The complicated, unproductive search for ‘the narrative’

A posting on X this week from @DuPageCountyGOP wails, in large white type over a bright-red background: “In the last 30 days, 24 Downers Grove businesses have been robbed. This should be the lead story in every suburban paper. Why isn’t it?”

In one sense that is a very easy question to answer. As a few of the 100 or so replies pointed out, the story has been widely reported going back weeks by both print and broadcast outlets, including a story the Daily Herald ran with a large headline in its print editions just the day before and had featured prominently on its website for two days.

But if we pretend that the post was accurate, its legitimate question about news judgment requires a considerably more complicated answer. Sorry.

When I taught high school journalism back in the 1970s, it wasn’t hard to lean on famous quotes that helped explore what the term “news judgment” means.

“The newspaper’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” … “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news.” … “If it bleeds, it leads,” and many, many more famous sayings attempt to summarize some formula for deciding what deserves to be reported and how.

But the truth today — as in the past really — is that news judgment cannot be compacted into a single clever phrase. It is a complex process that involves an imprecise, daily-changing mixture of that which is shocking, that which helps people understand their government, that which helps people find ideas for improving their daily lives, that which people find just interesting and countless other “that whiches.”

Indeed, one reason we have such an energetic, competitive, vibrant news media in this country is that so many different outlets apply their own blends of these objectives in the ultimate bid for an audience — and not always the same audience.

This reflection has grown in me recently as the Daily Herald’s letters to the editor and my own email have attracted frequent complaints about how our story play suggests our political or social bias. “When President Trump does something bad, it makes the front page. When he does something good, it goes in the back somewhere if it gets published at all” is a common theme. But we just as often hear very different grumblings, depending on the writer’s personal inclincations.

With this as background, I confess to some uncomfortable umbrage about the @DuPageCountyGOP post and, especially, to the comments it attracted. “Doesn’t fit the narrative,” declares one. “Not in the cheerleaders agenda” another. “Bcz they’re the enemy of the people,” yet another.

And on and on, though one of my favorites blusters, “These crimes in this area are never broadcasted, maybe they get mentioned on MSM, but if you blink, oh well! I don’t watch MSM so I tend to find out here or in my local network neighborhood,” which delightfully and frighteningly blends inaccuracy, incongruity and laziness into a single run-on sentence. How, after all, can one legitimately decry that certain media never mention certain stories who proudly refuses to follow those media in favor of neighborhood rumors?

In response to such complaints and conversations, I do sometimes ask myself, “Can’t we just read the paper?” Must there be intrigue and artifice in every decision editors make? Are we not willing to invest our own thinking, reading and viewing into our conclusions about what we encounter in media?

Yes, the answers are more complicated than one finds comfortable, but we have to admit that a familiar theme also fits the @DuPageGOP posting, so many of the cynical responses it inspired and so much of what is trumpeted on social media sites in general: Often, it is asking those questions that just doesn’t “fit the narrative.”

Sigh.

May we all become less concerned about defining “the narrative” of an information source than about evaluating the information it reports.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His new book “Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.