Doctorow, Doctorow, Give Me The News!

E.L. Doctorow reminds us of the immense power of storytelling. Long before Guttenberg, oral storytelling was the universal media for passing knowledge and norms between generations.

Of course, stories are used by leaders to achieve outcomes that are both good and bad. In his latest book "Creationists," Doctorow helps us understand how and why narrative, plot and character development are used to inform, motivate, persuade, control, unify and, yes, sometimes deceive us.

In a recent radio interview, Doctorow suggested that we, as citizens and employees, have a tough job discerning between the fiction and nonfiction found in our leaders' stories: "It's the people who tell the stories who claim that they are nonfiction who do the most damage. If I write a bad story, there are no great consequences. The book won't sell. It'll be reviewed, criticized and thrown out. But if the President tells a bad story, it'll resound around the world and have enormous consequences, usually bad."