Scripted reality: how political narratives influence and guide our thinking

Narratives aren't just used in entertainment; they are also a fundamental political tool of power to shape our perception of reality and guide it in a desired direction

Guest post by Maike Gosch. This is the first article of a series on the art of propaganda.

When I worked as a screenwriter for German television many years ago, I became familiar with the format “scripted reality.” This means that in a more documentary-style format (such as makeover shows or renovation shows), when reality is too boring, too unemotional or too unstructured, it is “enhanced” with written scenes and staged situations. In recent years, observing politics and political communication, I’ve noticed similar “narrative” interventions — not to provide better entertainment (although sometimes also that, for strategic reasons), but as a tool of power to shape our perception and guide it in a desired direction. In the following essay, I will examine this technique in more detail.

We live in excited and confusing times. And it wasn’t so long ago that things were different (or appeared different). I still remember well the time as a student between 1992-1998, when I was largely certain of my political reality. I lived in the narratives as if in a stable building. The West was good. Progress was underway. Democracy and capitalism were a harmonious pair. The times of war in Europe were over. The European Community was growing together. The world was continuously becoming freer, more connected, wealthier, better. International institutions like the UN, WTO/GATT, World Bank, OSCE, OECD and the EU, as well as our governments in (Western) Europe, were committed to the freedom and prosperity of the people. Communism had been overcome, the Soviet Union dissolved, the Iron Curtain lifted, Eastern Europe liberated, Germany reunited, and everything was on the right track. Sure, the world wasn’t perfect yet, but everyone (in the West) was working to the best of their knowledge and abilities to make the world better and safer for all.

As a young law student in Hamburg in the 1990s, I really thought this way. I studied German and international law, read The Economist and Le Monde Diplomatique, Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung of course. I studied abroad (in France under the Erasmus Programme), did internships in Brussels, and thought about how I could contribute to these many wonderful progress projects.

Today, the world looks different to me. My perspective, and that of many people, has changed. Has the world become more complicated and evil, or have we just become smarter and more enlightened? Or both?

We are experiencing a breakdown of narratives, the narrative of the benevolent West, the narrative of prosperity-promoting globalisation where people live together peacefully as a global community, the narrative of the necessary connection between democracy and capitalism. And many other stories.

How do we as a society deal with this? We gather around various “campfires” (as it is called in the storytelling world), form “bubbles” or “echo chambers,” trust different types of media, some the “mainstream media,” others the “alternative media”.

Distrust is growing, along with conspiracy theories, and many of those so labeled turn out sooner or later to be true or at least likely, such as mass surveillance by the NSA or the theory of the lab origin of the Covid-19 virus. At the same time, censorship is being intensified to suppress dangerous fake news and hate speech or the truth (depending on where you stand).

How it started, how it’s going

When I started working as a communications consultant in my mid-thirties, I was a big fan of the “storytelling” method. After my legal education, which was exclusively about facts, logic and precise details, and my work as a dramaturge and screenwriter, where I learned a lot about the power and impact of stories, the opportunity to touch and move people in a social and political context through stories, to interest them in the important issues of our time, to evoke empathy and mobilise support, seemed like a great chance to me.

I had studied law primarily for idealistic reasons and during my studies, I dealt extensively with topics such as justice, international law and human rights. In the storytelling method, I saw a way to continue this commitment with creative and communicative means. Few things had moved me as much in my school years as an analysis of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The use of language, metaphors, emotions, rhythm and rhetoric in the fight against injustice and oppression deeply impressed me and showed me how effective storytelling and rhetoric can be. Therefore, I consciously chose clients in the non-profit sector and hoped to make a positive contribution to development in many areas.

During my professional career, I learned a lot about communication strategy, communication psychology, storytelling itself, and of course about the various fields in which my clients were active. I researched and delved deeper into the method of storytelling and found very good examples of successful storytelling from the US, Great Britain and Australia. The English-speaking world was clearly ahead of us in the German-speaking world when it came to “storytelling” and the use of anecdotes, the playful mixing of private and professional levels, and the use of humour and feelings.

I have always tried to tell stories so that people can learn the truth about a particular situation and understand it better, to attract attention and resolve conflicts where possible. But the transition from communication to manipulation and propaganda is fluid. Every narrative is necessarily only a snippet and a version of the truth, and thus necessarily a distortion. As a consultant, one can look behind the scenes, and the more I gained in “standing” and expertise, the deeper I could delve into content and strategies, and the more I learned about how opinions are formed, how many “blind spots” there were, which political connections were not mentioned, how much negativity was projected onto a supposed opposite side. I noticed (increasingly from around 2015) how communication and public discourse were becoming much sharper, more tense and more unforgiving.

And something else happened — initially unconsciously — with my perception of the world, political discourses, and the media portrayal of events: if you deal with dramaturgy for a long and intense period, you start to look at your own life as if it were a film. For example, you ask yourself during a significant event: is this a “plot point” (i.e., an important turning point in the story)? Am I experiencing a tragedy or a comedy? Am I really the main character in this scene or just in a supporting role?

And if you know how stories work, how to evoke feelings and empathy, how to focus attention on one point and distract from others, how to explain connections, strategies and developments clearly and convincingly, and how to distract from them, confuse people and lead them astray, you eventually start to see more and more narratives at work not only in private life but also in politics, media and society, and to view public beliefs and debates from a dramaturgical perspective.

I began to recognise more and more which narratives were consciously used in public discourse and which were unconsciously at work, which techniques were used, and developed a pretty good sense of who did it well (craft-wise) and who did it poorly, who developed effective and who developed toothless narratives, and why some resonated with society or a certain target group at a certain time and why others did not. I began to read newspapers differently, listen to political speeches differently, and view the discourse on social issues on social media differently.

Shaking the foundations

Here are a few examples of societal narratives that were fundamental patterns in which I perceived certain political and social issues without recognising them as such and that I only later identified as “spin” or “narrative management” (as it is called in professional jargon):

PR agencies as war preparers: an example from the 1990s

This example involves the narratives and the role of PR agencies, media and politicians in the Kosovo War of 1999. We remember: NATO, which until then had primarily been a defensive alliance, led by the US, planned military attacks against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (a remaining republic consisting of Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo) under the pretext of a humanitarian mission, but presumably for geostrategic power interests. Without the prospect of a UN mandate for airstrikes on Belgrade, they aimed, after the failure of the Rambouillet peace negotiations, to compel the Serbs through warfare to accept the secession of Kosovo and the stationing of NATO troops on their territory. However, public opinion in European countries, especially in Germany, was against a military intervention not sanctioned by the UN, which would constitute a war of aggression in violation of international law and the German constitution. This clear anti-war stance in Germany certainly stemmed from the historical experience of World War II.

In this situation, the incidents in the Kosovar village of Račak suddenly became a global media event in mid-January 1999. The American head of the OSCE observer mission in Kosovo, William Walker, sparked it when he dramatically declared in front of a grave filled with bodies that a massacre of unspeakable cruelty had taken place and that evidence of “killings and mutilations of unarmed civilians” had been found, with “many shot at point-blank range”. The massive media coverage spread this interpretation of events worldwide and especially to the populations of NATO countries and their political decision-makers.

In the early 1990s, the Croatian side initially (and later the Bosnian and Albanian sides) hired the American PR agency Ruder Finn for the “information war”. They unleashed a wave of press releases, press conferences, press materials and even established a Bosnia Crisis Communication Center. The carefully and consciously constructed narrative interpretation by this agency of Serbia as the new Nazi Germany and Slobodan Milošević as the new Hitler laid the fertile ground on which the very complex civil war — with war crimes committed by all involved parties — could now be distorted and portrayed as a new extermination war and genocide by the Serbs against their own population. The horrors of the terrible massacres and genocides of World War II were invoked, rising like ghosts and overshadowing the current events. The “Račak massacre”, extensively reported worldwide for days, became a turning point in NATO policy toward Belgrade and changed public perception in Europe and the US regarding airstrikes on Yugoslavia.

This then enabled Joschka Fischer’s speech on May 13, 1999, in which he stated: “But I stand on two principles, never again war, never again Auschwitz, never again genocide, never again fascism. Both are interconnected for me”.

This was how he justified his decision in favour of the first German participation in a military attack since World War II.

From March 24, 1999, NATO bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days until it accepted the stationing of Western soldiers in its crisis province of Kosovo in June. When German leading news magazine Der Spiegel reported in January 2001 that a final scientific report by Finnish forensic experts found no evidence of the alleged Serbian massacre of civilians, and it could neither be proven that they were civilians nor that they were shot at point-blank range (they were likely combatants, which of course does not diminish the tragedy of their deaths) and also found no mutilations or other indications of cruelty, the damage had already been done.

Here, a traumatic historical event (Holocaust/Auschwitz, the extermination of German Jewish citizens and other victims) was laid as a narrative over a current situation, and where the comparison didn’t fit, facts were distorted, and evidence was suppressed to fit a particular communicative outcome. This awakened feelings of revulsion and, especially among the German population and politicians, feelings of guilt over the horrific crimes of the Nazi era, resulting in a political decision that, without this manipulative narrative, would very likely not have occurred.

How free is free trade?

Another example from the realm of economic policy: this narrative deals with capitalism or, more specifically, neoliberalism as a success model. As the renowned Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang outlines in his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the “idea of the free market,” which posits that markets, if left alone, will produce the most efficient and fair results, and that government interventions only hinder market efficiency, is a narrative that has little in common with reality. How does he arrive at this conclusion?

First, he argues that the premise of this idea (he even speaks of “ideology”), namely the assumption of the existence of a completely “free market,” i.e., a market without rules and boundaries that restrict choice, is false because such a market does not and cannot exist.

Next, he examines the evidence for the “free market” success model. Representatives of the ideology apply the method of selectively choosing historical excerpts to distort reality and present their interpretation as the only alternative: with few exceptions, all of today’s wealthy industrialised nations — including Britain and the US — became rich through a combination of strong protectionism, subsidies and other state measures, against which the West (for example, through the World Bank and IMF) strongly advises developing and emerging countries today. Only when the industries in these countries — also with the help of strong protectionism and state interventions — were significantly superior to their competitors in other countries were tariffs, subsidies and state investments reduced. Therefore, if the historical excerpt is chosen to consider the extent of state interventions only during the economic success phase, the narrative of the “free market” and “free trade” success model can be maintained. However, it does not correspond to reality.

The way we were

Another example of a dominant narrative, so convincing that I did not perceive it as a narrative and therefore barely questioned it, came to me through a very interesting and moving book I read in the early 2000s.

In the wonderfully written history book The Pity of It All by the Israeli journalist and writer Amos Elon, published in 2002, he describes the significant influence that Jewish German men and women had on some of the most important cultural, social and political developments of the 18th and 19th centuries in Germany and how intellectually and emotionally intertwined they were with German history. Particularly their crucial role in the 1848 revolutions as politicians, journalists, lawyers, writers and fighters was hardly known to me before reading the book. Only while reading did I realise how much I had historically projected the “separation” of Germans of Jewish origin and Jewish faith from the rest of the population, which was enforced by Nazi ideology, the racial laws, and later the Holocaust, backward into the years and centuries before. I also realised how little I knew about the admirable democratic aspirations of German (Christian, Jewish, agnostic) men and women in the mid-19th century because, like many people who grew up in West Germany, I learned so little about our own democratic traditions.

The focus of our general historical education (of course, I am not speaking about historians, but us laypeople) was so heavily on the authoritarian and dictatorial epochs of German history during schooling and in public discourse that this tradition and the people who created it almost got lost. One can certainly arrive at different assessments and evaluations on all these questions; however, what is important and clearly visible in this example is that another perspective on our own democratic traditions and the history of Jewish Germans is possible.

We live in stories like fish live in water

Thus, engaging with storytelling and analyzing societal narratives is not a trivial matter, not a hobby (though it is that too), nor a special but obscure niche topic of communication theory; rather, it helps us to recognize how these narratives and their manipulative use influence important attitudes and assessments of people and thereby also influence important decisions in politics and the economy.

There is a joke in which two fish overhear a bather exclaiming “Oh, the water is beautiful today!”. One fish then says to the other: “What is water?”.

We swim in narratives like fish in water and are often unaware of this invisible environment. I hope that critical engagement with narratives and narrative constructions will lead to greater societal awareness of these techniques and processes. Because as long as we do not know that this narrative layer exists at all, or know too little about how it works, we are easily manipulated and cannot make the free and informed decisions that we, as citizens of this world, need to make for democracies to fully function.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)