Excellent article

This explains the vaccine->autism link, no amount of statistical studies will overcome a good story.

It also has a lot to do with my taste in movies.

Thanks! That was an outstanding essay. It is significant that it took about 4000 years for writing to develop from lists and tallies to narratives. Once that happened, though, we could examine them in a way that oral traditions did not allow. Dance, theater, and painting also tell stories. Dance and theater now can be recorded, again, taking them out of the sphere of momentary expression and giving them permanence, and allowing analysis.

I think it goes back to Bicameral times; (pre-conscious), As evolution would have it, silent signals from the instinctive brain evolved into pictures first before the voice was heard. Had we heard the voice first...we really would have gone nuts! As it was, we thought it came from outside ourselves. Once we developed language, we could narrate the picture...ie, Story. [This is my take, based upon the work of Julian Jaynes and many others] Make sense?

Education is a good use of art, but not the only valid purpose for or type of art.

I think that the degree of learning in a story depends on the skill of the writer and the genre of the narrative. Thrillers are given more power when the author uses actual names, brands and researches the types of implements and locations which give the feeling of authenticity to the book.
I read a book many years ago in which the hero was a composer of music and I was impressed that it reminded me of The Fountainhead. It was Jean Christophe by Romaine Roland.

Good analysis, well written. I do question the complete dismissal of "Citizen Kane". I see it as a man who starts out to do positive work, and falls way short of being what he could become. His desire for power, his need to possess things and people, were so against the Objectivist he could have become. Kane was a study in how to fall sadly short of being an Objectivist. Sartre should have seen that Kane chose all the wrong paths, even though he always had choices. Sartre would hav known Kane alone was responsible for his acts, and thus his failure. Sartre wrote that writrs should write, but not overwrite, allowing for the reader to assume their responsiblity tor their part in the work. I don't think too many people today assume that responsibiity as readers or mover goers, to require more from the writers..

Excellent observations, which correlate with what I have read about witness stories at crime or accident scenes. (Witnesses will make stories about the isolated aspects they personally viewed, elaborating them to include cause and conclusion. This seems to be done instinctively and not with any deliberate intent towards malice or benefit.)

Jan

Well, that was quite interesting. I don't know much
about film; I hardly ever go to the movies,one reas-
on being cost, another the fact that so many are
dirty.

As to novels, I have read over and over books by Ayn Rand; but mainly, my favorites
are books written in the 19th century, such as
"The Hunchback of Notre-Dame", and "A Tale
of Two Cities". Now THAT one has a REAL
plot.

Whilst honestly denying that she ever fired a single shot, Lynch has continued to take the benefits accorded her due solely to the Post article and her hero status—a book deal worth one million dollars, movie rights (Saving Jessica Lynch became a television movie), a tuition-free university education, numerous events at which she was a guest of honor, military valor awards (Purple Heart, Prisoner of War medal, the Bronze star), a welcome home parade, major magazine cover page photographs and coverage, television show appearances to promote her book, West Virginian of the Year award, a Bahamas cruise paid for, guest appearances at the Golden Globes and Gator Bowl parade, and socialite party invitations (Campbell 2010).

How is it that the accolades kept flowing years after it was known that the initial story was false? From a cognitive science perspective—first, it was a great story, a narrative that was at once exciting and instructive and hence persuasive; second, the reader’s critical faculty was lowered by the attachment to the character, third, Appel’s absolute sleeper effect may have taken hold enhancing the attachment over time, and fourth, the story was reassuring, resonating with a belief in a just world. Yeah, the Post and the Times, the great citadels of journalism! The questions they asked---why hasn't this war yet produced a hero, and ...oh, women in combat, we need a role model, Then ... we got it. We got this script. Let's go.

Women in Combat Narrative, Washington Post. Case Study: Jessica Lynch, Nassiriyah, Iraq, 2003

The facts as enumerated in Campbell (2010) are:

i. Jessica Lynch was a 19-year-old supply clerk in the U.S. Army; the Humvee she was in accidentally detoured into Iraqi territory on March 23, 2003.
ii. Following an ambush, many soldiers were killed. Lynch was knocked unconscious by an explosion as she lay down praying and scared, without firing a shot.
iii. Lynch was taken prisoner. Nine days later, the U.S. Army rescued her.

Given these set of facts, Lynch was not a hero.

Yet, two days after her rescue, the Washington Post (Ritea 2003) published a sensationalized world exclusive on its front page, reporting that Lynch had fought fiercely and shot several Iraqi soldiers until she ran out of ammunition, fighting to the death as she did not want to be taken alive, even after sustaining multiple gunshot wounds, even as she watched several of her colleagues getting killed, and even as she herself was shot and stabbed.

The following excerpts (listed a to e) are drawn from Campbell’s work (2010):

a. The Hartford Courant called Lynch “an improbable war hero” and stated that “she is from rural America, daughter of a truck driver, raised in a West Virginia tin roofed house”;

b. USA Today declared Lynch to be “the latest in a long line of women who prove their sex’s capacity for steely heroism”;

c. The London Daily Mirror said, “she fought like a lion”;

d. The Times of London declared, “Lynch has won a place in history”; and

e. Australia’s Daily Telegraph said she had “staged a one-woman fight to the death.”

The ingredients of archetype storytelling are clearly present here: the humble beginnings—the references to rural America, the daughter of a truck driver raised in a tin roofed house, and the story of courage (she fought like a lion). The symbolism, and the ascribing of cultural significance, is unmistakable via the reference to steely heroism by a woman, via a character who stood for something bigger than herself (for womanhood, or for women in combat). With the perspective gained from the discoveries of cognitive science, what transpired in the Lynch case in terms of the clinging to the myth, stands to reason.

Campbell (2010) reports that, within hours of its publication, the Post’s initial story about Jessica Lynch had begun to unravel when doctors treating Lynch at a U.S. military hospital confirmed she had suffered neither stab wounds nor bullet wounds, however, the Post waited another ten weeks before revisiting the story, and, on a report that began on the front page as an update, only acknowledged the story’s profound errors on page 16.

In a Newsweek article written after the fabrication was exposed, the hero tale (including yet another reference to humble beginnings) continued, viz.—“It's a town so small and remote that Jessica never set foot in a shopping mall until she was a senior in high school,” and, further “In fact, Gov. Bob Wise credited her survival in part to the effects of a rural West Virginia childhood"(Adler et al. 2003, pp 42–48).

The New York Times later reported that the heroism attributed to Lynch may actually have been Sergeant Don Walters’, whom Iraqi radio intercepts had described as a blond U.S. soldier fighting to the death, and the Iraqi pronoun use, or the word blond, was perhaps misinterpreted; yet, interest in the real story proved thin (Campbell 2010).

Lynch’s photograph appeared on the cover of Time magazine, but when the editors found out it was not Lynch who was the hero, they never bothered to publish a story about Don Walters, a father of three; Don’s mother called all the publications that had covered the Lynch story and no one cared (Campbell 2010). As late as 2008, Newsweek still referred to Lynch as the war’s first hero (Campbell 2010).

Oh well, savvy street website has devolved back to the bandwidth hog again.
Requires multimegabyte of download for a text article of 13k.

Interesting content in the article ;^)

I could not find a name for the person who authored this article. I suppose the person did not put their name to it since it says nothing.