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It's all about the narrative - -

By David Kahane



It's All about the Narrative
What does policy matter, when ¡ª it's historic, historic, historic ¡ª we've elected a black man president?

By David Kahane

As is well known (as Pravda used to say), my family has been involved in the media for generations. For one thing, it got us out of the house. For another, it paid better than piecework. But the most important reason was: We wanted to control the narrative.

Journalism, fiction, movies, it doesn¡¯t matter. Uncle Joe Kahane started at PM, moved on to the Daily Worker and finished up his career editing Frank Rich at the New York Times. My dad, the sainted ¡°Che¡± Kahane, made his bones with his scripts for Mission to Moscow II: This Time, It¡¯s Personal (winner of the coveted Dalton Trumbo Award) and The Boy from Stalingrad Does West Hollywood (winner of the prestigious Sidney Salkow Award). And I, of course, write this silly column in between lunching at Chaya, pitching at Paramount, and schnorring for spare change at the intersection of Wilshire and San Vicente in Brentwood. Pearls before swine, indeed.

To the untrained eye, what we lefty American media types and our ink-stained comrades everywhere do may look like storytelling, and in a manner of speaking it is. Our stories have characters, events, incidents, action; after all, every screenwriter¡¯s spiritual antecedents are the hack newspapermen from New York and Chicago who headed west in search of nice weather, pretty girls, and a fast buck. ¡°Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots,¡± wired Herman Mankiewicz to Ben Hecht, who promptly hopped a train.







  

Kahane: It's All about the Narrative

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