ABSTRACT
The media may boast of speaking truth to power as if the media itself is not in fact a power equal to, if not greater than, the political powers to which it presumes to speak the truth. The result is that media narratives have too often distorted our understanding of the political life and have faced little effort from readers and listeners to counter the distortions. Their reading or listening audiences are generally uneducated in the practice of distinguishing between the unreliable, who are legion, and the reliable narrators. The unreliable narrator is a notable feature of the modern novel. The sophisticated reader is expected to pick up clues in order to correct whatever false impressions he or she receives from the narration. The pleasure of unreliable narrative in fiction is that it challenges the reader to remake the narrative in his own imagination in order to get at the truth of the fictional reality being depicted.
