Opinion creep: How facts lost ground in the battle for our attention

[Audio montage of cable news commentary]

Darragh Worland:

What’s a pundit?

Tom Rosenstiel: 

[laughs]

Darragh Worland:

[laughs] Why are you laughing?

Tom Rosenstiel:

Well, everybody’s a pundit today. A pundit is someone who offers opinions, who “pundicizes,” who opines, and it’s typically used in reference to politics. They’re a pundit about the events of the day in the city or the state or the country. I think it’s a term that cuts both ways. It can both be a compliment or an insult because some people are just full of themselves.

Introduction:

And you know what they say about opinions…

Welcome to Is that a fact? I’m your host Darragh Worland. This week we talk to Tom Rosenstiel, journalist, press critic, researcher and author of The Elements of Journalism, an industry reference guide on the practice and purpose of journalism translated into more than two dozen languages and used in journalism schools around the world. He’s also the Eleanor Merrill Visiting Professor on the Future of Journalism at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism. And in his “spare” time, he writes political thrillers. But on this podcast, as much as we may appreciate a good read, we do not deal in fiction.

We invited Rosenstiel on the show to help us understand how opinion has infiltrated so much of our news and information environment, gradually edging out facts in the battle for our attention.

Darragh Worland:

Let’s start with the basics. What is the difference between news and opinion?

Tom Rosenstiel:

Well, news is reporting that’s produced by the news staff of a news publication, and it usually involves a reporter going out interviewing people, covering an event. In the most traditional sense, it’s purely fact-based.

An opinion column … the point of that piece or of that opinion piece is I want to tell you how you should think or what I think about something. So the fundamental difference between news is “I’m telling you about an event so you can learn about it and decide what you think about it, and here are some basic facts that you need to know.” That’s where a news story ends. It might talk about what the potential implications are for the future and things like that, but it is not going to say, “Here’s what I think about it, and thus what I think you should think about it.”

Darragh Worland:

So opinion journalism takes many forms and it has many different players, which can be confusing for consumers. So for the sake of our listeners, I’m going to name a type of opinion journalist or a type of opinion journalism, and I’d like you to briefly explain what it is. So the goal of this game is to be as succinct as possible, but also as clear as possible. So what’s an op-ed?

Tom Rosenstiel:

That’s a term that comes from newspapers. An op-ed is written by someone who is not on the staff and not a syndicated columnist. They’re a guest columnist. Anyone can try and write an op-ed. Senators write op-eds. Mayors write op-eds. Citizens write op-eds. It’s more than a letter to the editor, but you submit it and it has to be accepted for publication by the outlet.

Darragh Worland:

Is it fair to say that these people would be considered subject matter experts?

Tom Rosenstiel:

Usually, yeah. There’s a reason that the publication has decided that their opinion has some merit and is worth listening to. And those are called “op-eds” because they’re on the page opposite the editorials.

Darragh Worland:

What’s an editorial?

Tom Rosenstiel:

An editorial is the opinion of the publication, and it is a group opinion. There’s an editorial board at a publication. They debate an issue. They might have speakers come in and help educate them, and then they come to a conclusion, take a vote, and decide where they stand on something. That’s where the publication takes an official position. So the editorial is usually written by one person, but it is the group opinion of the organization. That’s different than a column, which is signed and is the opinion of one author.

Darragh Worland:

That was going to be my next question. What is a columnist?

Tom Rosenstiel:

A columnist is usually someone who is either on the staff of the publication and writes a column, which is their opinion, a couple days a week or it could be a syndicated column, which is someone, who’s not on the staff of the publication but writes a column. “Dear Abby” was a syndicated column, not usually on the editorial pages, and that person makes their living selling it to lots of different publications. There’s fewer and fewer of that than there used to be.

Darragh Worland:

What’s a pundit? [laughter]  Why are you laughing?

Tom Rosenstiel:

Well, everybody’s a pundit today. A pundit is someone who offers opinions, who “pundicizes,” who opines, and it’s typically used in reference to politics. They’re a pundit about the events of the day in the city or the state or the country. I think it’s a term that cuts both ways. It can both be a compliment or an insult because some people are just full of themselves.

Darragh Worland:

So is a pundit considered a subject matter expert?

Tom Rosenstiel:

That’s a great question. I think a pundit is somebody who, in my mind, without looking it up in the dictionary, a pundit is somebody who opines often. They may opine largely on one subject, which would make them subject matter expert, but they just may be somebody who … Columnists may general assignment or general interest columnists and write about whatever they want to. They would be a pundit because they have a lot of opinions.

Darragh Worland:

“Pundit” is a term that isn’t just associated with people who opine on 24-hour cable news. It could be somebody who also writes opinion columns in newspapers as well.

Tom Rosenstiel:

Sure, because the term predated television. There were pundits before there was television. There was pundits before there were radio. So it’s probably fair to say there are fewer pundits in a traditional newspaper. A local TV station doesn’t have pundits. They don’t have usually people offering opinions on the local 6:00 news, and there aren’t pundits on the old network evening news, the ABC News, NBC News, and CBS News. But cable, with18 hours of programming every day … there isn’t enough news to fill, so they talk about the news. There are lots and lots of pundits on cable. So I think we associate punditry and pundits with cable news just because there are more of them, but they didn’t start there.

Darragh Worland:

How would you define Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity? Where do they fall in the spectrum of those different roles that we talked about?

Tom Rosenstiel:

Well, they are pundits and they are talk show hosts. In my mind, they are not journalists. They don’t do reporting. Sometimes they claim that they are, but they’re people with a point of view. In Hannity’s case, pundits often are supposed to be independent. They can offer their opinion, but they’re supposed to be intellectually independent. Their views are their own, they’re not on the team. They’re not secretly working behind the scenes advising the president or the mayor. Sean Hannity crossed that line. When Trump was president – and he was quite open about it – he would advise and call the president and tell him what to say and give him advice and invite him on his show.

Rachel Maddow is a slightly different case in that she is pretty much still just a talk show host who shares her opinions. She pretends to be a journalist by interviewing people and she will even anchor coverage on MSNBC, but I find that a blurry role. It’s a little hard to think of somebody as being a journalist who is independently observing events and providing facts, but then at 8:00 at night, they go on their show and tell you what to think.

Darragh Worland:

She’s still not an opinion journalist.

Tom Rosenstiel:

Well, she’s an opinion journalist. Look, if you’re on TV and you are offering your opinion and you’re working for a news organization, you are an opinion journalist on cable. It’s a slightly different thing. “Opinion journalism” is a term that comes from another era when you had magazines that would come out once a week or once a month, and they would offer analysis and interpretation of events, but they weren’t covering those events.

So the terms have gotten blurry partly because we have such rapid opinion now. It’s opinion all day long everywhere, but the original definition of opinion journalism usually came out of journals that were slower, that were offering opinion a day or a week or even a month after the event. Then newspapers came along and started offering some opinion, but it wasn’t instantaneous. Now on cable and on the internet, you have people offering their opinion within seconds of an event occurring.

Darragh Worland:

Is there a process or some ethical guidelines that governed opinion journalism? I’m calling it “opinion journalism,” but it sounds to me like “opinion” and “opinion journalism” are two different things.

Tom Rosenstiel:

So this is an interesting discussion of language. I would say that “opinion” is a big circle, and there’s a small circle inside it, a subset of opinion that I would call “opinion journalism.” What’s opinion journalism? At least by my definition, it would mean that I went out, I checked my facts, I interviewed some people to further inform. If I had questions or things I was unsure of, I researched them and, as you say, I built a case. Even if it’s only a few hours because I’m writing for a publication and my deadline is tomorrow or even tonight, that’s probably in that zone of “opinion journalism.” It’s fact checked. I’m building a case. I’m making an argument.

“Opinion” is just a much wider circle of things, and it includes, by the way, probably in the biggest definition or that biggest version of the opinion circle things that I share on Twitter or Facebook, and I say, “I think this sucks,” or, “I love this.” That’s an opinion, but it ain’t journalism.

Darragh Worland:

I was going to ask if a tweet would fall in there because there’s a lot of that happening these days.

Tom Rosenstiel:

I often think in these, “What’s a category and is this inside this category? Is it a subset of this category?” is to be able to make distinctions, “What’s inside the circle of what we would call opinion journalism?”

Darragh Worland:

I think these distinctions are not so clear to news consumers, to media consumers overall.

Certainly, “opinion” and “news” are not being parsed in a lot of people’s minds. I think part of that is absolutely on the part of consumers who don’t know these distinctions, and a lot of people have not been taught – why would they be? – what an op-ed is versus an editorial. A lot of people, I think, wonder, “Why does a newspaper, newspaper need an editorial board? Why do they need to have an opinion?”

Tom Rosenstiel:

The origins of that, without getting too super specific … we’re talking about newspapers because that’s what we had for a long time, for a couple hundred years. There wasn’t radio and other platforms.

The owners of these papers said, “Well, okay. We have the section where there’s news, and the purpose of news is to inspire conversation, to inspire people to consider public life, to consider their community.” It’s natural that they’d want to talk about that, what do we make or what do we think about the news. So you have a section of the paper that evolves where the newspaper says, “Here’s what we think. We’ve read many stories, we’ve talked to our reporters, we’ve considered this, and we have a group of people, and all they do is think about the news and they know a lot of things, and that’s going to be our considered opinion,” and those editorials were there to further inspire public consideration.

in 1980, the first cable news channel came along. That was CNN, and they mostly did news all day long, and the idea was whatever’s happening in the world, it’s breaking news. You can tune into CNN and hear about it. They had lots of bureaus and lots of reporters, and they didn’t do very much opinion.

Then in 1996, two other cable channels came along, FOX and MSNBC, and they didn’t have so many reporters. CNN was already there, and what they were trying to figure out was, “How can we get people to watch at the end of the day during primetime?” and they moved toward opinion. So they begin to have opinion shows at night instead of news shows. That evolved, and cable became much more about opinion than it had been in its first 20 years.

Darragh Worland:

So was that ultimately driven by a desire for ratings, a race between those three cable channels for ratings?

Tom Rosenstiel:

It was actually driven, and I could get a little technical here, it was actually driven by trying to create consistent ratings because in those early years – the first years of cable news when it was just CNN – their ratings would go up and down dramatically depending on the news. There were charts at CNN that showed the Challenger explosion and millions of people watching. Then a week later, the ratings had plummeted back down to their baseline of about 300,000 people. Then we went to war in Iraq, and CNN was covering it live, and nobody had ever seen what looked like war live before, and their ratings went into the millions. That was the first 16 years of cable, up and down and up and down.

When FOX came along in 1996, we already had seen the rise of conservative talk radio. These were DJs, talk radio hosts who were on during the day when people were driving around, and they had huge audiences. With the benefit of that hindsight, the people who started FOX – and the main guy was a man named Roger Ailes, who had been a political consultant, Republican political consultant – he wanted to figure out, “How can I put talk radio on TV at night and have the consistent high ratings that the talk radio hosts have during the day when people are driving around in their cars?”

Sean Hannity was a talk radio host in Atlanta, and he put him on TV – good-looking guy, and baboom. So cable moved towards opinion during the evening both because you could have what they call “appointment viewing,” which is I can predict how many people are going to show up every night, night after night because they just like Sean or they just like Rachel, and that’s how they spend their evening, much more predictable than the up and down of news.

Then the other thing that happened was the Internet right around the same time. They don’t have to go to cable to see what’s breaking news. They can go onto their computer and get it even more reliably because they can search for it as opposed to having to wait around for CNN to turn to the topic that they were curious about. So the other thing that drove cable news toward more opinion was the internet being a place where people could get breaking news at their fingertips. Now, what happened to the Internet? Social media happened and the Internet became a platform for more opinion as a result.

Darragh Worland:

So earlier, I don’t think I gave you a chance to answer this question, but we were about to get into the question of ethics in opinion journalism. What’s to stop an opinion writer or a pundit from making a bunch of unsupported assertions that are not backed up by any facts? Is there anything governing opinion journalism, any ethics such as there are in news?

Tom Rosenstiel:

Well, that’s a great question. First of all, these things differ by country because we have a First Amendment in the United States, and we’ve interpreted that to mean that there are no regulations over news, over journalism in general. Whereas in some countries, journalists are licensed, and if they do something that violates the code of the licensing organization, which is usually a journalistic union, they can be tossed out, they can lose their license.

Darragh Worland:

They’re licensed like doctors or lawyers, basically.

Tom Rosenstiel:

Exactly. Exactly. We don’t have that in this country because we esteem freedom of speech in a different way and in a higher level. So the way that journalism has governed itself is through a peer review, where people like me and you talk about these things and say, “Well, that’s really bad, and they got those facts wrong,” and that influences the rules that govern different employers. The worst thing you can do in news is to make something up. It’s a fireable offense. It’s the only thing that is a bright black and white line.

Darragh Worland:

You’re talking about news, on the news side of things, just to be 100% clear.

Tom Rosenstiel:

Yes, on the news side, and there are lots of examples of reporters for whether [it’s] magazines or newspapers or radio stations, if they’ve invented something, they’ve been fired. Now, that would have been true if they worked in opinion in the same organizations, but as we’ve been talking about, now there is opinion happening in these new places like cable news and internet publications and who’s a journalist and who isn’t. Is FOX opinion all the time or is it sometimes news and then certain shows during the day? These lines have gotten much, much blurrier and once those lines shift somewhere, they begin to shift in other places.

Darragh Worland:

Also, today, if news organization fires you and you have a big enough audience, you can go and create your own outlet elsewhere. You can set up your own website. You can create a channel on a platform that may not regulate you and can’t fire you.

Tom Rosenstiel:

It’s not clear at this point whether you can be that successful doing that. There have been various people who have been fired by FOX, including their most popular hosts. Now, we’re going to have to see this with Tucker Carlson. Can Tucker Carlson have the same three million people following him if he leaves FOX and starts a show on Twitter or somewhere else as he had on FOX? Up to this point, none of the people who left their conventional outlets have been able to reproduce a similar audience elsewhere, whether you’re Keith Olbermann, who left MSNBC or whether you are Tucker Carlson or [Glenn] Beck, who was a top-rated FOX host and left the network when he became too extreme.

Darragh Worland:

Do you think that’s because the peer review system is working?

Tom Rosenstiel:

To some extent. For that peer review system to work today, it has to influence the audience. [It has to] be shocked or disturbed or otherwise affected by the judgment of the tribe as it were. And to some extent, it’s just the convenience of the fact that people have the habit of turning on a channel, and whoever’s on at 9:00 in that channel is actually bigger than any one individual.

That’s true of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. We’re still in a world where journalistic institutions are bigger than individuals. We live in a world of what they call Substack. I could if I wanted to start my own column and offer it to people, and there are people who make a living doing that, but not many. There are lots of Substacks, but not too many people make a living on Substack, and those who do don’t make the kind of living that they could if they were being paid by FOX or MSNBC or CBS.

Darragh Worland:

I want to go back to some more basic questions. Do most news organizations do a good enough job distinguishing news from opinion for their news consumers?

Tom Rosenstiel:

Yeah. Now, you’ve touched on something really big. The news industry does not do a very good job of distinguishing news from opinion, and there’s a couple of different reasons. One is that we thought that the old platform would make those distinctions for us. This is on the editorial page, this is on the opinion page, and this is on the news page. Well, okay, now, we’re putting our content on the Internet, and those distinctions are harder to see. Even if I’ve got them on my website, they’re still harder to see because once I’m in a piece of content, how much has that been labeled opinion inside the content?

We didn’t catch up to that right away, and a lot of publications didn’t do a very good job of labeling online. Uh-oh. Now, our content’s being shared in social media, and I’m in my personal stream and I’m seeing my friend’s grandparents’ pictures, and then I’m seeing a piece of news content, and then I’m seeing … I don’t know what I’m seeing. The research shows that what I’m most likely to recognize is who shared it, not who produced it. So I may not even be that aware of what publication this is from.

So there was a movement about four or five years ago where publications said, “Wow, you can’t just put this on your website with a label. You need to put that label right in the headline of the content so it says, ‘Opinion: Joe Blow thinks this.'” Otherwise, it’s going to show up in somebody’s Twitter thread and it’s not going to be labeled. So that’s one problem, and that’s, I would call that “platform creep.”

Another problem is an “intellectual creep” that happens where the people themselves are not that clear on what they’re doing. I’m the host of a cable program and I watch a news event, and then they come to me on camera and suddenly I’m a moderator who’s not being very moderate. I’m talking to my audience like I’m sitting in a bar, not like I’m sitting in a news studio, and I’m offering my opinion and I’m going way past where I would if this had been written down on the teleprompter.

Sometimes people love it and the ratings go up and they say, “Hey, Tom, do that more.” That actually happened to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, where he flipped his lid one day and the ratings went up. So there’s an intellectual sloppiness. That’s the second problem. So the first problem is this platform creep, where we labeled things in newspapers, and then they started to gravitate onto other platforms and they weren’t well-labeled. The other is we haven’t defined these terms very well in our own minds, and we get sloppy in our behavior.

It even happens in news stories, where someone will write and they’re being analytical and it’s going on the front page and, whoa, all of a sudden I put a phrase into a story that is just what I think, and I’ve gussied it up to make it seem like everybody knows this is a fact when it’s really just my opinion.

Darragh Worland:

The editors aren’t catching that. Even the editors are not showing the discipline to dial back on that.

Tom Rosenstiel:

Right, and that’s a kind of sloppiness. They don’t mean it to happen, but they didn’t catch it.

Darragh Worland:

Why is this happening?

Tom Rosenstiel:

I’ve talked to lots of people about this over the years. What newspapers used to do before cable, suddenly they needed to be more interpretive because people knew things right away. The stories that were running in tomorrow’s newspaper weren’t the first version that people were seeing. So they said, “Well, we need to make our stories somewhat more interpretive to be helpful to people because they’re reading them hours after the event and they’ve already got some facts.” The slope was starting to get a little slippery there.

The New York Times, in the early 1960s, when I was a little kid decided to create something called the “News Analysis,” and they labeled a story “News Analysis,” but there were very strict rules for what could be labeled “News Analysis.” You had to have interviewed a certain number of people. They had to have offered their opinion. You could then describe their opinion and make it clear that this is the way that experts were beginning to see things, and that was a “News Analysis.”

Well, they jettisoned that label many years ago because almost every story would have that level of interpretation today, and people are writing so quickly, it’s not clear they could meet the test of how many experts they had talked to.

Darragh Worland:

So you would say that almost every story coming out of The New York Times is now “news analysis,” but it’s not labeled as such?

Tom Rosenstiel:

Not every story. Let’s keep it to the zone of national news because it’s easier to imagine that because there’s so many people covering national news. If you’re writing about the city council in a meeting where there were 12 people, you’re pretty confident that you’re the first source for people the next day or that night. But if you’re writing about what President Biden said today, there’s a lot of that already out there. So there’s more pressure on you to provide extra value to come up with something distinctive that other stories didn’t have. You can’t just report for tomorrow’s newspaper the things that people read four hours ago. There’s more pressure on you to be more interpretive, to slide closer to opinion the more journalists there are surrounding that story.

Darragh Worland:

So is this one of the reasons why publications like The New York Times get labeled? Is it because this “News Analysis” is showing a bias that people are interpreting one particular way?

Tom Rosenstiel:

Yes, in part. I would say the reason that publications get labeled, there are probably three big reasons. One, if you are a national publication, the market that you’re looking for to have a big audience is a pretty small share of the American public. If you’re FOX News and you want to have three million people, which is their most popular show, you’re talking about 1% of the American public, 1% of 300 million people. It’s not a large percentage.

So you can do well appealing to a subgroup. And then there’s another pressure. Publications tend to reflect their market through osmosis. Today with digital audience engagement data, they know which stories do well, and you just naturally lean towards repeating the things that you know did well the day before, the week before, the month before.

So there’s a gravitational pull for the audience you already have in national media. That’s why you see, I think, that poll happening at The New York Times, at MSNBC, at FOX, even CNN, which imagines that it likes to go down the middle, but it actually has done better recently in ratings when it leaned one way.

If you are a local TV news station, the market pressures are really different. You need 20% [or] 30% share of your market to do well, and there are penalties for leaning.

The other thing is we live in a world now where there’s so much partisan media that it doesn’t stand out the way it once did. So people are more likely to see bias in media than they were when I was young. We had three TV stations that did news – ABC, CBS, and NBC. They were extremely careful. There was something called the “Fairness Doctrine,” and there was another rule called the “Equal Time Rule.” If a TV network didn’t go right down the middle, they would have their license challenged. Well, those rules have been eliminated. They began to eliminate them during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. So it’s allowable now in electronic and broadcast media and on the Internet to be one-sided in a way that it was not for the first 40 years of electronic media.

Darragh Worland:

So speaking of partisan media, what distinguishes “opinion journalism” from “partisan media?”

Tom Rosenstiel:

That’s a great question. For me, that’s something I’ve thought a lot about. The difference between “opinion journalism” and “partisan media” is that you are not on the team, that “opinion journalism” is “I am who I am. I have my own personal politics, they’re idiosyncratic. Sometimes I like this politician, sometimes I don’t like this politician, but my goal here is to help you, Darragh, think about this issue, not to promote my team, not to help my team win.” “Partisan media” is designed to persuade you to like my team.

Darragh Worland:

Right. Well, that’s interesting. You mentioned Sean Hannity and his advising President Trump when Trump was in office while he was working at FOX and literally playing on the team that he’s rooting for.

Tom Rosenstiel:

In the lawsuit against FOX, the Dominion lawsuit against FOX News, lots of emails were produced as part of what they call the discovery, the legal discovery phase of the lawsuit. Those emails showed that lots of people at FOX, including Rupert Murdoch, were trying to figure out which candidate should they promote in the next election to try and be the Republican nominee. That is, to most journalists, even to most journalists who work in “opinion journalism” in that traditional way, that was shocking, and there was no pretense of them being independent. They were not only on the team, they were trying to figure out who was going to be the captain of the team.

Darragh Worland:

It sounds like the current season of Succession right there.

Tom Rosenstiel:

Yes, it does.

Darragh Worland:

Can news, even if you’re aspiring to the highest standards, can it truly be objective or neutral and entirely free of bias or opinion if those producing it are human and therefore subject to their own filters through which they interpret events, facts, their own reporting?

Before you answer, I just want to acknowledge that I know this term “objectivity” has been replaced by many in the news industry recently by this term “neutrality.” I know that you’ve suggested that this isn’t necessarily an improvement on the term “objectivity,” and that it’s based on a misunderstanding of what was originally intended by “objectivity,” but can you unpack that and can news truly be objective or neutral?

Tom Rosenstiel:

So the term “objectivity” came out of social science, came out of the German Academy at the end of the 19th century, and it was an attempt not to suggest that people didn’t have personal biases, but it was trying to figure out through method, is there a way to overcome your personal biases in the production of research or the production of information? We use the scientific method in hard science to know that the experiment was done and can be trusted.

So what they were trying to do in social science was can we adopt that mentality and figure out methods, statistical testing, and ways of interviewing people where you’re minimizing your personal influence? That was the original in intention. So “objectivity” as it was in journalism didn’t mean “neutrality.” It meant an objective method, a process.

Particularly with young journalists, they’re often told, “Keep yourself out of it. This is just your opinion. Get that opinion out of the story,” But they’re really not taught method very well. They’re mostly taught a style. So journalists are to blame for this confusion because they have been confused themselves.

Now, we’re at a point where people say, everybody says, “Well, objectivity is a myth. It’s impossible. No one’s objective. So that’s ridiculous. So let’s abandon this notion and let’s just be ourselves and say what we think.” Well, that’s contributed, I think, to the confusion between “opinion” and “news.” If you think of objectivity as a process, “How did I gather this? Can you show me how you gather this? Can I trust this method that you’ve used?” Then that, I think, particularly for journalists who’ve been at it a while, that’s really what they are trying to do.

Go cover the story and you haven’t decided what you think about it before you start. Go cover it, find out what happened, dig into it, do a thorough job of reporting, and then come back and we’ll write the story. A better term, a term I like to use is “open-minded inquiry” because the “inquiry” means you’re actually trying to find things out, and “open-minded” means you haven’t decided what to think before you began. That really, I think, is the goal of journalistic inquiry. If we got rid of the term “objectivity” all together, we would help ourselves.

So I think we need to abandon this notion that the press should be neutral, but it actually can be objective if we think of “objectivity” as a process of gathering, but let’s call it “open-minded inquiry” and get beyond the language that is confusing us and not helping us.

Darragh Worland:

Is “open-minded inquiry,” is that something that can also be applied to opinion journalism?

Tom Rosenstiel:

Yeah, absolutely. Look, first of all, it can be applied to all kinds of journalism. The highest compliment that you can give a journalist would be to say to the author of a book or a long magazine piece, “I really loved your piece. I disagreed with your conclusions,” because it means that, “I trusted your reporting. I learned something from it, and I understood when you moved from reporting, which I trusted, to your own conclusions. You were transparent about that.” There are lots of different ways to do that, to signal to the reader, “Okay. Now, I’m going to tell you what I think about this.”

Darragh Worland:

Rosenstiel covered a lot of ground, but here’s a simple tip to help you separate news from opinion: First, determine the primary purpose of the information. “News” aims to inform with fair and accurate reporting, conducted through open-minded inquiry. “Opinion” seeks to persuade you to adopt a specific perspective about a subject using fact-based information.

Is that a fact? is a production of the News Literacy Project, a non-partisan education nonprofit building a national movement to create a more news-literate America. I’m your host, Darragh Worland. Our producer is Mike Webb, our editor is Timothy Cramer, and our theme music is by Eryn Busch. To learn more about the News Literacy Project, go to newslit.org.