What if ... and just hear me out here ... all newspaper opinion pages are inherently bad because those two concepts are best when more clearly separate?
been shouting this for years. and many Americans don't have the mental to capacity to separate the two. people constantly refer to an opinion piece as 'the NYT said...' like it was factual.
put that shit on its own domain. opinion.nyt.com or something.
I think the NYT or other papers owning opinion publications is great. Should be separately named. And, honestly, they should be devoted to single ideologies. Just makes agendas more clear. The current setup erodes trust in news.
I'd be interested to know the origins and history of opinion pieces and full-time opinion writers.
wonder if it was 'here is the straight news', but also 'we need a way to spin the narrative in our favor'. could be, given papers were often owned by big business.
Opinion sections and editorials have been there since the very beginning of newspapers. It's peoples' consumption and the overall size of the landscape that has changed. We are dealing with a new trust gap and a collapse in the overall size of the industry.
I'd also be interested in seeing how most people who aren't Extremely Online react to opinion pieces. I am a physical WaPo subscriber and havent read an opinion once. straight to recycling.
only time I get outraged is when it is posted here (or previously the other site).
Much of my view here is seeing people
who consume this stuff see no delineation. It erodes trust in news at large. The efforts to supposedly run multiple perspectives also serve to obscure institutional agendas.
Part of the difference in the new landscape is there are so many less newspapers, magazines, and alt weeklies. An individual opinion page used to be part of an argument and dialogue. Now it's more like a megaphone.
If the few big companies left are going to be using their rare resources to advance an agenda we need more clarity and distance from attempts at straight news.
