film narrative techniques are so easy to spot because they have been very consciously created- someone has decided to create these characters as goodies and oppose them with these others whoa are baddies. Similarly, events will have been made up which set up a problematic, fit in neatly to a three act structure and end with the problematic’s resolution. To interest us in the narrative, the producers will have internationally attempted to include as much novelty as possible, but to make it comprehensible they will have included plenty of repetition. In short, a film narrative is made up of lots of deliberately chosen events.

The real world, of course is not like that and no news story will arrive on the news editors’ desks in this kind of form, but by the time the story gets to us in T.V. news or the papers, you can be sure that they will have attempted to shape it in some way using some of the narrative techniques that you are familiar with, all in an attempt to make the story more interesting and comprehensible for their audience.

This will involve them trying to represent people as either goodies or baddies- creating the kinds of binary opposites that we expect from a good story and looking for problems which they can follow up after a few days with some kind of solution. As the story develops you should be able to spot the process of them drawing the story to some kind of resolution all in neat ways that rarely fit with the sorts of things that happen with real lives.

A recent example of this is the Princess Diana story: While she was alive, Diana was subject to almost as much criticism as praise in the newspapers, but not surprisingly, after her death the narrative that was created by the media put her into the role of hero. As an opposite to this the editors needed a villain and searched desperately for one. An obvious choice was the paparazzi who clearly had a big role in her death and to be sure in some parts of the news a lot was made of their role, but some of the tabloids were embarrassed because of their own links with these people and so had to find new villains- the driver Henri Paul and in particular the Royal Family. None of this is to say that the media was making things up about these people, it is just that in order to find their opposite heroes and villains they chose to ignore some things about Diana’s character and chose to obsess about some aspects of the behaviour of the royal family which they could just as easily have ignored.

In the same way problematics have been searched out - questions that do exist which have been emphasised by the media to keep us interested in the story- What really happened in the crash? Was Diana going to get married? Will the Royal Family now change? Who will look after the Princes and so on. Here there is a difference from the films that you have studied because, as often in the news, this is a narrative which will continue to develop over a long period of time, unlike the single problematic of the film, new problematics will appear as others are resolved.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that this is a continuing narrative, there is even a sense in which the week of Diana’s death was fitted into a three act structure by the media, with the first act being the lead-up to the crash (plot point one) the second act being the build up to the funeral (plot point two as the queen’s speech?) and the funeral itself being the final act with its sense of partial resolution and Lord Spencer’s speech setting off some new problematics.

Once again it might seem bizarre to talk in these kinds of ways about real events. All of the things that the media reported did happen, but they have been shaped into this kind of structure in the way that the editors have drummed up the importance of some of them and ignored others.

One final example will I hope to explain this. On the morning of the funeral, there was apparently quite a deal of fighting in some sections of the crowd as some people jostled for position- on one occasion an old lady was hit over the head. If we had been seeing the coverage of a different event like a protest march, this might have been reported, but it was ignored at the time because it didn’t fit the narrative structure the media chose to follow.