By analyzing case studies involving Black Panther Huey Newton, Mother Teresa, baseball player Mark McGuire and Hurricane Mitch, among others, Lule — a great storyteller himself — demonstrates seven master myths in the news that shape our thinking about foreign policy, terrorism, race relations, political dissent and other issues. He calls them The Victim, The Scapegoat, The Hero, The Good Mother, The Trickster, The Other World and The Flood.

As Lule writes in this selection, digital technology may either nourish "a far-reaching medley of voices and stories" or else impose "the crushing conformity of a few global scribes." He uses Haiti to illustrate the latter, perceiving an unconscious racism in the coverage of Haitian politics by The New York Times. Lule's reading is neither academic nor literary but an insistence that storytelling, including its cultural and social role, is crucial to the revitalization and survival of journalism.

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As Myth, News Will Be Crucial But Conflicted In An Online World
Myth and the new technology may seem to be an unlikely pair. But we have already seen that myth has adapted to every storytelling medium from tribal tales to cable television. The new technology is no different. The combination of myth and online news, though, will produce intriguing, paradoxical, perhaps ominous, results.

The information model of journalism, already in great disrepair, will be dismantled by the marriage of myth and new media. News is losing whatever franchise it had on whatever information is. Information is no longer some scarce resource, a commodity that newspeople can cull and sell. Our society rapidly moved from information explosion to information overload. Information is everywhere. From online events calendars to live, continuous congressional coverage, anyone can give and get information online. If news is only information, news is nothing.

Yet information overload offers opportunities to news: as myth. In the throes of all this information, the need for myth increases. People grapple with the meaning of rapidly changing times. People seek out ways in which they can organize and explain the world. People need stories. Myth has long played these roles. Myth has identified and organized important events in the lives of individuals and societies. Myth has interpreted and explained the meaning of the past, the portents of the future. Myth has offered the stability of story in unstable times.

Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan foresaw the increasing need for myth to organize experience in the face of information overload. "You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns," he told literary critic Frank Kermode in a 1964 interview. "You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds."

"So the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on — the need for pattern recognition," McLuhan said. "It's a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing experience." And so myth and new technology offer opportunities to one another. In a modern, wired world, the news provides pattern recognition — mythic forms of organizing experience.

State scribes stand poised to exploit these opportunities — perhaps to the detriment of society. Amid the chaos of the information explosion, the authority of the storyteller seems likely to increase. In the din of a million voices, the voice of an established storyteller, for better or worse, attains even more status. We have already seen evidence of this power in the infancy of online news. Dramatic events — the election of a president, a terrorist killing, a celebrity trial, a devastating flood — bring a rush of readers to the Web sites of traditional news outlets, the established "brands," the state scribes.

And the power of the state scribes is being enhanced, politically and economically, as they join together in huge global conglomerates. As previous propositions affirmed, it's always been dangerous to have storytelling power invested in a select social few. Power corrupts. And in our times of consolidation of new and news media, the danger looms larger. State scribes, long beholden to privileged and powerful rulers, now are also compromised by their responsibilities to stockholders, corporate owners, and even to other scribes to whom they have been married and merged. It is a perilous world in which a very few voices, so compromised, can signal to society what is important and what is not, how to act and how not, who is worthy and who is not.

The Web, though, is terribly tangled. Myth and new technology may actually pose threats to the state scribes as well. People are increasingly able to seek out stories and storytellers who challenge and reject views of the state scribes. People have the ability to find others who share and confirm their views of the world, bypassing the communication of the scribes.

For example, people with disabilities can find each other online and organize to challenge their exclusion from positions, power, and print. Political candidates unaffiliated with the two major parties have a means to reach a larger audience. Hate groups, isolated in their own communities, can seek support from around the world. What happens online in all these different connections? People share stories. They sustain each other with stories that draw from archetypal figures and forms to offer exemplary models and meaning for human life. They tell each other news — as myth. Through these disparate online stories, the status of state scribes quite possibly can be challenged. Digital technology thus has the possibility to nourish a far-reaching medley of voices and stories — or to impose the crushing conformity of a few global scribes.

Myth, News Values And A New World
With the end of the cold war and the beginning of a new century, U.S. news coverage of international affairs finds itself at a crossroads. For previous generations of reporters and editors, the world could be organized and explained in relation to the political, military, economic and cultural rivalry of two superpowers. News values — the criteria by which the news media select, order, report and give meaning to events — were structured by this one dominant model, a model that has tumbled with the stones from the Berlin Wall. Today, the questions facing [The New York] Times and other news organizations include: How is international news to be defined in this new era? What news values will guide the selection and shaping of events?

As we have seen, two models have emerged. One model has embraced the era as a time of promise for journalism. This model valorizes aggressive, progressive news values that promote social justice, and might be called the model of "a new global and human journalism." Other scholars have offered a more pessimistic model, a model of international news dictated by the actions and initiatives of U.S. foreign policy. This model might be described as promoting "Fortress America" in a world of chaos.

This chapter has offered a preliminary assessment of the prospects for each model through a case study: the work of one Times correspondent, the reporting of Larry Rohter from Haiti. Analysis of that reporting supports the most cheerless view of post-Cold War news values. In the amount of coverage, the nature of the content, and the strategies offered, Rohter's reporting for [The New York] Times can be seen as working in concert with U.S. foreign policy. Even as that policy shifted course — rejecting the junta, warily restoring Aristide, but insisting that he accept U.S. policy — so too did the reporting. Fears that U.S. foreign correspondence would become captive to U.S. foreign policy were realized in Rohter's reports.

To restate the particulars: The influence of U.S. foreign policy can be seen quite readily in the sheer amount of Rohter's Haitian coverage. As the Clinton administration made Haiti one of its first major foreign policy campaigns, Rohter gave over most of his work for almost two years to following Haiti. The Caribbean correspondent of the Times over some 20 months [from July 1994 through February 1996] filed, for example, five stories from El Salvador, three stories from Colombia, three stories from Honduras, two stories from Trinidad and none from the Dominican Republic. From Haiti, as previously noted, Rohter filed 120 stories.

The themes of Rohter's reporting also worked in concert with U.S. policy. Rohter's reporting did not stray far from U.S. policy perspectives. As the United States prepared for an invasion to remove Cedras, U.S. officials postured mightily through Rohter's reporting. Rohter's denunciations of the regime and his chronicling of the junta's repression made a case for U.S. intervention. At the same time, his depictions of Aristide as the rightful leader, whose return would bring peace and reconciliation, also bolstered the U.S. case.

When Aristide and U.S. policy soon began to conflict, Rohter's themes shifted. The uplifting portrayals of Aristide and the lavalas movement segued to critical accounts of intransigent ideology and radical leftist politics. As FRAPH continued to terrorize the population and U.S. forces refused to move against them, Rohter's avoidance of the U.S.-FRAPH relationship shielded Times readers from the U.S. establishment of a conservative "counterweight" to Aristide's progressive politics. And Rohter's depiction of Haiti as an "ungovernable" place whose people were not "culturally or psychologically" equipped for the demands of democracy captured the patronizing and paternalistic attitudes that have driven U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean for decades.

Haiti As The Other World
Myth provides another, complementary way to understand Rohter's coverage. Like all reporters, Rohter did not have to create brand-new story forms to report events from Haiti. He, his editors and his sources consistently drew upon an established narrative — an eternal story — that helped shape coverage even as it explained and justified U.S. policy. In Rohter's reports, we can see the unmistakable structure of the myth of the Other World.

Underlying the reporting of Haiti's political turmoil — turmoil orchestrated often by U.S. policies — is a classic portrayal. Haiti is rendered as a primitive land, filled with danger and chaos, and ruled by death squads and paramilitary patrols who leave the streets littered with corpses. Its helpless people perversely admire bloody shows of force as they engage in animal sacrifice and bone-stealing voodoo rituals, even on Christmas. And they passively remain under the sway of rogue leaders and psychotic priests with no respect for order or reason or privatizing industry. It's a nightmare world.

Rohter provides us with a modern depiction of the Other World, one that also seeks to define our society in relation to other societies. As [Jean-Pierre] Vernant argued [in "Myth and Society in Ancient Greece"], myth "expresses how a group of people in particular historical circumstances sees itself." The myth expressed in Rohter's reporting portrays a mighty and superior people descending with fascination and disgust into a primitive place on the globe. The Other World is a world to be feared and perhaps someday avoided. But for now it's a world in desperate need of U.S. guidance and military might.

The Other World In U.S. International News
The Other World is not a rare portrayal in U.S. news. Close reading of the Times and other newspapers shows that reporting of international affairs often relies on the myth of the Other World. In fact, many nations do not appear in U.S. news unless and until they provide stories that allow the myth to be told. From around the world, U.S. reporters and editors apply news values that judge other nations newsworthy when they provides stories of bloody coups, tribal warfare, perverse politics, strange customs and other tales of the underworld for the U.S. audience back home.

Even a cursory reading of international news shows the influence of the myth of the Other World on news values. We find stories about animal sacrifice in Taiwan; female genital cutting in Africa; the stoning of the devil at Mecca; a thwarted coup in Qatar; Central American drug warlords; a military junta in Sierra Leone; genocide in Rwanda; ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; stolen Aboriginal children in Australia; and many other dark tales. Once again, we can marvel at the durability of myth. A tale told for centuries is told to usher the United States into the 21st century.

Modern mythology, Joseph Campbell said, confronts an enormously complex "fact-world that now has to be recognized, appropriated and assimilated." U.S. society today faces an enormously complex "fact-world," a post-Cold War world in which the United States is the lone superpower on the world stage. U.S. international news confronts that world through tales of the Other World. It offers coverage that affirms U.S. superiority and other nations' inferiority. It provides scary, fantastic stories of a world beset by anarchy and chaos. It promotes the "image of 'Fortress America,' an island of civilization in a sea of political barbarism." It does all this with a myth as old as Odysseus.

— Jack Lule is a professor of journalism and chair of the Department of Journalism and Communication at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He has published widely and has won numerous awards for excellence in research and teaching. A former bartender, truck driver and reporter, Lule continues to be an avid observer of the American scene and a frequent contributor to newspapers and periodicals.

This essay was excerpted from the book "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism," by Jack Lule (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001). Copyright © 2001. Reprinted with permission of The Guilford Press.

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