If you’re not thinking about story craft in fact-based stories, what are you doing?
State craft is the pursuant of strategy to defend and promote an organisation, official or government’s reputation. Strategy is the manoeuvring to secure power.
All powerful bodies exhibit state craft of a kind. It acts to preserve and promote self interests of a nation and its people by ruling powers.
In implementing any strategy, a group will invariably have to navigate complex systems (involve several inter/actions), which envelop human relationships. And, some problem solving is situated in what’s referred to as ‘wicked problems’. That is there’s no precedent e.g. Climate catastrophe.
There’s widespread knowledge of these issues, but in the 21st century something changed. These changes include hyperconnectivity, multiple actors and openly contested ideological wars, a debasement of globalisation, info ops, behaviour of a new generation, and governments and the powerful who only serve the interests of those that support them.
I’ve been interested in innovations for more than two decades (my PhD covers it) and what I call story craft. That, coupled in particular being a member of Chatham House — leading UK think tank, where I’ve interviewed its then Director Victor Bulmer-Thomas.
I’ll come back to this in more detail in later posts, but here’s some developing thoughts that spell real problems ahead.
In state craft governments and officials create events, even stories, which require amplification, for instance in news delivery, for traction.
Techniques such as the repetition of simple slogans and disinformation aren’t new. We can trace examples of these acts in the early twentieth century. For instance the Mohawk Valley formula was how industrialists destroyed the unions in the 1930s tarnishing them as Anti-American. Experts cite Goebbels, but it was Edward Bernays (I’ve written about him previously) who Goebbels learnt from.
To decode the complexities of human relationships, society has largely come to rely on a professional strand of people called journalists. It is their job to make sense of the world, by filtering and decoding complex systems into manageable comprehensive narratives.
If you were interviewing a government minister even two decades ago, you would make the assumption, you were being told something that bore more truth to it than the opposite.
They, governments, officials and policy makers, then were largely good faith actors. Journalists acting on this decorum largely moved in linear cause and effect to their messaging. In other words a dead moggy really was actually in fact a dead moggy and not some insidious attempt to undermine a seemingly natural cause. Britain’s economy in ruin was the compound effects of Brexit rather than exclusively external global factors.
The 21st century of complexity, ultra ‘wicked problems’, hyper-connections and new actors vying for attention and power is creating rogue games of chess where you can move anywhere you want.
Hyperconnectivity and new politics have upended an order. The new politics of now has benefited from years of psychological info ops — part of statecraft.
Whilst once that could signal wider checks and balances on seats of power by journalists, generally journalists themselves have been overrun, unknowingly or in concert with statecraft systems.
Hence, the bewildering use of governments to persistently using photo ops to skew a story to their favour, whilst trying to obscure negative press. Of course that’s not new, but what is is that governments exercising the new politics of statecraft give little concern to being discovered manipulating their electorate or indeed telling outright lies, not to largely ‘opponents’ outside the state, but to those inside.
The development of journalism placed emphasis on pillars post 1945 that revolved around fairness, objectivity, impartiality and balance. Under this umbrella journalists could do their job rather and relatively successfully. Their job again is a professional decoding of our complex world.
In 2022, and much before it, it’s become obvious in plain site that generally journalism in a more complex system can’t function efficiently. Its tool kit leaves it anemic to everyday state craft.
Take Britain 1945–60s, its population was less multicultural than 2020s, hence culture through the lens of race was not a prerogative for journalistic practice. Information flows using this variable were more predictable in Britain then. Bad actors too didn’t generally have a megaphone ( Internet) to deliver widespread attention to their cause. Yes politically-leaning newspaper ran the gamut, but there was, how can I put this, “method in the madness”. Not the case now.
By 2030, journalism will be seriously undermined. Firstly from governments that have destroyed it. If you’re reading this in 2030 then the BBC and Channel 4 should by this current government’’s efforts exist as shells of themselves or not at all. Secondly AI will have corralled journalism jobs by the bucket load.
Whatever you’re reading on AI tools being incapable of performing the many functions of journalists, by 2030 that will be a distant thought bubble. Emotion, if you can call it that is being hardwired through 1s and 0s into algorithmic writings. Be afraid, very afraid.
Borrowing from the theory of progressive statecraft practitioners what if in story craft journalism acknowledged it required a new set of tools. What if a revised tool kit was needed to make sense of events. What if deep skepticism was built into the multiple entry points now necessary to making sense of cause and effect events. I mooted these ideas at one of the most trusted journalism festivals in Perugia, specifically Cinema Journalism.
What’s required? A greater sense of story craft — that is the strategic use of a number of story styles, with the conscious use of multiple disciplines to unearth facts and truthfulness in a story.
Note, City University this year is introducing history as a necessary prism to filter/ decode events for emerging journalists. The premise is obvious. Journalists could learn about today’s complex systems by mining the past.
Story craft is intrinsic to state craft, but it’s not so transparent and obvious for journalism. If you look at the last twenty years there was an acknowledgement because of new platforms that new techniques and styles were necessary, but they were either hived off as “other”, or carved into and from Western centric forms of storytelling. Is there always closure to a story? Must a story possess binary players? Is the hero always in white?…
This may no longer suffice. With journalism under assault and lagging behind official acts of statecraft isn’t time journalism retooled? Part of that requires new models. To riff of a rhetorical question posed by an international relations expert Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, “Are there any non-western models of journalism?
In recent posts I’ve talked about TV/ Video with a memory. This I predict will be the norm. I’ve advocated journalism studies is reviewed to situate story craft at its centre and the array of elements that would entail. I’ve said cinema journalism that embraces cultural specific norms of storytelling should be considered that facilitate strategic entry points into a story.
I’ll post further on these soon.
