Storytelling Bias Quotes

Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.

As a reporter, you know the tropes of how stories on poverty work in any country. A reporter will go to an NGO and say, "Tell me about the good work that you're doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give." It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos in which almost every poor person you read about is involved with a NGO helping him. Our understanding of poverty and how people escape from poverty, in any country, is quite distorted.

I think in television and film, it's not usually the child's point of view. It's the story of an adult. If there's a child in a drama or an action-adventure movie, they're someone who needs to be saved, someone who needs to be protected, or if they're killed, someone who needs to be avenged. Their character doesn't matter much.

My mother always said, 'The best way to ruin a story is to tell the other side.'

That's the history of the world. His story is told, hers isn't.

I think that, in terms of mainstream storytelling, the rebel gets off way too easy. We're way too hard on the insiders and way too soft on the outsiders.

You have a natural tendency to want an emotionally satisfying tale - and to make investments based on that - despite times when the actual data may be telling you something different.

The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.

In journalism, there are only two stories - "Oh, the wonder of it," and "Oh, the shame of it."

The women I know are smart, interesting people who aren't just there to service the men's stories, so I don't know why our art continues to do that.

No one ever writes a book in which he is the bad guy.

The fictitious worlds created for kids are nearly bereft of female presence. It's sending a very clear message from the beginning that women and girls do not have half of the adventures, that they're not as important. We're teaching kids that girls and women don't take up half the space in the world.

There's a tendency when you write a book to portray yourself as the hero.

Even in stories that I like, with a female character that I love deeply, it always feels like there's something that she has to prove to the male characters before she can even get started.

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.

Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error.

Because there is less female storytelling, especially motherhood storytelling, there has been immense pressure on my storytelling to represent more people, and to do so in a sort of unrealistic way.

I feel that a documentarian has an obligation to tell the truth as he or she interprets it. And what I mean by that is that documentarians don't necessarily have the same sort of obligations that a journalist might have. A journalist might be called upon to be objective, whereas a documentarian is sort of forced to take sides.

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.