THE FACTS ANSWER

The Arab Spring? It was
just a Hollywood film
Instead of reporting facts from  the Middle East, the media seek  “stories” that conform to a pre-fabricated script.

BY JOHN WATERS

From time to time, a wave of change is announced in the world, which suggests itself as a dramatic movement toward some ideologically defined improvement. Of course, it is never couched in exactly these terms. Instead, there will be a subtle presentation of a series of events in a particular pattern, which immediately arouses expectations in the minds of the public. Suddenly, everyone is talking about it and watching the events unfold on TV. The Internet is agog.
Then, reality takes over. Events take a different turn. Some things happen that don’t quite fit in, but for a while the media manage to avoid this problem. Things get played down, or explained away to keep the dominant narrative alive. Eventually, the pressure of facts and events becomes too much, and the story falls apart. After that, nobody mentions it anymore until someone comes up with a counter narrative to explain why the first one came undone. Then a new movie begins.
We observed this three years ago with what was called the “Arab Spring.” To any shrewd observer of Middle Eastern politics, the idea of some kind of “velvet revolution” happening there was fraught with enormous improbabilities. There was the challenge of Islamism, for one thing, which many commentators insisted on ignoring or playing down in favor of a narrative in which “the people” were being mobilized across the Middle East. Borrowing a plot-structure and storylines from the Eastern European revolutions of two decades before, the media daily insinuated that a whole new era had been ushered in via Facebook and Twitter.
It could not have been more silly, and so it has proved to be. There was no “Arab Spring,” merely a cynically orchestrated series of pseudo-revolutions which in most cases have resulted in circumstances far worse than those that persisted before. Something has changed from the olden days when media merely told us what was happening, and–when possible–why. Now, a pattern must be insinuated from the beginning, and events dressed up under a dramatic heading, like the name of a new movie. The media tell us “stories” which are written as though in Hollywood, rather than simply telling us what is true.
Journalists have always used the word “story” to refer to the material of their work. But of course real “stories”–in the classical sense–rarely manifest spontaneously in real life. These stories engage us because, like music, they operate on something intrinsic to human desiring. The media’s job, on the other hand, is to tell people what has happened, what the facts are and why these things matter to anyone not involved in them. Journalism, by its nature, dips into situations, lives, and epochs in which stories, in the classical sense, are elusive. But now the media insist that every “story” conform to a script, with a storyline which must be subjected to a process of resolution.
We observe, then, a kind of “Hollywoodization” of journalism. Instead of simply reporting what happens, media today seek to tweak and edit real-life events so they acquire storylines in the manner of soap operas or popular novels. Journalism has become a branch of the entertainment industry, seeking to convert reality into stories in the classical sense, with heroes, arcs, endings, and moral conclusions. Increasingly, too, we, the “consuming public” now look to conventional news reporting in much the same way we look to the entertainment industry–to satisfy our deep human craving for stories. Reality is no longer sufficient.