My Friend Peter Dao, Kerry's blog guru and well known for Daou Report on Salon.com, has, as one of his major themes, the problem of "stories versus storylines in the media. What he means by this is that regardless of what the individual story is, the media uses adjectives, descriptions and explanations which amount to the constant accusation that Democrats are weak, corrupt, disorganized and incapable of governing, while Republicans are described as strong, decisive leaders who act like adults.

We all know the problems with these top level descriptions, any nation that runs up a massive multi-trillion dollar deficit in response to a stock market crash and a one off terrorist attack is not led by strong decisive people. Nor do I disagree with Peter that the top down press persistently casts the Republicans as manly men against infantile Democrats who won't make tough decisions.

But there is a growing body of evidence that the public has become more and more immune to the traditional media, and that, in fact, we have two streams of discourse. The media/public discourse, and the private discourse. Each, in its own way exists in a kind of bubble, ignorant of the realities of the other.

For example a recent ABC News poll on corruption in Congress shows the rifts within the public mood based on coverage.

On one hand, there is clearly a response to coverage: 86% of respondants think that the FBI should be allowed to search congressional offices with a warrant. On one hand this means that the public is watching the news, they do have an opinion on the news story of the day. However, when looking at the "storyline not story" part of the poll, a different picture emerges.

When asked about Congressional ethics in general, the public is remarkably consistent: congress is seen as being corrupt both in the present – with 66% responding that Congressional ethics were "Not so Good" or "Poor", while the January 1995 number was 72%. Half of this difference is "Unsure", so what we are really saying is that the present is almost the same – within the margin of error – as the past, in terms of the publics view of the institution and its members. However, when asked for a partisan breakdown a clear pattern emerges – namely, that while 71% of the public say there "isn’t much difference" between the two sides, the Republican support has bled downards, while the Democrats have remained largely the same.

Thus the constant media narrative of equal ccorruption is the overwhelming majority position, but while the coverage has not made clear differences between individually corrupt members among the Democrats, and the kind of systematic party corruption that is being investigated on the Republican side, the faith of those paying attention in the Republican Party has been shaken. Because that is who would respond that the Republicans are better at ethics in the first place. Lossing 25% of one's partisan base is significant on any issue, these are the people who are going to make the argument at the ground level. The picture is starker when asked about financial corruption, a recent CBS poll had the Republicans as more financially corrupt 40-15, with a trendline against the Republicans: a previous poll had it at 34-18. This means that the spread has gone from 16% to 25% - a ballooning deficit. In this poll, "unsure" was going down, and the "the same" stayed the same.

This is significant – because it means that the public does not believe the media coverage of a balance of corruption, despite the coverage. Within the public, there is a persistent erosion of support for Republican ethics, despite outlets like Fox covering almost nothing but a one sided view of who the guilty party is, and it isn't, on Fox, the Republicans.

The same data, however, shows why the top down media can continue with its narrative that there is something fundamentally ideologically wrong with the Democratic Party. Consider the split between the two polls. Even taking into account differences in methodology and survey questions, a gap of 71% saying equal corruption in one poll and 30% in another is significant. It means that 41% of the public believes there is some other kind of corruption, among both parties. And this systematic corruption equalizes the publics doubts about the Republican Party. Put it another way, when asked about financial corruption, the Republicans are overwhelmingly viewed in a more negative light, but when asked about generalities, many people who admit that the Republicans are more financially corrupt, then go on to believe that there is some other form that "balances the scales". The media can spin, but the queue ball can only inflect that spin on to others on the table.

Getting at this difference in narratives is important, because it suggests that there are really three streams of narrative. The first is the public's considered reaction to events. As Machiavelli noted, "people are often willing to deceive themselves in generalities, but seldom in specifics." When asked specifically about financial corruption, the public has a definite opinion that one party is worse than the other. This specific view is not reflected in the general view – where twice as many people say that the two parties are equal. However, the specific does manage to begin inflecting the general, as can be seen by the trend against the Republicans, even in the realm of generalties.

The third narrative, of course, being how the press attempts to mine the general view of the public, while presenting story lines that contradict the public's own perception of the stories. Or to put it another way, the public believes in a story line, that contradicts their own view of the stories of the day, and contradicts the media's narrative of balance. The media presents the story in context of the story line, if people believe in general inequal corruption, the media is happy to reinforce this. However, the public is not so linear, or fixed in its opinions, they don't inflect the story by the storyline, but instead build the story line out of the individual factoids, images and events that they see. The public's understanding of discourse is fluid, the media meta-narrative is static.

Peter Daou noted that the Post and the Times, however, persist in covering those who maintain their faith. Rather than covering in detail the erosion, today the New York Times led with a puff piece on how Provo Utah voters stand by their man.

It doesn't take an advanced degree in anything to read the polls on Bush: he has not only plummeted down to his reactionary base of support on his job rating, but his reactionary base of support on personal likeability. Recall that in early 2000, this was one of the factors that buoyed him up: that even people who did not like what he was doing, liked him. To cite a phrase from the present, they believed "his heart was in the right place." In 2001 Provo Utah would have been seen as the epicenter of a national effect: a belief by people of good will that Geroge W. Bush is also a man of good will. However, in the present they do not represent anything of the sort: instead there is almost no difference between the people who like Bush, and who like the job that Bush is doing.

What is causing these separate streams is a matter of anecdote, speculation and some hard data. One could argue that simple economics accounts for most of it. In 2001, while people were being laid off, those who still had jobs were seeing rising purchasing power. While the economy had started its down turn, that down turn had not yet reached most people. In 2006 the reverse is the case, there have been four years of falling or stagnant real wages, there was a long slog out of recession, with the largest gap between the declared end of the recession – with some help from rules changes at the National Bureau of Economic Research – and the rebound in post war history. The recession's declared end was Novebmer of 2001, the rebound did not start until 18 months later, in August of 2003.

However, brute economic reality would not change the likeability. Even when people were very angry at the Republican Party in 1958, the did not dislike Eisenhower the President. That year the Republicans suffered a horrendous defeat at the polls – losing 13 Senate seats, 3 of the 4 new senate seats for Alaska and Hawaii, and more than 40 seats in the house. The Republicans went from being in contention to retake the House and Senate, to being a distant minority party.

Thus there is something larger and more complex here, where the public trend line indicates that there is a reappraisal of the parties and of George Bush, while the media continues to portray him as the once and future king – that this is a temporary dip in his approval, which he can battle back from with support from the good moral people of America.

This same effect is writ even larger on the war in Iraq – which has been "the invisible war" – with few pictures of the casualties, devastation or collateral damage of the war – merely wide panning shots with smoke rising over a city, whose details are indistinct. Iraq has become the "internet war" as the first invasion was the "cable war" simply because the television and print media have abandoned coverage. As a result, without prompting from above, the American public has turned against the war. To some extent this is a reflection of a long standing narrative, Americans like short interventions in other nations, even though we have fought numerous long wars in our history. However, again, it is not completely the result of this: public support for Afgahnistan is untouched, and there is still a broad willingness to use force around the globe. It is Iraq that is seen as a dry hole in the desert.

This suggests that one of the fundamental differences between the media narrative and the public narrative is that the media narrative is broader and more encompassing than the public narrative, which is stitched together of separate, almost discrete, events, images and pictures. This patchwork narrative is one reason the press and elite opinion looks down on the public narrative, the first thing one learns in public policy is that there are always tradeoffs, and that everything is connected. The public, on the other hand, wants to judge each thing in isolation, and without reference to other events in a systematic fashion.

There are, as it were, two streams, each filled with fish that will not swim in the other.