Since each story purports to explain a shifting human reality, it must rely on institutional gatekeepers who interpret messy events according to tidy plot lines. That has been the business of Christian bishops and White House press secretaries: to impose the justifying story on the chaos of events. But we have seen that the evolution of technology hasn’t been kind to mediators. The public’s conquest of the information sphere has meant the overthrow of the gatekeepers—often accompanied by the collapse of the stories which imbued their institutions with authority and prestige.
