What makes a story worth remembering?
Propaganda is in the Details
Statistics remove emotion from things. Listing the number of people killed by drunk drivers in a single year has little emotional impact on promoting outrage and engaging activists, but a single detailed story of an individual can.
It is the details that fill the human imagination with images, and stories, and from that comes empathy and emotion.
Many people are familiar with selection bias, choosing only stories that fit a specific political ideology or agenda.
But there is another type of bias that allows media to address a story, but also downed it in boredom: detail bias. The choice to include or leave out details that could provoke emotion based on what the news organization wants.
Statistic Conversion
“On December 2nd, 1980, four American women were killed in El Salvador.”
For some news organizations, that is all they reported. That the event happened. It is language that attempts to convert the occurrence to almost the level of a statistic. Other pieces of the language are part of the propaganda and persuasion as well. The statement: “were killed” removes the subject. No one is being blamed in the news report. No one is being investigated. It, too, is part of trying to remove emotion and outrage from the story.
Emotional Provocation
Other news organizations reported the event as follows: “The El Salvador army murdered four American nuns. The women donated their time to help in schools, education programs, and to provide food and health care. They were raped and bruised as an indication that they may have been tortured before being executed. One woman had her underwear stuffed in her mouth, another had it wrapped around her head. The last two had their underwear around their ankles, convered in blood. One woman’s face exploed out the front where the bullet exited. They were found in shallow dirt graves.”
The second story includes a multitiude of details intended to provoke emotion and outrage. It also points a finger of blame to direct the outrage of people. Also note that while the second one uses details the provoke emotion, it stays away from bias language, giving it the appearance of simply being the facts.
Both news reports are true, but both are intended to manipulate their audience in a very different ways.
Next time we will cover Narrative truth…How can something that is only true in a story change how people see the real world?