So much of what appears in the media—and what doesn’t—can be explained by the instinct for storytelling. Conflict draws reporters because it is essential to a good story; Othello wouldn’t be much of a play if Iago didn’t spread that nasty rumor. Novelty is also in demand—“three-quarters of news is ‘new,’ ” as an editor once instructed me. The attraction to both qualities—and the lack of interest in stories that fail to provide them—was evident in the results of a 2003 study by The King’s Fund, a British think tank, on the reporting of health issues. “In all the news outlets studied,” the researchers concluded, “there was a preponderance of stories in two categories. One was the National Health Service—mostly stories about crises besetting the service nationally or locally, such as growing waiting times or an increased incidence of negligence. The other was health ‘scares’—that is, risks to public health that were widely reported but which often involved little empirical impact on illness and premature death.” That second category includes so-called mad-cow disease, SARS, and avian flu—all of which offered an abundance of novelty. What was ignored? The slow, routine, and massive toll taken by smoking, alcohol, and obesity. By comparing the number of stories a cause of death garnered with the number of deaths it inflicted, the researchers produced a “death-per-news-story” ratio that “measures the number of people who have to die from a given condition to merit a story in the news. It shows, for example, that 8,571 people died from smoking for each story about smoking on the BBC news programs studied. By contrast, it took only 0.33 deaths from vCJD (mad cow disease) to merit a story on BBC news.”
An ongoing narrative is also highly valued because a story that fits an existing storyline is strengthened by that larger story. Celebrity news— to take the most extreme example—is pure narrative. Once the Anna Nicole Smith narrative was established, each wacky new story about Anna Nicole Smith was made more compelling by the larger storyline of Anna Nicole Smith’s wacky life, and so we got more and more stories about Anna Nicole Smith even after Anna Nicole Smith was no longer providing fresh material. Even the smallest story could be reported—I actually got a CNN news alert in my e-mail when a judge issued an injunction temporarily stopping the burial of the body—because it didn’t have to stand on its own strengths. It was part of the larger narrative. And if the big narrative is considered important or compelling, no story is too small to run. Conversely, if a story isn’t part of a larger narrative—or worse, if it contradicts the narrative—it is far less likely to see the light of day. This applies to matters considerably more important than celebrity news.
In the early 1990s, the AIDS epidemic in the developed world was showing the first signs of being more manageable than had been feared. But the storyline it had inspired—exotic new virus emerges from the fetid jungles of Africa and threatens the world—didn’t fade, thanks mainly to the release of Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone in 1994. Billed as “a terrifying true story,” The Hot Zone was about a shipment of monkeys sent to Virginia, where they were discovered to be infected with Ebola. There was no outbreak in Virginia, and if there had been it wouldn’t have amounted to much because the particular strain of the virus the monkeys had was not lethal to humans, but that didn’t stop The Hot Zone from becoming an international best-seller. The media started churning out endless stories about “emerging viral threats,” and the following year a Hollywood movie inspired by The Hot Zone—Outbreak—was released. More books were commissioned. Documentaries were filmed. And when Ebola actually did break out in Congo (then known as Zaire), reporters rushed to a part of the world that is generally ignored. The coverage was massive, but the 1995 Ebola outbreak didn’t lead to chaos and disaster. It just ran the usual sad course, killing about 255 people in all.
For the people of Congo and central Africa, however, chaos and disaster really were coming. In 1998, a coup led to civil war that sparked fighting across the whole region, and civil authority collapsed. It’s hard to know precisely how many lives were lost—whether to bullet, bomb, or disease— but many authorities suggest three million or more died over the first several years. The developed world scarcely noticed. The war fit no existing narrative, and without any obvious relevance to the rich world it couldn’t start one, so the media gave it a tiny fraction of the attention they lavished on the 1995 Ebola outbreak—even though the war killed roughly 11,700 people for every one lost to Ebola.
Even compelling stories that fit narratives can disappear if the narrative isn’t operational when they happen. In 2006, a Tennessee school district sent home 1,800 students following reports that radioactive cooling water was leaking at a nearby nuclear plant. It was the first nuclear-related evacuationin the United States since the Three Mile Island accident of 1979. If it had occurred at a time when the “nuclear accident” narrative had been in place—as it was for years after Three Mile Island and again after Chernobyl—it would have been major news. But in 2006, that narrative was gathering dust, and so the incident was treated as a minor local story and ignored.
Terrorism is obviously a major narrative today, as it has been for some time, but a decade ago it was quite different. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing made terrorism the story of men like the bomber, Timothy McVeigh, a white, paranoid, antigovernment radical. Following that storyline, journalists churned out countless articles about tiny groups of cranky gun enthusiasts who grandly styled themselves “militias.” There wasn’t much evidence that the militias were a serious threat to public safety, but McVeigh had briefly belonged to one, so reporters flocked to cover their every word and deed. The September 11 attacks scrapped this storyline and replaced it with the story of Islamist terrorism that is still going strong today—which is why, when a suicide bomber detonated himself outside a packed stadium at the University of Oklahoma on October 1, 2005, the media scarcely reported the incident. The bomber, Joel Henry Hinrichs III, wasn’t Muslim. He was a disturbed white guy with a thing for explosives whose initial plan was apparently to detonate a bomb identical to that used by Timothy McVeigh. If he had carried out his attack at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1990s, it would have been major news around the world, but in 2005 it didn’t fit the narrative so it, too, was treated as a minor local story and ignored.
This happened again in April 2007, when six white men belonging to the “Alabama Free Militia” were arrested in Collinsville, Alabama. Police seized a machine gun, a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, two silencers, 2,500 rounds of ammunition, and various homemade explosives, including 130 hand grenades and 70 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) similar to those used by Iraqi insurgents. The leader of the group was a wanted fugitive living under an alias who often expressed a deep hatred of the government and illegal immigrants. At a bail hearing, a federal agent testified that the group had been planning a machine-gun attack on Hispanics living in a small nearby town. The media weren’t interested and the story was essentially ignored. But one week later, when a group of six Muslims was arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix, it was major international news—even though these men were no more sophisticated or connected to terrorist networks than the “Alabama Free Militia” and had nothing like the arsenal of the militiamen.