Page 297 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Narrat ve Power and Med a Influence

representatives—whether writers, broadcasters, documentarians, or bloggers—
reveal their points of view with every word choice, photo selection, and edit.
They define character, underscore event, privilege place, and announce time.
They roll out a story incrementally, one moment at a time, in order to prompt
specific interaction with an audience. It would be much healthier for the demo-
cratic contest of narratives to acknowledge this power of media rather than to
ignore or deny it.
In 2007, in the wake of multiple campus shootings at Virginia Tech Univer-
sity and the media coverage that followed, one student spoke her frustration to
a TV broadcaster: “You’ve got your story.” She made her point with the second
pronoun: “You’ve got your story.” Apparently, this student, a first-person partici-
pant, felt co-opted into “your” [the broadcaster’s] story. Bill Moyers, legendary
independent journalist, looks to the Internet to democratize media monopolies,
empowering more first-person storytellers: “Freedom begins the moment you
realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen
from his hand and started writing it for yourself.”
In acknowledgment of media influence, consider five guidelines of narrative
ethics:
1. To ensure fairness to all “characters,” determine whose story is being told,
and the possible consequences of giving voice to another.
2. To ensure fairness to all “audiences,” determine what selection and sequenc-
ing of information will best assist comprehension and responsiveness.
3. To ensure fairness to “events,” determine all relevant contexts, including
“place” and “time,” required for understanding.
4. To ensure fairness to other media sources, any secondary or tertiary repre-
sentation should specify prior transformations from medium to medium
(e.g., a TV broadcast, edited into a clip for YouTube, then incorporated
into a blog).

To ensure fairness to oneself as “narrator,” interrogate all human sources for
the accuracy and completeness of their statements.

see also Audience Power to Resist; Bias and Objectivity; Blogosphere; Media
and Electoral Campaigns; Minority Media Ownership; Presidential Stagecraft
and Militainment; Propaganda Model; Public Access Television; Representa-
tions of Class; Representations of Race; Representations of Women; Transme-
dia Storytelling and Media Franchises; User-Created Content and Audience
Participation.

Further reading: Andersen, Robin. A Century of Media, A Century of War. New York: Peter
Lang, 2006; Coles, Robert. The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination. Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1989; Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Commu-
nication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1974; Lakoff, George. Thinking Points: Communication our American Values and
Vision. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006; Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson.
Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; Mumby, D. K.
“The Political Function of Narrative in Organizations.” Communication Monographs 54