1
COM 802 – Narrative in News
Instructor:Dr. Ron Bishop
Office:PSA Building, Room 324
Office Hours:T and TH 12:30-2 or by appointment
Office Phone:215-895-1823
Ron’s Cell: 302-598-2667
Class Location:PSA 115
Email:rcbsam@comcast,net
Ron’s Website: rcbsam.com
Our Facebook Page:Narrative in News (friend me and I’ll add you).
Welcome!
We explain life to each other through narrative, through stories – not PowerPoint, TED Talks, or term papers – stories. But that comes with a cost: truth. This is not necessarily a bad or destructive thing. Stories are comfortable – and often make us uncomfortable, but they are, from the moment they are hatched, inaccurate, rooted in preconceptions and assumptions that we carry with us, shaped and colored by context and motivations, and, 20 years later, told to achieve different goals and impress different people.
The same is true about the stories about people and events we receive from the news media. But all of these stories share one characteristic: it is less important to us that they are true than that they resonate, that they hold together and make sense – and that they are easy to pass on. But how do we – and how do journalists – reconcile these attributes with theiralleged desire to provide us with the information – factually accurate, timely information – we then allegedly use to make sense of a mixed up, complicated, tumultuous world? Even if we accept famed journalist Bob Woodward’s assessment that journalism is “the best available version of the truth,” the movement we need, young Julian,is supposed to be toward truth, as well as on your shoulder – but to paraphrase Linus Van Pelt in A Charlie Brown Christmas, that’s not what narrative is all about. That’s not why we – and journalists – tell stories.
Our Project: When Journalists Die
Together, we’ll explore how a narrative emerges, comes together, and is reinforced by journalists as they follow a story. To amp up the fun, the narrative we’ll explore is one told by journalists about colleagues who either have passed on or have retired after a storied career. We can talk about whether to expand our criteria to include journalists whose departure from the field was…let’s just say…less than mutually agreed upon.
Using my paper on how the news media covered Walter Cronkite’s death in 2009 as a guide (see our Reading and Project Schedule), each of you will choose a journalist who meets our main criteria and then compile all of the coverage of his or her death, retirement, or firing. You’ll then conduct a thorough narrative analysis on the coverage. I’ll be joining in the fun – I’ll take one of the journalists left over after you make your choices during our very scientific selection procedure.
My goal is to pitch our collection of essays to a book publisher. Don’t worry, though: I’ll handle the prospectus – although if you’re up for it, I can go over how one is written. One of our first orders of business is to come up with a less morbid title for the collection. It’s catchy, I guess, but it doesn’t accurately reflect the scope of our endeavor.
While I’ll happily help you with the project at any point, I’d like to see a rough draft of the chapter by week 7. And while we’ll be talking about the project throughout the term, during our last class in Week 10, each of you will give short (10-minute) presentations about your papers and the journey. The final version of the chapter is due that night as well.
Your Project: The Watchdog Files
I’d also like for you to have the experience of soliciting and collecting narratives from actual human beings. To that end, each of you will arrange to conduct half-hour long interviews with 2-3 people whose lives have been positively impacted by the work of a crusading “watchdog” journalist or journalists.
Please understand that we’re not talking about someone who was interviewed once by a journalist or caught by a TV crew on camera while waiting for a bus. The folks with whom you speak will have had their lives made significantly better by investigative reporting.
I prefer that the folks you interview be the ones who called the issue to the journalist’s attention, or served as a key source, but folks who simply realized the benefit of the reporting – and can speak with some depth about it – will do nicely.
My motivation? Well, it’s easy for me to tick off story after story and series after series that impacted society. It’s a little tougher – and more illustrative – to hear the stories of how the folks whose lives were improved make meaning of the experience and of the journalist’s work.
We’ll develop the interview protocol in Week 2. Your papers will be due Week 6.
Article Summary and Critiques (or ASACs as we’ll call them)
There is no text for the class. I will either distribute the week’s readings in class, put them up on my website, or email them to you. I hope, believe, expect, and know that you’ll have completed the readings before you come to class.
Within each batch of readings, you’ll find journal articles that report the results of narrative analyses. Beginning Week 2, we’ll set aside time for discussion of that paper/those papers. Now for the fun part: one (and on Weeks 8 and 9, two) of you will get us started by summarizing and critiquing one of those studies. Each member of our merry band is responsible for doing two ASACs during the term.
To sum up: everybody reads, one or two folks present (or for you West Wing fans: “When the President enters a room, nobody sits…”).
Policies and Particulars
I’ll keep this section brief: Please be here – and be here on time. If you have to miss a class, let me know as you soon as you know. Then we’ll both know. And be safe out there.
The work you submit should be yours – and when it’s not yours, it should be fully attributed and referenced. If plagiarism rears its ugly and overly dramatized head, I won’t haul you off to the Star Chamber; we’ll talk about it.
While we’ll write the final projects, you can, if you wish, choose an alternative route for the Watchdog Files – you can videotape the interviews (I’d recommend that in any case) and stitch the together as sort of a mini-documentary, for example. Just give me a heads up if you decide to take me up on this amazing offer. And if you call in the next 10 minutes, you’ll get not one but two Sham-Wows!
As for grading, I expect that your work will be as good as you can make it, clear andthorough with everything spelled correctly – and with page numbers – and featuring in-depth and compelling arguments that reflect a burgeoning fluency with the course material.
Oh, you wanted numbers – my bad. Each ASAC is worth 15 points (30 points total); your “Watchdog Files” paper is worth 30 points, and your “When Journalists Die” chapter is worth 40 points.
Comments, ideas, musings, quarrels, responses, criticisms, rejoinders, queries – all are welcome and expected in my classes. And don’t sweat critiquing my work; I’m a big boy (I have been since age two) – I can take it.
Reading and Project Schedule
Week 1Anyone can narrative! Stories as the fabric of social reality.
Why do journalists love them so?
Readings:Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” from Illuminations.
Walter Fisher, Chapter 3 of Human Communication as Narration.
Sonja Foss, Rhetorical Criticism (Chapter 9).
Ron Bishop, “The Least Anxious Person in a Boat,” Electronic Journal of Communication, 2011.
Week 2Casting our experience into narrative forms.
Developing interview protocols.Conducting a sound analysis.
Readings:Jerome Bruner, “Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry, 1991.
Jerome Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research, 2004.
Danielle Klapproth, Narrative as Social Practice (Chapters 1-3).
David Secko et al., “The Unfinished Science Story: Journalist-Audience Interactions From the Globe and Mail’s Health and Science Sections,” Journalism, 2011.
Week 3Collective memory, interpretive communities, and the birth of myth.
Readings:Jack Lule, Chapter 1 of Daily News, Eternal Stories
Dan Berkowitz and Robert Gutsche Jr., “Drawing Lines in the Journalistic Sand: Jon Stewart, Edward R. Murrow, and Memory of News Gone By,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 2012
Carolyn Kitch, “Anniversary Journalism, Collective Memory,
and the Cultural Authority to Tell the Storyof the American Past,” Journal of Popular Culture, 2002.
Week 4
Reading:Linda and Vicente Berdayes, “The Information Superhighway in
Contemporary Magazine Narrative,” Journal of Communication, 1998.
Week 5
Reading:Robert Gutsche Jr., “There’s No Place Like Home: Storytelling of War in Afghanistan and Street Crime ‘At Home’ in the Omaha World Herald, Journalism Practice, 2014.
Week 6“YOUR PROJECT” DUE.
Reading:Ron Bishop, “The Pursuit of Perfection: A Narrative Analysis of How Women’s Magazines Cover Eating Disorders,” Howard Journal of Communication, 2001.
Week 7“WHEN JOURNALISTS DIE” CHAPTER DRAFTS DUE
Reading:Peter Parisi, “The New York Times Looks at One Block in Harlem: Narratives of Race in Journalism, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1998.
Week 8
Reading:W. Lance Bennett, “Storytelling in Criminal Trials: A Model of Social Judgment,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1978.
Sheila Webb, “The Woman Citizen: A Study of How News Narratives Adapt to a Changing Social Environment,” American Journalism, 2012.
Week 9
Reading:Robert Gutsche Jr., “Building Boundaries: A Case Study of the Use of News Photographs and Cultural Narratives in the Coverage of Local Crime and in the Creation of Urban Space,” Visual Communication Quarterly, 2011.
Week 10“WHEN JOURNALISTS DIE” FINAL CHAPTERS DUE
CHAPTER TALKS AND FUTURE PLANS
Building Boundaries: A Case Study of the