In the Honduran news fable, one of the central images on the mainstream media storyboard has been the press conference Mel Zelaya conducted in his pajamas in Costa Rica.

Yet the Honduran military has now declared on the record for the first time – in a judicial proceeding – that the pajama gambit was a fake.  They stated that Zelaya was sent out of Honduras fully dressed in normal clothing and his customary cowboy boots.  That is the same account of events that the Honduran authorities were privately telling people from the first moment, but no military official had ever stated it on the record until now.

From the first moment news commentators and arrogant interviewers would nail their argument by saying “when a president is flown out of the country in his pajamas how can that not be a military coup”.  No legal analysis was really needed because of the pajamas. (more…)

The flashy British tabloid the Daily Mirror and America’s so-called newspaper of record, the New York Times, would seem to represent opposite ends of the MSM.  Yet in the third week of January 2009, as two of their respective columnists rendered verdict on the outgoing president George W. Bush, the two papers seemed barely a bitch slap apart.

On one side of the Atlantic, writing for the fish-and-chips crowd, Tony Parsons declared Bush “the global village idiot,” “a 10th-rate President for a nation in decline,” “a natural simpleton, a rich man’s son who got to the Oval Office on his daddy’s shirttails.”  Meanwhile, in the learned pages of the Gray Lady, Maureen Dowd dropped the guillotine, deriding Bush as “the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance,” “Oedipally oddball,” “an asphyxiated and pampered son.”

Now that is all clever stuff, sure to win a round on the house at the MSM bar, where everybody knows that the Nobel Laureate out of Chicago will be remembered as a better president than the one-time drunk driver from Texas.

But the view from the future will likely be a different one.  The notions of Parsons and Dowd, like so much of the MSM storyboard, shall be of scant interest to presidential historians.  Instead the media’s decade of rage at George W. Bush will be written about by doctoral candidates in social psychology under the title “5 million minutes of hate.” (more…)

To “storyboard the news” is to replace straight news reporting with a pre-shaped comic-book narrative, an edited fable sustained by selective reporting.

Victims of media fraud suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder will be excused for hearing the phrase as a riff on Guantanamo, that “storyboarding the news” occurs when the MSM submerges the facts underwater until the truth surrenders.

The truth about Honduras – such as why the so-called “coup” was not a coup at all – was left by the MSM on the cutting-room floor, edited out of the news reporting because it did not fit into the storyboard.

A storyboard is a sequence of pictures that tell a story, like a comic strip.  In Hollywood or on Madison Avenue, the storyboard is used as a production guide for building a narrative.  In the hands of the MSM, the narrative becomes a news fable in which what gets left out is just as important as what gets included, and the story is frequently written years before the events themselves unfold.

Hence, the 2009 Honduras news fable can be seen as a sequence of iconic images: (more…)