Journalism operates with a set of informational or structural biases (Bennett, 2001) that determine what journalists understand or "see" in a news situation and how they may relay what they understand to citizens. Narrative is among these-the structuring of news situations into stories using all of the elements of literary story-telling, including a central conflict between protagonists and antagonists. The narrative bias is the tendency of the press to structure issues in terms of stories for the purpose of creating a coherent and causal sense of events. Further, this bias tends to promote the creation of master narratives-set story lines that create a basic understanding of how and why individual candidates act as they do in political situations, and prompts them to see certain types of stories as news and others as not news. Conflict among politicians, especially regarding campaign tactics, is one of the definitions of news in politics.

As in most fiction, the writer won't let the protagonist attain the resolution of the story too easily nor the climax too soon. Hence, the press looks for drama, and often creates drama (in political stories, the illusion of instability), in an otherwise stable system. The drama they seek is human: candidate versus candidate. This search for human drama both reflects and projects that policy analysis is boring and unworthy of serious scrutiny unless it collides with the human drama of political maneuvering.

To portray a stable process as an unstable process does not conform to the facts. But the narrative bias blinds the press to the ethical issue: The stability of the process, which we experience as a predictable, frontloaded process, limits voters' choices. In a plea to journalists to change the way they cover politics in the pre-primary phase of the nomination process, Hanson argued that journalists should avoid typical horse race coverage in favor of covering candidates' policies and characters. In other words, journalists should take a critical look at the structure of journalistic practice.

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