The press and political controversy: The case for narrative analysis

This paper introduces narrative analysis, a method for press criticism that relies on concepts drawn from nondeconstructionist literary criticism, to study questions about the political power of the media. Narrative analysis seeks to specify the range of compositional options available to journalists covering a particular topic and the conventional meanings associated with each option. In the case at hand, the paper identifies choices made by profilers of James A. Baker III, to affiliate their news stories with six genres of American political journalism. The genres are called celebrity, contest, image, passage, investigation, and crusade stories. Classifying news stories by genre shows, in this case, that media portrayals of authority figures are not as uniformly supportive or adversarial as, respectively, left‐liberal and neoconservative theorists of media power have contended.