When every story becomes a politics story, institutions lose the ability to speak in their own language.
I used to write for a legal trade publication in California. As the criminal justice beat reporter, I wrote many-an-article about Supreme Court rulings like the one that was issued this morning. Because the audience I was writing to were primarily lawyers and judges, the stories were designed to dissect the real-world impact of the decision, the break-from or continuation of norms it implied, and what the decision might reveal about the composure of the justices.
I longed for this kind of analysis today when the Court issued its unanimous ruling that will make it more difficult for the federal government to prohibit firearm ownership by people who occasionally use illegal drugs.
The case raised a series of legitimate legal questions. How broadly can the government define dangerousness? What constitutional protections remain available to people who fall into disfavored categories? How should courts reconcile federal marijuana laws with a reality in which millions of Americans legally consume cannabis under state law?
But in the mainstream media, those substantial questions, the ones involving constitutional rights, criminal law, federalism, and the government’s burden when restricting individual liberties, were afterthoughts. Instead, most outlets opted for the political angle: the law at issue was the same law used to prosecute Hunter Biden.
The observation is accurate. And, maybe, the political angle is more click-provoking. What struck me, however, was not the inclusion of the reference but the speed with which it became the organizing frame for understanding the story for multiple outlets.
A court ruling about constitutional law was rapidly translated into a story about contemporary politics. That transformation has become increasingly common across American institutions.
Most Americans have watched this happen in real time. During the pandemic, public health became a proxy fight for broader political identities. The result was confusion, mistrust, and a body count that cannot be separated from our inability to maintain a distinct public health conversation.
Education has followed a similar path. Debates over school curriculum routinely move past questions of history and pedagogy into battles over national identity. The controversy around Critical Race Theory is a useful example. In many communities, people argued fiercely about a concept that often was not even being taught in the schools at the center of the dispute. The institution was trying to have an educational conversation. The public was having a political one.
The problem is not that politics enters these conversations. Politics has always influenced public life. The problem is the speed at which politics becomes the only language through which public life is interpreted.
Historically, institutions developed distinct forms of discourse because they served distinct functions. Courts existed to answer legal questions through legal reasoning. Universities existed to generate and test knowledge. Journalists gathered information and attempted to explain events. Public health agencies evaluated evidence and translated it into guidance. Advocacy organizations organized constituencies around values and objectives.
These institutions frequently disagreed with one another, but they were at least operating within different and autonomous frameworks. Each institution possessed its own standards for determining what counted as a good argument, what constituted evidence, and what questions were worth asking.
Those distinctions mattered because they created multiple pathways for understanding complex issues.
A person could examine a court opinion as a legal document, a research paper as an academic contribution, or a news story as a reported account of events. Different institutions contributed different forms of knowledge.
Today, those boundaries are becoming increasingly porous. Political narratives flow across institutional lines that once acted as meaningful barriers, reshaping how courts, universities, journalists, and public agencies are understood by the people they serve.
As a result, institutions frequently lose the ability to communicate on their own terms.
This creates a challenge that many organizations misdiagnose. When a message fails to land, leaders often assume the problem is disagreement. They assume audiences encountered the argument and rejected it. Increasingly, the argument is never encountered in its original form. It is absorbed into a larger narrative before people engage with its actual substance.
The Supreme Court ruling offers a useful illustration. One can agree or disagree with the Court’s reasoning. One can support or oppose broader Second Amendment protections. Those debates are legitimate. What is notable is how quickly the conversation moved away from the legal reasoning itself and toward a familiar political storyline.
We are witnessing the erosion of distinctive discourse.
When every issue is filtered through the same framework, society loses some of its capacity to think in multiple dimensions at once. We become less capable of evaluating legal arguments as legal arguments, scientific claims as scientific claims, or institutional decisions as institutional decisions. Everything becomes evidence in support of a preexisting narrative.
For mission-driven organizations, this presents a profound communication challenge. The task is no longer simply developing a clear message. The task is preserving the integrity of that message long enough for audiences to encounter it before it is translated into a story you were never trying to tell.
That may be one of the defining narrative challenges of our time.
COJA helps mission-driven organizations understand those narrative pressures, identify where their messages are being reinterpreted, and build communication strategies that preserve clarity, credibility, and meaning. If you feel your organization operating within larger narratives it does not control, book an intro call with us.
