The Narrative

The media doesn't only reflect pop culture, it also helps create it. At some times the mainstream media, with its monolithic culture, tries to influence the culture deliberately, by means of The Narrative: a broad picture of the world most people carry around in their heads, assuming it's 'What everyone knows'.

The problem is when The Narrative is wrong, or used to create bogeyment, scapegoats and enemies. A prime example is the Kamloops story. Linking with the Magdalen Laundries narrative in Ireland, this takes stories of grim conditions in early-mid twentieth century institutions and embellished them for the sake of prurient interest or as an excercise in Catholic-bashing. Kamloops is a town in Canada where what looked like graves were discovered, in the grounds of an admittedly brutal orphanage (like pretty much all of them at the time). The mainstream media took to it like flies to dung, of course, and as a result, there were demands for charges to be laid, churches were literally burnt to the ground, and the Narrative had yet another stick in its edifice of Evil Catholicism.

The only problem was - there were no graves. Once again, the Narrative has been proved false, but you won't see a retraction, you won't hear the record being corrected. The Lie has been set free, the Truth never released.