The Narrative

Friedman's column in today's NY Times gives a pretty good account of how "jihadist" media have created a narrative in which The U.S. and Israel are responsible for everything that's wrong in the Arab-Muslim world (whatever happened to the Arab-Muslim "street"?). What the column doesn't mention is the way in which all media - including the one in which Friedman's column appears - use narratives to create marketable, easy to write "news" ranging from Palin to Black Friday to Middle America to reality TV. Change a few nouns in Friedman's description of the "jihadist" propaganda machine and you've got ... FOX "news".

I first read about "the narrative" in Joan Didion's "Political Fictions" which, like the movie Network, shows that life can become much stranger than art.