On Sunday, I was reading the New York Times (on my iPhone for free…), and I ran across a rather curious op-ed piece (in the Opinions category of the paper). This ‘opinion piece’ was written by the seemingly new Public Editor (Arthur Brisbane) for the NYT: ‘In an age of Voices, Moving beyond the Facts’. This article, which was written in a breezy, bonhomie style, was one of the most breathtakingly insulting opinion pieces I have ever read! The intent of this article seems to have been superficially an opportunity for the paper to apologize for so many of the ‘news’ articles actually being opinion pieces (advocacy journalism, or ‘interpretive journalism’). In reality it much more a seemingly friendly finger in one’s eye…

If you were to read the very first paragraph, you might conclude that the writer was against this growing practice:

WHAT some call opinion, others call interpretive journalism — a label as opaque as the practice. Call it what you will, nothing has generated more reader indignation in the past few weeks than when it has appeared on a news page.

The writer goes on to set up some straw men, only to push beyond them. For me this was the first inkling that there was something afoot in this article… The writer never even took the time to try to refute what are apparently the overwhelming number of complaints about this growing practice of reporters and editors sculpting the news as if it were some sort of a performance piece…

This opinion piece went on to create a trope that presented reporting the news as an opportunity for writers and reporters to ‘stretch’ the boundaries of their craft. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know that reporting the news was all about them…

I immediately started thinking of a comparable situation in a few other industries…service industries. For if the new industry does not provide a service for us the readers and watcher, what is it?

Imagine going to a restaurant, a restaurant which has a menu from which you have ordered for years. Now, in a seemingly random manner, anything you order is replaced with what the waiter wants to eat… and then the manager of the restaurant tells you that this is the way things are, that it has been a growing trend in many restaurants, and that you should just get used to it…

Would you go back to this restaurant?

Ironically enough, this article was posted in the op-ed section of the paper, and this article was merely describing the changes in direction that the news department at the NYT is headed towards… This is almost stupidly ironic in that this article should have been posted in the new pages (since it objectively refers to them), it then describes some news articles which should be in the op-ed page…

I was wondering why the ‘Grey Lady’ has gotten to the point where is seems to be trying to throw away decades of credibility. OF course, this is not anything new in the news game; this would seem to equally apply to most major city newspapers, and much of TV news.

As I slowly get past this idea, I should also mention that this editorial and the cited NYT readers guide are worthwhile pages to use in any high school class in which a teacher could work with students to gain some semblance of understanding how much of a morass the news industry has become…

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