Foxfyre wrote:The journalists who become op-ed columnists have to first prove themselves in the trenches as reporters. Therefore, the op-ed pieces are as credible and often better researched than is the average 'straight' news story;
First off, the "therefore" suggests some kind of logical deduction, but there is none.
Eg: just that before I became an A2K poster, I "proved myself in the academic trenches", say, with a thesis on East-European minorities, doesn't mean that
therefore, my A2K posts on Eastern Europe "are as credible and often better researched" than the chapters of a thesis. Not at all. When writing an opinion piece, you can go by different rules - more relaxed rules when it comes to researching your every assertion - and thus people do. And so it needs be, for how otherwise could you be able to unfold a
vision, which is what your opinion piece is supposed to be about, and which by definition a speculative thing?
Thats the tricky bit. Op-ed pieces are pieces of
opinion. When explicitly stating that what you're expressing is merely your
opinion, your
take on the situation, rather than as close (if not always complete) a reflection of actual facts as journalistically possible, you grant yourself a leeway that a regular story's journalist has not got. Fine; thats what op-ed pages are for. Facts are just facts, after all, and when you want to express what you think is the
truth, you're talking about the personal way in which you look at those facts, make sense of them and construct an overall view on the situation out of them. To be able to do so, you need that extra leeway: the freedom to speculate, to interpret, to associate and assert. But the reader needs to realise that
that's what's going on in op-eds, never mind columns. Spin. Just like our A2K posts represent spin - our own private spin on a situation.
Fine - but that means we're talking of a different calibre of "evidence". In an op-ed, let alone a column, you can - as did the author of an article JW pointed me to the other day - get away with stating, "A recent article I read says the real Muslim population in France may be between 8 and 9 million", and "One forecast I read suggests that France may be half Muslim by 2050", and base the rest of your argument on that. Never mind that you could find a forecast saying pretty much anything on the topic. You pick and choose, based on what illustrates or bolsters your train of thought, specifying a source only when you choose to - again, the prerogative of the opinion piece writer. Now you say that nowadays "news stories are almost as much opinion and speculation as are the op-ed pieces", but a news story writer would not get away with the example I just gave. (Not in the media I read, anyway).
Where the trouble comes in here is where, then, individuals like certain A2K posters seem to illustrate and "prove"
their entire argument again purely through references to those columnists, opinion pieces, talk radio interviews, blogs - which themselves were already a processed take on the situation. We're very much on to the meta-level here. No longer is a personal opinion construed from one's personal interpretation of the factual news stories, of the raw material; the raw material is hardly even gotten
round to anymore. Hell, the raw material is itself declared irrelevant or discredited: who can trust the MSM anyway? Those reports from the ground ... you gotta take them with a grain of salt, because don't you know, all those reporters are liberals, anyway!
And so, in full distrust of any NYT, WaPo or "alphabet network" news story, the conservative poster bypasses the stories from the ground altogether and instead retreats to Townhall.com, to the National Review Online, to any number of opinion pieces and already processed takes on the situation and takes
those as the "raw material", to then base their own opinionated take on again. We're into serious virtual reality territory by now, one that explains ever so often coming across the same pre-rehearsed spins and takes all across the Net, simultaneously ... an echo chamber of unprecedented proportions.
It's kind of ironic, really. Conservatives claim the MSM journalists offer (liberal) opinion instead of fact. So instead, they've erected a parallel news space that, barring Fox News, mostly doesn't even
try to collect its own first-hand info from around the world - but skips straight to the opinionating! From talk radio to columns to blogs, they seem to focus passionately and near-exclusively on applying conservative interpretation, selection and opinion on those dreaded CNN or BBC news items. It's not an alternate news space at all - it's an opinion factory!
