"And yeah, I hear that she wants to now engage in more multidimensional storytelling."

"Versus, I guess, just the straight-on reading-into-that-teleprompter-screen storytelling. So more power to her. I wish her well with her multidimensional storytelling."

Sarah Palin mocks her nemesis Katie Couric.

Multidimensional storytelling is an expression that lends itself to comic riffing. Palin's jab isn't particularly clever. It's mainly just the sarcastic repeating of Couric's own term. How did the term "storytelling" catch on over the last quarter century as a positive way to talk about narration of real-world events? If I remember correctly, before about 1980, the term "storytelling" mainly referred to fiction or lying.

There was a real fad in the legal academy for writing and pontificating about "telling stories" about this or that aspect of law, and it was meant in a positive way. I hate to pick on an individual lawprof, but here's an example of what I'm talking about from a recent law review article:

Narratives matter, place matters, and care's embrace of storytelling situates law in a more robust dialogue on the allocation of rights to controlling our surroundings.

Like most law review article sentences, it has a footnote:

Ecofeminist literature often portrays the ethic of care through the use of narrative, telling stories of human and nature interactions, in which nature is approached not as a challenge or commodity, but as a partner or collaborator. Ecofeminist stories describe nature from the perspective of a loving eye instead of from arrogant perception - not as something to dominate and conquer, but as a participant in an experience. Karen Warren illustrates why ecofeminism relies on the power of narrative to undermine the patriarchal biases in rights rhetoric. Warren’s story invites the reader to the tension between the climber and a large rock edifice. Through her story, Warren is able to evaluate the process by which she reconsiders the goals of rock climbing, from which she arrives at an understanding of her relationship to this rock feature in which the two are engaged in one another as “silent conversational partners in a longstanding friendship.” [Karen J. Warren, The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism, 12 ENV. ETHICS 125, 134 (1990).] Narrative enables the expression of interests and behaviors that may be misunderstood, undermined or excluded in dominant rhetoric. By rejecting the restraints of dominant vocabularies, narrative offers “a way of conceiving of ethics and ethical meaning as emerging out of particular situations moral agents find themselves in, rather than as being imposed on those situations (e.g. as a derivation or instantiation of some predetermined abstract principle or rule.” Id., at 136.

Whether Couric was ever steeped in this kind of scholarship, I don't know.