Jon Carroll, long time columnist for the SF Chronicle, picks up a Jay Rosen article on “master narratives” and the press.

In standard coverage of political campaigns, where one goal is always to appear nonpartisan and above the fray, the master narrative has for a long time been winning— who’s going to win, who seems to be winning, what the candidates are doing to win, how much money it takes to win, how the primary in South Carolina is critical to winning and so on. Reporters call this the horse race, one of the rare occasions on which they have aptly named their own master narrative and recognized it as a story machine— almost an appliance for cooking news….

Carroll gives a good intro, quoting extensively from Rosen.

You can read the whole Rosen here.