News Stories as Narrations and as Myths

Abstract

News Stories as Narrations and as MythsNews stories fulfil an essential democratic function. If "journalism has always been a forum for public discourse," as Kovach and Rosenstiel (2014, p. 197) assert, news provides the material for this discourse. Through news, people "learn and think about the world beyond themselves" (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2014, p. 50). News thus facilitates "meaningfully active citizenship" (Gripsrud, 2000, p. 287). That, at least, is the ideal model of news as suggested by classical liberal theory (Ryfe, 2020, p. 294). Historically, it emerged in the US during the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century which deemed political participation to require "intelligent" citizens who "kept up with the news" and acted based on the non-partisan information that newspapers were supposed to provide (Schudson, 1998, p. 182). Philosophically, it roots in a "version of modernity rested on an association with rationality, certainty, consent, reasoned thought, order, objectivity, progress and universal values, all of which journalism was expected to promote in order to create the conditions needed for an optimum public life" (Zelizer, 2012, p. 463). The liberal model builds on the normative expectation that the "core purpose of journalism is and should be about producing and distributing serious information and debate on central social, political, and