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C H A P T E R 1 Master Myths, Frames, Narratives, and Guard Dogs Journalists at first paid little attention to Michael Newdow’s suit. Several of the journalists with whom I spoke about Newdow argued there was a good reason for the absence of coverage: the suit, originally filed in Florida, was dismissed by a federal judge in the Eastern District of California a little more than six months after it was filed. In addition, Newdow , who earned a law degree from the University of Michigan, chose to represent himself. I instruct my journalism students to jump at such an obvious “David v. Goliath” story. But he was mounting his challenge in Sacramento, California—not Los Angeles, New York, or Washington, where much of a reporter’s attention is typically focused—without a lawyer, and he had lost on the district court level. So much for David and Goliath. One journalist, who covered the case for the New York Times, said he would not have dreamed of pitching the story—at this stage, anyway— to his editor. “Nobody would have thought this suit would succeed,” he said (A. Liptak, personal interview, July 2004). “Here’s this little guy who can’t even get a lawyer.” On top of that, the reporter said, the district court gave Newdow, in essence, “the back of its hand” when it dismissed the suit. “There was no news there,” Liptak said. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who covers the Ninth Circuit acknowledged that he had never even heard of Newdow until the Ninth Circuit issued its controversial ruling in June 2002 (B. Egelko, personal interview, July 1, 2004). I conducted a series of computer searches using the Lexis-Nexis database in 2003, 2004, and 2005. I searched for news articles, editorials , and broadcast transcripts that appeared in the nation’s major daily 11 newspapers and television networks from the day Newdow filed his suit in March of 2000 to May 15, 2005. I also conducted lengthy e-mail and telephone interviews in 2004, 2005, and 2006 with several of the journalists who covered the case, several of the attorneys involved in the case, and a number of interested observers. As I read and reread the newspaper articles and news transcripts, I looked for key themes and narrative strands, keeping in mind Jack Lule’s idea that news “comes to us as a story” (2001, p. 3). News is composed of what Lule believes are “enduring, abiding stories.” In covering what goes on in the world, journalists tap “a deep but nonetheless limited body of story forms and types.” This reliance on certain story forms is no surprise , writes Lule, given our love for stories. “We understand our lives and our world through story,” he argues (p. 3). Perhaps more important, Lule contends that familiar myths—“the great stories of humankind” (p. 15)—regularly come to life in news reporting . Lule defines myth as “a sacred, social story that draws from archetypal figures to offer exemplary models for human life” (p. 17). Myths empower society to express its “prevailing ideals, ideologies, values, and beliefs.” They are, Lule writes, “models of social life and models for social life” (p. 15). Myths are not evident in every news story, as Lule cautions , but in many instances journalists draw upon “the rich treasure trove of archetypal stories” to revisit those shared stories that help us make sense of the world in which we live. Lule’s analysis of news produced seven of what he calls “master myths”: the victim, whose life is abruptly altered by “the randomness of human existence”; the scapegoat, deployed in stories to remind us of “what happens to those who challenge or ignore social beliefs”; the hero, there to remind us that we have the potential for greatness; the good mother, who offers us “a model of goodness in times when goodness may seem in short supply” (p. 24); the trickster, a crafty figure who usually ends up bringing “on himself and others all manner of suffering,” thanks to his crude, boorish behavior; the other world, which enables us to feel good about our way of life by contrasting it, sometimes starkly, with ways of life elsewhere (as when reporters wrote of life in the former Soviet Union during the Cold War); and the flood, in which we see the “destruction of a group of people by powerful forces,” often because they have “strayed from the right path” (p. 25). Lule...

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