Political Narratives Are the Media s Default in Times of Tragedy – WSJ

But the unfathomable isn t something our media masters can tolerate. An unsurpassing self-assurance in their own moral and intellectual wisdom isn t allowed to be punctured by the complex inexplicability of the real world. So to maintain the patina of omniscience they must fit the story into one of their narratives. It ceases to be a complex act of mental derangement and becomes instead simply a blindingly obvious case.

This morally indignant and intellectually tendentious approach is what characterizes almost all news reporting now. The media holds up the brutal murder of 10 African-Americans this month in Buffalo as indicative of the white nationalist wave that supposedly has the nation in its grip and much more excitingly for the new breed of journalist that wants to ban all journalism other than his own as primarily the fault of Fox News.

The killing by a police officer of a black man in Minneapolis two years ago becomes an exemplar of the allegedly ongoing war by police officers across the country against black people.

Every hurricane and forest fire events that have been occurring with random frequency and intensity for millennia are now all a climatological synecdoche for the evil we have done to the planet in the last half century or so. Any journalist who challenges the narrative is denounced and assigned his share of the responsibility.

The primacy of preaching over reporting inevitably leads journalism down a path of hyperbole, distortion and outright fabrication.

via www.wsj.com