“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
—Alan Alda
Welcome to all the new subscribers who joined after my Medium Day talk Saturday. You’ve pushed the Writer’s Guide beyond 370 subscribers in the exact week when we mark one year since the launch of this newsletter. I’m so thrilled to be sharing with all of you what I’ve learned about nonfiction article writing. In my Medium Day talk (recording is here), I spoke a lot about accuracy, credibility and building trust with readers. After that intense how-to session, I thought I’d take the Writer’s Guide in a slightly offbeat direction today, less how-to and more of a how-to-think.—Rob
The New York Times announced last week that it will stop making political endorsements beyond the presidential race. The Editorial Board will no longer endorse candidates for local or state offices. It’s a monumental shift in policy that’s 160 years too late, in my opinion. The company joins a handful of other news organizations backing away from recommending candidates for office, in a trend that’s good for readers.
"In 2022, the second-largest newspaper operator in the country, Alden Global Capital, announced that its 200 newspapers would no longer endorse candidates in races for president, Senate and governor, saying readers were 'often confused' about the distinction between news and opinion. The new owners of The Baltimore Sun said in January that they would also stop making endorsements."
What’s this got to do with you, and your writing?
We writers need to understand just how difficult it is to build credibility, and how easily trust can be squandered. So this is a different sort of post for the Writer’s Guide, a cautionary if tangential tale. But once you see the problem of Editorials in newspapers, I hope you’ll gain new respect for the need to be accurate, straightforward and honest with your readers, and always be clear about your facts (citations help!) and transparent about statements that are opinions—yours or otherwise.
Here’s my opinion: I think the Times and other news orgs should all go further, for their own well-being and in the best interests of the nation: Stick to delivering news and information and stay out of the Editorial business entirely. While Editorials are largely the purview of newspapers, this issue speaks to the broader trust problem in media.
Among all US adults, trust in national news organizations dipped from 76% in 2016 to 61% in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. Among adults 18 to 29, trust has fallen from 62% to 56%.
A 2022 Gallup poll, framing its questions and labels differently, found 28% of US adults don’t have very much trust in mass media and 38% have none at all.
It’s not hard to figure out why.
“It isn’t just political partisanship that’s driving this distrust,” Mandy Jenkins, a former president of the Online News Association, once said. “There are lots of people who don’t like seeing opinion in their news and having all of that mixed together.”
The reasons for growing media distrust are numerous, some being outside the control of news organizations, including the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation. But here’s one thing a noble news org can control: Its own content. An otherwise respectable media outlet—print or online or broadcast—loses credibility and sows confusion when its owner or Editorial Board takes political positions (or any positions on matters of import, for that matter) with traditional Editorials or, worse, other opinion-laden content posing as news.
Sure, opinions can energize a media company’s “base.” But that’s absolutely not something a respected news outlet ought to be striving for. (Again, something for you to ponder as you frame and execute your own articles).
To be clear, opinion sections—a separate section in a newspaper or its online presence, populated by writers who are not representing the news org’s official stance—are yet another content type, and one of value… so long as we understand who the opinion writer represents (themselves). (And again, if you write opinion pieces, great! Identify them as such.)
But an Editorial Board, speaking for the news org, muddles the mission, making it harder than it already is for an audience to believe that the news side of the business is truly independent and objective.
In media, appearances are everything.
Before I studied journalism (more than 30 years ago) I was likewise confused by the presumed difference between the news side of newspapers and the muckety-mucks who are compelled to put their own spin on things via Editorials. Do those high-minded editors tell the journalists in the newsroom what to write and how to write it? (No, they will tell you.) But regardless of the answer, how can the average reader possibly know, with any confidence, that one side is not influencing the other?
We all see bias in the media. We know (or at least think we know) which media orgs lean left or lean right. Some of us crave coverage that is neither. What a wonderful world it would be if more news orgs hewed to the middle of the road, stuck to facts, didn’t try to tell us what to think.
Media execs either don't realize the damage their Editorials do, or they just can't help spouting off. Either way, they create an audience of choir members they can safely preach to, lending to their publications a clear and obvious stance that devalues the work of every well-meaning journalist on staff, the writers and editors who are just trying to present the facts and the quotes and set their biases aside for the sake of an accurate story.
I recognize that nixing Editorial is not a silver bullet in solving today’s distrust of media. But news orgs need to claw back every ounce of trust they can muster. Likewise, you need to build trust with readers, which means they deserve to know when you are stating facts and when you are sharing your personal views.
The unfortunate devolution in media—a direct result of the birth of the internet but also owing to the failure of media companies to demarcate fact from opinion—represents an opportunity for respectable new orgs. Get off your high horse, I would tell them, provide trusted news reporting and useful, factual information, label opinions and analyses as such when that’s what they are, get out of the Editorial business, and let readers decide what to think. While the mission of an individual writer bears little resemblance to that of a media org, I do see parallels. It all boils down to honesty and clarity, which builds trust.
For the record, this is an opinion post.
Cheers,
Rob
PS: I love to hear from subscribers, to learn what you’re up to and what you’d like to learn more about as you fine tune your craft. Drop me an email anytime by replying to of any of these newsletter emails (it comes directly to me) or via rob.britt@gmail.com. Tell me where your writing is published, what your goals are, and what help you might need to get you there. Thanks!