Opinion: Opt-in to op-eds, a final attempt to distinguish news from opinion – Poynter poynter.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from poynter.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Deadline Detroit | Starkman: Paying My Decades Old Debt to Detroit deadlinedetroit.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from deadlinedetroit.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
is an occasion. If you re a racehorse, or a sailor at the equator, it might be cause to celebrate. If you are the nation s best-known newspaper, it might call for a more sober response. For instance, the milestone op-ed piece that ran in the New York Times, on Sept. 20, 2016, marking one of its own editorial decisions. It was about a certain word. A loaded word, admitted Liz Spayd, then the paper s public editor. But in this particular case, it passes my smell test. The word was lie. It wasn t just what the word was. It was where it was. Not in an editorial, or an opinion piece, but in a straight news story. On the front page, in a headline. Trump Gives Up a Lie but Refuses to Repent.”
In April 2017, The New York Times published an Op-Ed by “Palestinian leader and parliamentarian” Marwan Barghouti who wrote that he was serving multiple life sentences after being subjected to “a political show trial.” Liz Spayd, The Times’ public editor at the time, rebuked her paper for failing to disclose to that an Israeli court convicted Barghouti for five counts of premeditated murder and membership in a terror organization (“An Op-Ed Author Omits His Crimes, and The Times Does Too“): I have written before on the need to more fully identify the biography and credentials of authors, especially details that help people make judgments about the opinions they’re reading. Do the authors of the pieces have any conflicts of interest that could challenge their credibility? Are they who they say they are, and can editors vouch for their fidelity?
The Social Order Traditional newspapers never sold news; they sold an audience to advertisers. To a considerable degree, this commercial imperative determined the journalistic style, with its impersonal voice and pretense of objectivity. The aim was to herd the audience into a passive consumerist mass. Opinion, which divided readers, was treated like a volatile substance and fenced off from “factual” reporting. The digital age exploded this business model. Advertisers fled to online platforms, never to return. For most newspapers, no alternative sources of revenue existed: as circulation plummets to the lowest numbers on record, more than 2,000 dailies have gone silent since the turn of the century. The survival of the rest remains an open question.