the xenophobic prejudices of the British public would not have been stoked so and the referendum result might have been different. But I didn’t want to get into the political argument, my apologies for bringing this up after all.

Editorial

So what’s the answer to this complex problem? Well, if you’re reading this and you got this far in this article – which has turned out longer than planned and has no editor to lob its end off –, then I have no more for you than some advice:

If you feel yourself getting worked up while watching the news or reading a newspaper, beware!

If you notice yourself tutting and shaking your head in disbelief at the audacity, the unfairness, the outrageousness of a news item, take a deep breath and a step back. You’ve just succumbed to a storytelling technique. Your emotions have just been manipulated. Is this the time and the place to have your feelings agitated? Are you in the cinema slurping a drink and munching popcorn? Are you cuddled up with the new novel of your favourite author?

No. You are consuming the news. If you feel morally outraged, chances are the news is skewed and you are not being given the chance for a measured, considered, thought-through, researched, nuanced, and balanced response to a complicated situation.

---

Header image by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash

---