[ChuckMcM]

As I read this, I think what the author is saying is that today's media is more about creating "Narratives" rather than communicating "Information."

My Grandfather, who was an attorney, shared with me that attorneys cut apart narratives with evidence to get to the truth. If all of the evidence is available, the only surviving narrative is most likely the truest representation of an event.

At the time, I didn't appreciate what he meant by that, these days however it seems "obvious" to me. When you are reading a story that says something is now "twice as likely" but doesn't tell you how likely it was before and how likely it is now, that is a missing piece of information that would help you evaluate the overall presentation. That it is missing, may be an indication that the presentation is less compelling if it were present. And it is that which changes something from "information" to a "narrative" in my opinion.

One used to be able to read multiple sources, which is touted these days as "meta journalism", in order to pull the evidence from a number of different narratives in order to arrive at something closer to the truth, but with the consolidation of media that becomes harder to do.

[im3w1l]

A huge part of narrative building is story selection. If there are groups A, B, C all of which do good and bad stuff to each other, media will create a narrative by highlighting again and again bad things that A does to B, leaving out the good things, leaving out what B does, and leaving out C entirely.

[mormegil]

Definitely. And with today's vast amount of information and stories available, it's not difficult to do so. It's nicely explained in https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...

[pm90]

It depends on what kind of media sources you're looking at.

Long form media (like the New Yorker) are generally better at being somewhat exhaustive with their sources. Newspapers...are almost entirely narrative driven but do include the factual description of at least one event around which the stories are based. "Instant" media (e.g. Twitter, TikTok) is even more extreme in being narrative driven.

Because of the time commitment involved in consumption, I suspect that long form journalism won't ever get the audience that other types of media gets.

[rayiner]

I quite disagree. Long form media tend to be just very long narratives. Newspapers are narrative wrapped around a single factual event, to fit that event into a preferred narrative.

Tweets can be narrative driven, but sometimes they’re centered around some primary source document or chart or something like that, and in that case they can be far more useful than a newspaper article.

My view these days is give me the primary sources or GTFO. For example, I don’t trust you to tell me what’s in a court filing—the first thing in your article better be a link to the filing itself and you had better actually quote the source material.

[remarkEon]

The lack of a link to the source material is the quickest way to get me to stop reading and mash that back button.