THE DANGER OF THE WRONG STORY
As we grow, we learn the importance of telling a story. This importance is of course nothing new. It is one of the most ancient practices, just as old as culture itself, which function to entertain and educate. I grew up in a time where normal was go tlhaba mainane around the evening fire at my grandmother’s masimo. The stories were always in Setswana. With the benefit of hindsight, I see how stories are the ways we keep things alive. They are the ways we remember things. Stories are the photographs of culture. They are, in many cases, intended to preserve a people’s history, and to keep alive certain notions and principles as well as beliefs.
The ways in which the stories are framed, and the times they are presented, including the ways they are elaborated on is quite deliberate in every culture and for every community and people. Setswana stories were often told at night, right before we went to sleep, as an anecdote for the mind. Almost like a meditation for your time of sleep and dream. In our society, our stories are not solely limited to the narration of chronological events. It is almost a succession of language. It connects people with each other and with those who have gone as well as the ones who are yet to come. In many families, I have observed how the stories or our memories are what keep the deceased alive in our hearts, even as they continue to rest in eternal peace.
Storytelling has tremendously evolved in our lifetime. We watched stories move from tales around the fire, to stories on our screens, shared in posts of captions, or 24hour stories. Each of us has become a story teller in our own right, to one extent or the other. Our presence is expressed in our silence, or in how frequently we engage. Where Botswana was previously a country that did not document, we have transformed to being a country which preserves culture and passes on cultural knowledge through generations. Herein lies the importance of storytelling. Stories hold power.
They hold life lessons which are essential to bind us to each other, and to moulding the way we think, collectively and how we interpret and frame issues of different natures in our minds.
Enter propaganda! Media’s very persuasive and very misleading sibling! I guess the question is whether there is a place for propaganda in the media? Is there room to evoke a certain very specific emotional or obligable response from the reader?! Well, every story teller is biased, one way or the other. We all have an agenda, framed by our political and personal beliefs. Propaganda in the media, on its own, is neither sinister, nor evil UNLESS the purpose it serves is harmful. The same as silence or indifference in the period of hardship. Our litmus test, on engaging propaganda, and advancing our perspective is really social morality.
There are times however when social morality and therefore the propaganda it advances are both fundamentally flawed. That brings us to today’s topic (and yes, it took us this long to get to it). The other day, I read a story in a newspaper which said, “… the father…had sexual intercourse with his daughter between June 2020 and July 2021 at Block 2.”
Let’s pause here. Unwanted and unlawful sexual activity is not “sexual intercourse”. In a society where incestuous defilement and rape are rife, and have spiked, the way we narrate the stories of violence, is illustrative of what we entertain, what we allow and what we incubate.
It reflects how we think about sexual violence in our society. It is also telling. It explains why, for so long, we have been unable to beat this problem. It is because we don’t see it as a problem, and we don’t frame it as the appalling stain on our society that it is. Rape is not sex. It is a violation, and should be called by its name. When the story of rape, is told as a story of sex, it misleads the reader into accepting as normal, the violence visited on children in their homes. It is a dangerous thing, to tell the wrong story about something so vile, as if it is something as normal as sex.
The media represents our collective means of storytelling. In this way, storytelling through the media humanises and summarises the ways we should see things. It adjusts our values and morals and indicates or communicates the ways things should be engaged with.
Framing theory in media, in the context of politics and mass media communications, defines the packaging of an element of rhetoric in a way that encourages certain interpretations, discouraging others. Media reporting a very significant way of developing “normal” and presenting what should and should not be accepted by a people. The media dictate what a problem is, that needs a solution. There is therefore power in the ways that media develop stories. They hold the authority to shift mindset and skew knowledge on a specific topic by presenting false information, or presenting the information in a manner which guides the reader to accept it in a certain way. Framing issues in stories sets the agenda and impacts how we perceive issues of social concern, what we believe about them, our attitudes and behaviours thereto related, and it shapes our ethics and morality related to these issues.