I’ve been a big fan of the novelist Tana French for years and, as a newly landed Irish woman, I expected to have a fresh eye as a reader of her latest, The Keeper, and what it might tell me about my adopted home.
What I didn’t expect was how hard her insights on power, hierarchy, and insularity would hit, and their broader truths about the politics of storytelling. Nor could I have predicted what her fictional townland of Ardnakelty would say about the professional culture I’d left behind in America.
Is there a more insular world than the elite American press and the people it is charged with covering? And does that world, where cultural standing is foremost and influence the currency, leave any room for the American public?
Take the White House Correspondents Association annual dinner, which its leader said serves as “the bridge” between its members and the administration. A day after a gunman tried to enter the gala, President Trump attacked the media on “60 Minutes” as “horrible people” when correspondent Norah O’Donnell tried to ask him about the motive.
Or last week, when Trump called ABC News journalist Rachel Scott “one of the worst” when she tried to question him about his singular focus on Washington landmarks when America was at war. “You can understand dirt better than I can baby but I don’t allow it,” he told Scott, who he has attacked before. Women journalists, especially Black women like Scott, have been repeated targets of his venom.
While the National Association of Black Journalists demanded an end to this pattern of “disrespect, hostility and public denigration,” critics have pointed out that the political press corps has often said or done little in response to these attacks, which undermine press freedom.
In French’s Ardnakelty, when the big local boss Tommy Moynihan was having his way, many of the locals wanted to stay in his good books even if it might mean the loss of their land. To change course, said a village rival, they’d “haveta change their way of thinking, and maybe even stand up to the big man.”
Thus is the politics of storytelling in the rural Irish townlands, as it is in the halls of power. Narratives are spun, true or not, to hold on to one’s place in the hierarchy. And it doesn’t hurt if you’re propping up powerful organizations along the way.
Take the Pulitzers. The judges this year named a New York Times podcast about gender transition, The Protocol, as a finalist even though its producers barely spoke to their subject, trans people, and the series was premised in good part on the unsubstantiated claims of a right-wing activist. The podcast was put together by the same New York Times department that gave the world Caliphate, about a purported ISIS fighter, a tale that turned out to be complete fabrication. That too was a Pulitzer finalist, after having been lavished with other awards.
The podcasts shared one trait: They fed narratives about race and gender that the elite agenda-setters and powerful political players had wanted.
For all this mutual stroking of egos, the American press itself is worse for wear. A Pew survey in February found 57 percent of respondents had low confidence that journalists act in the public interest. Last October, Gallup reported that public trust in the media had hit the lowest point — 28 percent —since the organization began tracking the question in 1972.
Shaking things up, as the denizens of Ardnakelty did, will come at some cost and will mean the tearing down of the false narratives we tell ourselves. That’s a good thing.
Billie Jean Sweeney is a news editor, press freedom advocate and trans woman.