Who controls ‘the narrative’? journalistic emplotment and political discourse in the networked public sphere

Abstract

Over the last decade there has been a massive spike in use of the word ‘narrative’ in both media reportage and political discourse. This essay interrogates the rhetorical function and theoretical assumptions of this widespread usage, arguing that narrative rhetoric operates as a form of metajournalistic discourse shaping coverage of domestic politics and international relations while revealing an anxiety about the authority of contemporary news media. The prominence and semantic variability of the word narrative in public discourse is both a symptom of and a response to an epistemological crisis wrought by information overload and a fragmented public sphere in the digital age. The essay examines usage of the familiar phrase ‘control the narrative’ to reveal how journalistic discourse self-reflexively frames the dynamics of cultural debate. In this formulation, ‘the narrative’ operates as a synonym for what Chadwick (2017) calls the ‘political information cycle' in a hybrid news system, signifying an ongoing discursive struggle in which news media construct their moral and epistemological Others in a global communications network: social media, foreign state-run media, and competing news media. By tracking the phrase in coverage of the global COVID-19 outbreak and the notorious Steele Dossier in five major US dailies throughout 2020, this article demonstrates how the metajournalistic quality of narrative rhetoric facilitates an intramedia struggle for moral and referential authority in the networked public sphere.