E. Storytelling & Media

E.1 Introduction: Can you believe it?

In 1938, just as Europe broke out into WWII, Orson Welles narrated a radio broadcast that told a story of how aliens from Mars were invading the planet — the infamous ‘War of the Worlds’. It was a fictional story, but as a radio drama he told it using the narrative present and present progressive tenses, as if it were actual news. The next day, the news reported that many people had called the radio station, local authorities, and news outlets in a panic about the invasion to check if it was really happening. Many people had been skeptical, of course, but some actually believed it, perhaps because of fears about invasions due to the war in Europe, Welles’ use of a news register, or the fact that many had heard of the story not because they had listened from the beginning but because friends had told them to tune in. After the panic, the law forbade broadcasters of fictional stories to use news reporting registers so that they wouldn’t inadvertently fool listeners into a panic about something.

Orson Welles had pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes ever seen up to that time. While hoaxes have been attempted throughout history, the power of Welles’ story surprised everyone because it spread and grew so quickly thanks to the new medium of broadcast radio. More recently, thanks to the nature of the Internet, hoaxes can become very widespread very quickly, and when reports of them are purposefully presented as news stories, it counts as fake news. Unlike many hoaxes, however, fake news is meant to act as disinformation, contributing to widespread belief and influencing social behavior. It is not meant to be satire like The Onion, which purposefully exaggerates to the point of obviousness.

E2. What is narrative?

Stories are a fundamental means of how we humans make sense of the world — we tell stories to inform, to entertain, to socialize, and to relate to each other. Used to express imagination and the range of human emotion and experience, stories are what comprise culture, religion, and history (notice that ‘history’ shares the same etymology as ‘story’). As much as stories might be considered just a form of entertainment and artistic expression, they are also the primary means by which humans socialize each other into particular worldviews and ideologies. Of course every culture socializes and teaches children through stories, but the practice is still powerful among adults in the form of narrative, found in everything from news broadcasts to to television, film, and music, from social media posts and memes to conversations with friends and co-workers.

From a traditional rhetoric perspective, narrative describes events and acts and is one of the traditional four composition types, along with description (things and people), exposition (analysis or explanation), and argument (persuasion). From a literature perspective, narratives can be categorized into categories or genres like fiction, non-fiction, and poetry; each can be divided into sub-genres like biography, mystery, romance, or science fiction. Genres also typify film and games, which have their own sub-genres. Traditional narratives have predictable narrative elements like characters (e.g. protagonists, narrators, etc.), settings (place and time), acts, scenes, and plots. Plots usually have conventional and predictable structures with the fortunes of characters rising and falling in various predictable patterns, for example, the monomyth/hero’s journey, coming of age, or underdog plots.

As a technique, narrative can be found in many different text types — anything that ‘tells a story’–from Instagram reels to TV commercials to fashion outfits. Increasingly, as politics, entertainment, and other aspects of society, culture, and everyday life become mediatized (i.e. turned into media), storytelling is used for purposes of persuasion, that is, to convince audiences to buy something, to vote for someone, or to align or identify with something or someone (which can lead to future purchases or votes). By its nature, a story invites its audience to identify with the person telling the story or the people and characters experiencing the story. In this way, experiencing (i.e. reading, viewing, or listening to) stories can create empathy with the storyteller and the characters and a sort of vicarious lived experience. Good storytellers and characters give us a sense of connection and relatedness, which is a fundamental human need.

E3. The language of narrative

Narratives can be told through a variety of non-linguistic means — through imagery, sound, color, music, and even smell — but spoken and written language is the traditional means. Usually an author or storyteller creates a narrative by taking a point-of-view or perspective on a story and using a particular set of first-person pronouns (I, we, etc.) or third-person pronouns (he, she, it, they, etc.). A second-person perspective (you) is used in rarer text types like interactive fiction, games, and therapeutic speech (e.g. hypnosis), which makes these very powerful at suggestion (and some would say addiction). Commands and the generic you are also powerful because they use the second person — basically they tell the audience what to do or how they should act and feel. While all parts of speech work together in storytelling, pronouns are vital because they can invite readers to identify and empathize with the narrator, protagonist, or characters, just as they may imply that the audience should not.

The use of particular verb tenses and aspects also typifies narratives and storytelling. A tense codifies when an action took place–past, present, or future, and an aspect explains something about how it happened — in a continuous manner as in the progressive aspect, or in a way that focuses on whether and when it was completed in the perfect aspect. The most obvious tenses for telling a story are of course the past tenses: simple past, past progressive, and past perfect. Using these tenses together along with first or third person perspective, a storyteller can tell events in the exact order as they happened or they can tell story events out of order for narrative effect. If an author uses flashbacks they can tell a past event using present tenses (simple present, present progressive, and present perfect), but we can also recount an event using the narrative present, the use of present tenses to tell a story. Narrative present is very powerful because it makes the reader or audience feel like they are experiencing the story as it is being told. Compare:

So I was walking to my car this morning, eating a breakfast burrito, and suddenly a hawk flew right at me and I screamed and dropped the burrito, and he swooped in and took it.

with

So I’m walking to my car this morning eating a breakfast burrito and suddenly a hawk flies right at me and I scream and drop the burrito, and he swoops in and takes it!

The narrative present can also be used with reported speech, which normally ‘goes backwards one tense’ from present to past or past to past perfect.

Beth: I finished. I am leaving tomorrow.

Jane: What did she say?

Bob to Jane: Beth said she had finished and was leaving tomorrow. (although she hasn’t necessarily left yet)

However, Bob could also say “Beth said she is leaving tomorrow”, or “Beth says she is leaving tomorrow” to make her act of leaving seem more immediate and impending.

E4. Storytelling in media

A. What is newsworthy?

Not all stories are told in the florid style used by the artificial intelligence author of Ella and Whiskers and Olivia Sterling. In traditional media, news stories are meant to be informative and not intentionally entertaining (although some media use an infotainment model to ‘sell’ the news). While a traditional news report is supposed to answer all the ‘wh’ questions (who, what, where, when, why, how), a reporter can build an engaging story by showing that it has newsworthy qualities like impact (it affects the audience), proximity (it’s physically near the audience), timeliness (it’s happening now), human interest (it has to do with humanity), oddity (it’s unusual), conflict (it’s causing friction between people), and prominence (it’s important). At the same time, reporters may practice sensationalism – playing up emotionally evocative elements of a story in a disproportionate way – in order to sell papers or programs.

B. How do media influence narratives?

Media play a major role in not only the creation and spread of narratives but also in keeping certain narratives in public consciousness while deemphasizing or not reporting on others. News organizations may word headlines provocatively, they may put stories on front pages or bury them, and they may shorten, lengthen, or even omit stories to intensify or downplay their importance. What they choose to report most frequently, what time they choose to share it, and what goes viral because it garners the most emotional response does not necessarily correlate with objective importance but rather with what they believe — and what social media algorithms calculate — people want to read, hear, or see. Moreover, media organizations may be politically biased to reflect their owners’ and their subscribers’ worldviews, presenting stories from their particular perspective in order to confirm and reinforce them.

C. Why are social media powerful at spreading narratives?

Social media are especially powerful because users and influencers, not just journalists, can create and share content, and algorithms based on popularity rather than veracity determine what goes viral and what does not. Moreover, in comparison to traditional print media, social media stories are powerful because they can utilize modalities like images and sound in addition to language. Because of the nature of digital technology, social media story content can be easily altered and removed from its original context so that its original authorship or provenance is unknown. When this is done for humorous, satirical, or entertainment purposes, the viewer is usually meant to know it, and the decontextualization contributes to the humorous effect. However, an author can lie or fabricate information that is quite believable and serious, and if it’s sensational or seems newsworthy, it may be spread as misinformation. When the author or sharer has dishonest intentions, it may ultimately become disinformation. In other words, people can fabricate or misrepresent something or somebody by taking images, sounds, and quotes out of context and emphasizing their newsworthy or sensational features. With AI and deep fake technologies that allow the alteration of voices, photos, and moving images, nefarious individuals and troll farms can easily create stories that are not true.

Political and corporate entities (individuals and groups) can develop and coordinate stories, sharing them in press releases, news conferences, social media posts, and campaigns. They may attempt to spin, or influence the interpretation and virality of, certain events and other stories, and control the narrative that is emerging around an action, event, or outcome. This may be done by something as basic as using a bit of doublespeak, or as nefarious as purposefully releasing coordinated campaigns of disinformation and propaganda.

D. What language power techniques can media use to reflect bias?

Language power techniques can be used in any social media or news media story–no matter how short– to reflect a particular bias or perspective on something. Authors may do this by:

• intensifying or downplaying certain stories (intensification involving repetition, association, and composition; downplaying involving omission, diversion, and confusion; Rank, 1980)
• using language that reflects and reinforces certain grand narratives, metaphors, or certain cognitive frames
• employing or repeating doublespeak without questioning or exposing it
• not calling out name-calling
• using particular pronouns and address forms that involve or exclude certain audiences
• using the narrative present or the present tenses to give a sense of immediacy, proximity, and timeliness
• reporting anecdotes or hearsay rather than objective evidence
• using weasel language like vagueness, passivization, and nominalization for deceptive purposes

E5. How does storytelling work?

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, said, “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” Why is storytelling so powerful? Watch “Whoever controls the narrative has the power” by narrative scholar Gretchen Busl to learn more.

As Busl explains, communication theorist Walter Fisher argued that narrative is actually the primary means by which humans make sense of the world throughout life, not just childhood. His theory is that a narrative paradigm guides human understanding and sense-making even more powerfully and universally than a rational world paradigm, that is, making sense of the world through evidence, logic, and argumentation, which must be learned, and upon which the scientific method is based–modern science and, for the most part, the law operate according to the rational world paradigm. A rational world paradigm assumes that people will change their minds when faced with convincing evidence that counters their beliefs, even if it is not intuitive or immediately tangible. In reality, however, many people only need to hear a single, convincing story to believe something — proof by anecdote. In other words, for many people, one story can be more powerful than an array of scientific facts (unless you’re a scientist, of course). People may also take proof by anecdote as evidence to believe conspiracy theories, which statistically are highly unlikely and impossible to disprove, since one cannot technically prove that something does not exist, only that it does. In other words, a rational world paradigm is the result of learned scientific literacy, while the narrative paradigm is rather a basic human trait.

The narrative paradigm is a way of understanding reality through narrative storytelling and anecdotal example, that is, subjective judgment, relatability, and common sense moreso than pure objective, rational empiricism. A good story is coherent with our worldview and seems truthful, that is, it exhibits narrative coherence (it fits together) and narrative fidelity (it seems true). Research shows people are more likely to accept something that aligns with their belief system than something that does not and that they act, sometimes unconsciously, on confirmation bias, the phenomenon where we are more likely to seek out and find what confirms what we already believe rather than something that challenges it. Also, humans naturally gravitate towards echo chambers where they are more likely to hear only narratives that align with their belief systems and the grand narratives of their culture, that is, the network of discourses and narratives that all relate to one another and provide a culture their historical sense of identity.  In short, humans must intentionally learn to be critical and demand evidence, but they are more likely to believe what fits with what they already know, what they implicitly perceive about the world around them, and what they know through socialization and enculturation. If they were purely rational and logical creatures, they would not need laws and legal systems as an objective arbiter, and they wouldn’t believe in notions that may conflict with one another or in conspiracy theories.

Module author: Jonathon Reinhardt

Last updated: 28 March 2024

This module is part of Modern English Grammar and the Power of Grammar, an open educational resource offered by the Clarify Initiative, a privately funded project with the goal of raising critical language awareness and media literacy among students of language and throughout society.