Soothsayers and political narratives

Today, nothing stands still. Events shift in hours or minutes, and what we generously call “reality” mutates at the twitch of a tweet, or the whim of some granny-glasses billionaire in Silicon Valley. This produces a situation in which only the foolhardy would try to predict, with any confidence, what tomorrow might bring.

Take the extravagant tangle down south produced by Tuesday's presidential election. I don't want to guess where that's going, or what a contested vote will mean in the days ahead for an already intensely divided nation. But of the process and practices that ineluctably led up to that mess of an election, there is much to be said.

The high-paid mandarins of the polling industry flopped, massively, again. Their projections misled the nation for weeks. After their pathetic and risible performance in 2016, the public hoped for better this time. Actually, it looks as if the pollsters took 2016 as a blueprint for their fresh ventures into incompetence in 2020. How wonderfully they succeeded.

When these pollsters are called on their wretched performance, are they sorrowful and repentant? Let us examine the response of the maven of election projections, the celebrated Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight. Apparently, he's mad at everyone but himself. “If they're coming after FiveThirtyEight, then the answer is f--k you,” he said.

A couple hundred years ago, these number wizards and forecasters would be in the stocks, trying, one hopes vainly, to duck rotten cabbage heads and stale eggs.

They have one defence, however. Pollsters could play with the Ouija board or study the entrails of dead yaks as a technique for fortune-telling (the polling's original charter) and no one would care, so long as they kept the results to themselves, or weren't backstopped by a compliant press and used as leverage or cover for imbalanced coverage.

The polls and the press reinforce each other in this gaming of reality. The press adopted and reinforced the narrative, which was suggested by the erroneous polls, that the Democrats were riding a wave that might allow them to grab the Senate and swell their numbers in the House.

The word “narrative” is key here. Narrative is a darling term in modern media, and basically may be defined as “the storyline we would like to see and therefore one that we construct,” as opposed to a neutral account of events as they actually are. Narratives are a genre of sophisticated spin, a consciously manipulated management of events to produce a predetermined political effect.

An excellent and most thorough treatment of narrative can be found in poet-essayist David Solway's recent C2C Journal piece: Narrative “functions as a material idea that commands belief, as if it were alluding to something that exists in the world, like gravity or bankruptcy, rather than in the mind. The truth is that narratives, more often than not, can disguise or embroider or deny what is.”

The polls were high-grade ammunition in the press narrative that Joe Biden was a shoe-in, the Republicans were toast and Donald Trump was done. Right up to election night, and even during, much of the media strained to keep up the narrative. They delayed calls tending to Trump, and with eager prematurity called those favouring the Democrats.

The classic example of narrative journalism was the three-year press saga of the Trump-Russia conspiracy. The Russian hoax was never a genuine news story; it was instead a narrative: an obligingly credulous interpretation of dubious data and compromised sources to promote a story that might unseat Donald Trump. This consumed three years of media coverage, and it should be worrisome that it probably swayed voters in this election. It was, after all, an empty bubble.

This is all American stuff, some might mutter. Well, we have narrative pushers up here, too. Much Canadian coverage only too closely mirrored that of the left-leaning or fully left-committed broadcasts and newspapers in the United States.

Some Canadian media believe, like their brethren in the U.S., that they know what news must be presented. And so they select the news. Thus, that which they think advances a worthy perspective or an enlightened outlook is what makes the broadcast or the front page. The template of their preferences is overtly left, coupled with an almost feverish determination not to know what life is like outside metropolitan borders.

It was under this dubious rubric that for the past two years stories damaging to Trump were ravenously consumed. The opposite — the Joe and Hunter Biden travails with foreign money, Joe Biden's reclusive and flailing performance — didn't exist. This is immoral. When they underplay some stories and overplay others, journalists become actors in a drama who are posing as spectators.

In sum, they are being deceitful. They may dress this deceit in comforting rationalizations, flatter themselves with the excuse they are “serving a higher purpose,” or even (it being such a joke), “speaking truth to power.” It is journalistic self-delusion. And by submitting to it, media outlets are playing politics with the kind of careless ethics politicians themselves play with.

So, while it may well be that we can't guess where things are going, we can say what should happen. There is a need for some mighty reforms in the practice of both politics and press. And the most urgent of these is for the news media to return to its old standards of objectivity, and abandon the idea that it is here to mould events rather than report on them. Leaving the politics to the politicians would be a great start.