The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative

Abstract

The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative investigates the textuality of all discourse, arguing that the ideologically charged distinction between 'journalism' and 'fiction' is socially constructed rather than natural. Phyllis Frus separates literariness from aesthetic definitions, regarding it as a way of reading a text through its style to discover how it 'makes' reality. Frus examines narratives by Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway, showing that conventional understanding of the categories of fiction and non-fiction frequently determines the differences we perceive in texts. When journalists writing about historical events adopt the Hemingway-esque, understated narrative style that is commonly associated with both 'objectivity' and 'literature', it leads to an audience unable to face the historical and social conditions in which it must function. She interprets New Journalistic narratives, such as that of Truman Capote, as ways to counter the reification of modern consciousness to which both objective journalism and aestheticised fiction contribute.

The relocation of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in 1953 and the Jerusalem question

“…Resumption of relations will create [the] feeling she has gained bargaining power and has [a] larger number of options which she will be tempted to utilize as [a] means of influencing [the] United States on matters of importance to [the] Israeli government. 112 In this correspondence, the Americans noted that the Soviet Union could not provide Israel with unlimited backing because of its relations with the Arab countries. Another point they stressed was Israel's close ties with the Jews of the West, and especially American Jewry, upon which Israel depended financially.…”

The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction

“…The contesting of the factual standards of the establishment press reflects a "gestalt shift in Western epistemology," she says, and a reaction to an emerging postmodern worldview in the scholarly community that can be attributed to "profound social and political dislocations of the 1960s" that affected journalism in various ways, including in the creation of a growing discontent among some journalists (as well as many academics and members of the public) with the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity. 81 On top of this, conventional news organizations-besides having fallen on hard economic times and facing a perilous future in the age of the Internethave found the public increasingly questioning their credibility, challenging their role as gatekeepers of the news, and expressing wariness at their claims to balance and dispassion in the news reporting process.…”

The Facts and Fictions of Qualitative Inquiry

“…There were three different professional groups, each producing different but often parallel tellings about society: journalists, novelists, and social science ethnographers. Then the lines between journalism, imaginative writing, and ethnography began to again blur (see Eason, 1984;Frus, 1994;Wolfe, 1973). Impatient with the rigid conventions of objective journalism, the New Journalists &dquo;started to borrow technical devices from the novel ... [and] novelists ... began to borrow research methods and subjects from journalism&dquo; (Fishkin, 1985, p. 207).…”

“…The facts were visible events, taken as givens, objectively known and knowable by the scientific reporter. This unquestioning acceptance of the facts creates, as Dorothy Smith (quoted in Frus, 1994, p. 113) notes, a situation in which &dquo;what ought to be explained is treated as fact or as assumption.&dquo; In this model, facts are reified (Frus, 1994, p. 112). The validity of the text is self-evident, it is grounded in the objectively reported facts.…”

“…This called for a new form of reading. They produced texts that challenged readers to read reflexively, to read between the lines, to erase the distinction between fact and fiction, to reread experiences, altering prior understandings based on new information (Frus, 1994, p. xx). This new information was contained in the reflexive text, which disrupted temporal sequence, rearranged events and their chronology, and constantly altered the past in light of new understandings (Frus, 1994, pp.…”