As one who has spent more than 60 years in the business of seeking, finding, writing and analyzing facts for public distribution, it continues to confound me how human beings are attracted to lies and sweet nothings.
Like the suitor who knows in his heart that the love of his life tolerates him while waiting for a better catch, fact-gatherers are less appealing than the colorful personalities and outrageous, swaggering illusions of heroes.
Yet we suffer public ignominy and abuse for bursting the bubbles of fantasy and faith with exposure of fraud and corruption.
To me, the most frightening aspect of the Digital Era (I predict it will become known as the Digital Error) is that too much evidence of incompetence or criminal deception will be swept under the rug of Artificial Intelligence. No printed trail will be left behind for future archeologists to sift through as they seek the cause of the decline of Western civilization.
If you see something in print that strikes your fancy as a nugget of truth you should fold it neatly and put it in a fireproof vault for future access because the alternative will be available only on technologies that are no longer available to the general population. If you think I’m wrong, try to find files of things written and stored on something called floppy disks, MPs or CDs.
But no matter how history is recorded, there is still a problem in comprehension. I find that even well-read people often are confused by the differences between news, analysis, opinion and just plain recreational reading.
When I learned the basics, a proper news story answered all of the following in the lede — or first paragraph: Who, what, when, where, why and sometimes how. That way, even if you had no time to be informed, you had the basic facts. Subsequent paragraphs were still in print so you could return to sort context among quotes, additional supporting facts and statistics and references to other sources.
Very simple, and the object of such direct simplicity is to inform a reader (viewer, listener) of the most important facts without bias or opinion. That’s old school.
I learned it from veterans of an even older school who espoused the idea that no reporter should get a byline — their name on the top of the story — until they had been around long enough to have the know-it-all kicked out of them. That’s because the most precious thing we had to offer was credibility. Past tense.
Modern news marketing differs from old-school journalism in that what is being offered is something they call “eyeballs.” News in printed form has ads all around — top, sides, beneath, but not embedded in the text of the article.
Online news begins with a hook in the headline that you will scroll for pages to see again, because the effort on social media and television is to keep your eyes on the screen and turn off the smart switch in your head.
Over the years, I’ve had the honor and opportunity to guide young journalists to write the news first; the five W’s, and only the facts and context. Then they’re ready to write features or some related story called a sidebar.
Next step on the ladder is the analysis — and here is where many veterans got their first bylines — with in-depth background into context and the why of the news topic, but not an opinion.
Ultimately, the management in the news department might choose to offer an opinion on a public issue. An editorial identifies a problem or failure and suggests a course of action. Opinion is supposed to be on the editorial page, along with letters to the editor and columnists.
Today, opinions are often the headline, if not the entire digital or video display. Most of the “news” on television, particularly the “shows” with a regular host and a changing cast of panelists, is an entertaining, show-biz approach to opinion and analysis.
Social media, from TikTok to Facebook, is propaganda with hidden political agendas, or just plain entertainment. Mindlessness has market value. This is where AI will fester and thrive.
Dean Minnich writes from Westminster.
