by David Forsmark In I, Sniper, Stephen Hunter’s latest thriller, a Vietnam War hero is assumed to be a crazed killer, but a veteran FBI agent smells a rat.
As the agent and his colleague dare to challenge the media’s “narrative,” he delivers a wonderful rant that combines critiques of the mainstream press that Thomas Sowell and Bernard Goldberg have advanced:
“The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide ‘these are the lies we tell today.’ No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual non-rigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s their way of arranging things a certain way what they all believe in without ever really addressing it carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know Communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They knowSaddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was f—-ed up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. …The story was somewhat suspiciously concocted exactly to their prejudices, just as Jayson Blair’s made-up stories and Dan Rather’s Air National Guard documents were. And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin-stroy anybody who makes them question all that. …”
And this from a fellow who’s not only a former journalist but also a Pulitzer Prize winner (for his film criticism).








