When a story ends the way the MSM doesn’t want to end, it has a simple solution. It largely ignores it.

Recently, Big Journalism’s Mark Klugmann illustrated how the MSM shaped the story concerning the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya to fit a “pre-shaped comic book narrative.”

To be fair, ABC’s Charlie Gibson did, though, air an unbiased report during the early stage of the story.

But most of the MSM coverage leaned more toward that offered by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow who, at the 1:30 mark in this video, accused Senator Jim DeMint (R.SC) of committing treason by opposing the Obama administration’s support of Zelaya. (Watch the entire video at your own risk.) (more…)

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…)

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…)