While you read this digital lecture, please feel free to leave comments with questions/thoughts/ideas/examples/counterarguments/etc. You can also annotate using Hypothesis if you wish. In real-life class, we would absolutely be discussing these issues together as a class, rather than me just telling you what I think.
As I said on the Unit Overview, “news” is not actually one genre, but many different genres of writing. Look around the website of any major newspaper: you’ll see “facts” reporting (what we typically think of when we think of news), obituaries, analysis, opinion writing, summary pieces (like this one), listicles (like on Buzzfeed), interviews, captioned photosets, and more. However, most of these subgenres share common features.
However, the most important thing I want you to take away from this is: Everyone is Biased. Every news story is biased. The question is never, “Is this biased?” but “What is the bias, and how has it affected the reporting?” Bias impacts not just how an article is written, but also which articles get published in the first place. What is considered important/newsworthy?
Bias is not inherently bad, and it doesn’t automatically mean an article is not trustworthy. But news writing — any other kind of writing — always carries implicit assumptions, and implicit messages about what people ought to think about the story. These messages are sometimes hard to detect, especially if they support what most people consider “common sense,” or what you as the reader already think about a topic.
Type 1: “Just the Facts” Reporting
This is what most people think of immediately when they think about “the news.” In facts pieces, the journalist reports the basic, relevant information about a story they think is of public interest. These kinds of articles are typically very short.
For example, this article on some accidentally-poisonous dog food, or this article on some Billy Joel concerts. An article of this type seeks to answer the “5 W’s” as quickly and clearly as possible: to communicate the Who, What, Where, When, and Why of the story.
For the Billy Joel article, that’s probably all there is to the story. He cancelled some concerts due to coronavirus, and is now trying to reschedule them. However, “just the facts” stories can also be deceptive. Even if every piece of information contained within them is true, a journalist can still shape the story, or how it comes across, by choosing which information to include or exclude, which sources to reference, etc.
For example, here is an article in CNN about some of the stealing that happened in early June during the curfew. But we should also be careful when reading: how much of what seems to be fact is actually stated as opinion? (For example, some of the interviewed police officers say, “We think that….”). So, they might be right (and the article doesn’t suggest any reason to doubt their analysis), but they might be wrong.
We should also ask, what perspective are we getting? This article almost exclusively uses statements/information from the NYPD. Other people might have other knowledge about the same night/incident, which could add to, undermine, or just complicate the NYPD’s perspective. What were people in NYC saying on social media on that same night, especially if they were in midtown? What have protest organizers said about it? Were there any essential workers around who were not part of either the protests or the break-ins, but observed some of what was happening? Without doing more research/trying to seek out other perspectives (even if the other perspectives agree with/corroborate the information in this article), we can’t know for sure.
Here is a report from The Insider citing tweets from journalists at several other news agencies, presenting a very different view of the situation. This article says that while police did make some arrests of people in the stores, they also often drove by or otherwise ignored similar instances. This report also reports on facts, but is using different sources and different kinds of evidence: videos and tweets by journalists, rather than mostly interviews with police.
It’s entirely possible that none of the journalists or the other people interviewed are lying, and that everyone is telling the truth to the best of their knowledge. To find the “real” facts about this, or any other news story, you have to think critically and cast a wide net in terms of your information.
Framing a story via omission can happen on purpose, but it often happens entirely on accident. You can also frame a story based on what information you bother to include.
For example, this article about someone who was arrested last night includes information about the woman’s parents’ wealth and occupations. How does that information impact your view of the story? What does the article seem to want us to do with that information?
Type 2: Analysis
Analysis reporting is typically longer, and involves synthesizing information from multiple sources and interpreting the implications of the information, rather than simply relaying data. It is more similar to a research paper, but is still written in a journalistic style (shorter paragraphs and sentences than is typical in an academic paper).
What is the difference between “facts reporting” and “analysis,” or between “analysis” and “opinion”? If an analysis piece requires interpretation, doesn’t that mean it’s the writer’s opinion? And shouldn’t an opinion piece include evidence for the writer’s opinion? Yes! These 3 types are not distinct, totally-separate kinds of writing. There are lots of overlap/gray areas.
Generally, we could perhaps say that an analysis piece takes it upon itself to do some of the critical thinking and evaluation of sources/information from multiple sources that I wrote about above.
Here are some examples of what I would consider analysis pieces:
How We Hurt Animals We Cherish
3 Examples of Data Journalism
Working From Home Poses Hurdles for People of Color
The Trump Docket: A Look at the Fights Fueling Trump’s Big Legal Bills
Type 3: Opinion
The opinion pages of a newspaper are the place where people are most welcome to explicitly argue for their own point of view. Other opinion pieces don’t necessarily include “arguments” per se, but simply want to inform readers about their experiences with a topic. An opinion writer may speak from their own personal experience with a matter, or refer to other sources of information, similar to an analysis piece. Often, it’s a combination.
The Opinion section also enables newspaper staff to argue for their own perspective on things, which lets them use their platform to argue for specific positions while maintaining their reputation as an “objective” news source. For example, the Washington Post has an entire section on their Opinion page called “The Post’s View.”
Here are some examples of articles put in the “Opinion” section of a newspaper:
There is No Route to the White House Without Latino Voters
The Inanity of Zoom School Suspensions
Jessica Krug is a Symptom of a Bigger Problem
Why U.S. Right Wing Populists and Their Global Allies Disagree Over Big Tech
Just in scrolling through the Opinion pages on various news sites while trying to choose examples for this post, I noticed that it’s not super clear how the sites decide what gets put in the “Opinion” section vs. in other sections of the website. Why is the article above on the importance of Latinx voters in the Opinion section and not in Politics? The author uses a lot of data, not just his own experiences.
How papers decide what is “Opinion” and what is “News” is also shaped by bias.
Some Journalism Vocabulary
Byline: It’s the line of a news article that tells you who the article is by. You could say, “I have a byline in The New York Times” or “This intern actually wrote a lot of the article, make sure to put them in the byline too.”
Column: A column is a recurring section of a newspaper/magazine where the same person gets to write about a topic each week/month/etc. Getting your own column is very exciting. Someone might get a review column, an advice column, a fashion column, etc. This term gets its name from print newspapers, when the writing would literally appear in its own column of text on the page.
Copy: In journalism, “copy” means all of the text that is going to be printed in the newspaper. It is the material that will be copied many times when the printing takes place. Example: “I need to submit my copy to my editor by Thursday.”
Editorial: Any piece in a newspaper that is primarily someone’s opinion. This could be written by an editor of the paper, but doesn’t have to be. Also known as an op-ed (opinion-editorial).
Editorial Line: The criteria a publication uses to determine what they will publish and what they will not. Example: “This article doesn’t really fit our editorial line.”
Headline: The title of the article!
Lede (also sometimes spelled Lead): The first sentence of a news story. You may have heard the phrase “bury the lede,” which refers to when someone doesn’t mention the most interesting/most important piece of information until later. (It’s generally bad to bury the lede.)
Off the record: If you’re talking to someone and they say “This is off the record,” they are saying you are not allowed to quote them or attribute the information to them. (The opposite is on-the-record)
Press Release: Sometimes, a person or organization wants to distribute some information to get it into as many newspaper as possible. They could hold a press conference (where journalists attend, listen to information, and ask questions), or they can put out a press release: a written document stating the information. Newspapers can either publish the press release directly or use the information to write their own piece.
Retraction: If you publish something that you later discover was wrong, you need to issue a retraction, or a statement acknowledging and correcting your error. In print newspapers, a retraction is printed in the next edition of the paper. Online, a statement is usually added to the beginning or end of the article saying “This article originally said that ______. Actually, the truth is ____. This article has been edited to correct the error.”
Verification: Generally, news sources try to verify all of their information before they publish it. This means they have to find proof of the same information in more than one, unrelated place. If I cite two articles, but one of them gets its information from the other, that’s not verifying. During the Russia investigation/Trump impeachment proceedings, there were a lot of rumors/allegations that had one source, but that reporters, the FBI, etc. had to try to verify. In high-stakes, secretive situations like that, it can be hard to verify even stuff that is true.
