Political Narratives Are the Media’s Default in Times of Tragedy

They become props in the larger drama that is being constantly written for us by the preachy puritans who now control most news organizations, convenient plot devices to illustrate the virtue of their cause and the malevolence of that of their critics.

The mass murder of happy fourth graders and teachers celebrating the last few days of the school year in a Texas border town could almost stand as the definition of an inexplicable act of a single mind gone catastrophically astray. There’s a vast literature on the psychology of mass shootings. With each new atrocity we get a more nuanced understanding of the pathology that yields it. But there’s no elementary causal accounting for why some young men’s moral compass has been so corrupted that they think it legitimate, or even heroic, to shed the innocent blood of small children.

We all grasp that. But the unfathomable isn’t something our media masters can tolerate. An unsurpassing self-assurance in their own moral and intellectual wisdom isn’t allowed to be punctured by the complex inexplicability of the real world. So to maintain the patina of omniscience they must fit the story into one of their narratives. It ceases to be a complex act of mental derangement and becomes instead simply a blindingly obvious case.

This morally indignant and intellectually tendentious approach is what characterizes almost all news reporting now. The media holds up the brutal murder of 10 African-Americans this month in Buffalo as indicative of the white nationalist wave that supposedly has the nation in its grip and—much more excitingly for the new breed of journalist that wants to ban all journalism other than his own—as primarily the fault of Fox News.

The killing by a police officer of a black man in Minneapolis two years ago becomes an exemplar of the allegedly ongoing war by police officers across the country against black people.

Every hurricane and forest fire—events that have been occurring with random frequency and intensity for millennia—are now all a climatological synecdoche for the evil we have done to the planet in the last half century or so. Any journalist who challenges the narrative is denounced and assigned his share of the responsibility.

The primacy of preaching over reporting inevitably leads journalism down a path of hyperbole, distortion and outright fabrication.

The remarkable account of how the world’s media created a moral panic last year over the discovery of old graves of indigenous children at residential schools in Canada is a fine example of how badly misled we can be by this determination to make a story fit a narrative. It turns out they weren’t “mass graves,” suggestive of some newly uncovered horror inflicted by schools and churches, a reminder of the continuing evil of the white colonialist mindset.

The moral panic about guns is also overblown. The violent crime spree of 2020 produced a spike in the rate of gun murders that year. Still, overall homicides by firearm are still much lower than they were 30 years ago, even as the number of guns in circulation has increased sharply. But mass shootings are up so they get the attention—and are the subject for our lectures.

It turns out it also isn’t true that police officers are engaged in an ongoing massacre of blacks, as the director of data science at Reuters discovered when he tried to bring attention to the falsehood. He was fired.

It is true that conservatives sometimes indulge the temptation to use news for convenient, ulterior purposes. Right-leaning news organizations can also seize on episodes and incidents, around immigration for example, that are used to support a narrative.

But it’s much more baleful coming from the progressive media. Not just because they are the cultural hegemons, driving so much of the national discussion. But also because of their faith in the unerring ability of government to fix the various flaws these incidents supposedly expose. The answer to all our problems is never more freedom but less: more gun restrictions; more restrictions of speech and behavior; more regulations on the economy; more limitations on energy development.

Every bad thing that happens has a ready-made solution in the form of a new government program, tax or regulation. To paraphrase what an ambitious Democrat once said: Never let a tragedy go to waste.