tell me a story

Mickey Kaus loves to make fun of CNN exec Jonathan Klein, who, when he took over the reins at the cable-news network, promised to do more “storytelling” on the network’s news programs.

Klein got lucky with his “strategy” when the tsunami struck Indonesia some six or seven days into his stint: no more talking heads on CNN; from now on, the network would “report” the news rather than talk about it; pundit shows were “crack.” (Daily Show host Jon Stewart had recently berated talking head Tucker Carlson for “hurting America” with Crossfire, his shoutfest talk show–a low moment for Stewart, who was a guest on Carlson’s show at the time. Nevertheless, Stewart received lots of politically correct kudos from the folks who still believe that the news is serious, rather than show, business).

Mr. Klein continually described CNN’s new news concept as “powerful, emotional storytelling,” the kind of firsthand reality TV in which anchors emoted and opined more and even the most eye-glazing subjects—Social Security, campaign-finance reform—became stirring conflicts between opposing human faces.

Cynics like Kaus were quick to see through this faux-serious makeover: viewers of the new CNN might miss out on a few episodes of the Scott Peterson soap opera (Klein bragged that he would be doing fewer “tabloid” stories), but they would be rewarded with a million other little soap operas–probably something like the “up close and personal” vignettes familiar to viewers of the Olympics in the 1980s.

Personally, I am underwhelmed by the CNN makeover. I miss “90-Second Pop” and Andy Borowitz on CNN’s American Morning. I never thought I’d say this, but I even miss Bill Hemmer. The show is unbearably dull.

Storytelling gets a bad rap from serious news types and serious lit types–let’s call them the keepers of the flame. Plot-driven stuff is too reductive, they say. It’s not nuanced. It’s unsophisticated. It’s downmarket. Et cetera.

I know what they mean–I love nuance and layers in my fiction, too–but I disagree with the “news-must-be-a-sober-business-or-it’s-not-news” folks. News at its rawest is, of course, serious business–it’s an early-warning system to alert us to danger. But when people say they want to “hear the news,” they are rarely looking for raw data. Even when they turn to the Weather Channel–ostensibly a raw-data-serving channel–they get segments called “Storm Stories.” And they sit transfixed in front of the television.

We crave stories and cannot do without them. More important, we can’t make do without them, either. Storytelling is our most basic means of communicating, and the most efficent information- and message- transmission system known to man. Especially in an age when mass culture has atomized into a mass of niches.

So. It’s a mistake to underestimate the spellbinding power of narrative–even the kind found on cable TV news–and a misconception to think that an emphasis on storytelling makes for inferior journalism.

I would even argue that it is the only kind of “journalism” that will survive in our speeded-up, plugged-in 24/7 media world…because it’s the onlly kind that will attract the attention of distracted people. And soon we will all be distracted.

If we can’t fight it, let’s get ahead of the curve. Let us shape our new storytelling forms.

Here, the always provocative “Michael Blowhard” speculates on one kind of storytelling:

I wonder too if stuff like blogs don’t also supplant traditional short-on-the-page-fiction in a way. If you follow blogs, you’re checking in on “characters” — Terry Teachout, Neil Kramer, Alice in Texas. (Each of whom is, to some extent, a kind of performance artist.) And stories semi-sorta evolve out of this. If you’ve got a circle of blogs (and bloggers) you follow, it can almost be like being a fan of a soap opera — all these familiar characters, going on and on … Hey, reality-TV has supplanted a certain amount of traditional fiction-TV, why shouldn’t blogs be supplanting a certain amount of traditional printed fiction?