The Ideal Journalist: Opinion Warrior or Conveyor of Facts?

Originally published 21 January. Transferred from another blog provider. Some changes due to better WordPress formatting capabilities.

Ironically, this post is an essay. Perhaps months will go by during which I will be ever more astonished by the naïvity of this opinion. But that’s okay. I constantly reckon with the role of the journalist.

In this information age, vile opinions can rapidly amplify and spread by social contagion. Under any polity, whether a totalitarian oligarchy or liberal democracy, cultivating informed, ethical judgements in ordinary masses is critical to the society’s development. Information is the basis motivating our judgements and actions. For tyrants, the ideal organisation of informational power is one in which they can manipulate public opinion at their fingertips squarely to their advantage. It is easy to point to blatant abuses of informational power. Yet there is far less consensus on the ideal functioning of the press in optimally cultivating informed judgements. How should we engage with journalistic content? How should journalists produce content?

One fundamental question is the mixing of fact and opinion, or “neutrality” more colloquially. We should first distinguish this from the plethora of Trumpian senses of “fake news” (far from being limited to just him, or even ethnopopulists in general; but Trump’s rhetoric has conveniently embodied all these senses, useful for disambiguation). One day, it can mean that the prominence of certain topics on the press’s agenda does not conform to his wishes. Then, he might tweet on some other occasion “fake news” to mean that what editors consider as relevant facts to put into particular pieces do not conform to his wishes. (Agenda prioritisation and individual framing can be a separate blog post for future.) On other occasions he goes rogue, flat-out disagreeing on obvious statements of fact, e.g. contending that an election had been “stolen”. These notions are not the subject of this article. Rather, opinion refers to statements that directly implicate on the audience’s attitudes — judgement on something’s merits, or on actions that should be taken. Facts refer to substantiated empirical observations.

Comment is free, but facts are sacred.

CP Scott, 1921

Thus, pieces that seek to purely convey facts would result in formulations such as,

• ‘Ukraine suspended its so-called “anti-terrorist operation” after the accord.’ (CBC, 2014)
• “Israeli forces have dropped leaflets in the southern Gaza Strip […]” (Al Jazeera, 2024)

And they would avoid formulations such as “the ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation)” or “the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces)”, even if the author agrees personally with the sentiments espoused by them. For example, even though the editors of the Arabic editions of Wikipedia or Al Jazeera likely see the overall conduct of the Israeli army as despicable and illegitimate, the colloquially much-used term قوات الاحتلال الإسرائيلي (“Israeli Occupation Forces”) is avoided in preference for الجيش الإسرائيلي (“Israeli Army”).

The genre of informative journalism is generally also taken to include descriptions of peoples’ opinions in an objective manner. For instance, such a piece on debates since January 2024 to ban the German AfD Party might include the following interpretations and contextual facts (quotes constructed by me):

• “AfD members, including the party’s parliamentary leader in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, and a federal MP, were revealed by the investigative journalism group CORRECTIV to have held a meeting with right-wing extremists, where they discussed deporting millions of people from Germany, regardless of their German citizenship status.”
• “There have since been dozens of mass street demonstrations urging the party’s ban. The largest was in Hamburg, whose organisers reported 160,000 participants.”
• “The Bavarian lawyer Chan-jo Jun supports the call to initiate proceedings before the Constitutional Court to ban the AfD in accordance with provisions in the constitution, added after WW2 with the concept of the wehrhafte Demokratie (‘militant democracy’) in mind, that aimed to remedy tangible threats to the fdGO (‘liberal democratic basic order’).”
• “In the history of the Federal Republic, two parties have been banned: The SRP (successor to NSDAP) in 1952, and the KPD (Communist Party) in 1956. A prominent case in recent years is the NPD Party, whose requested ban was declined by the Constitutional Court in 2017 as the court ruled that notwithstanding the anti-constitutionality of the party’s goals, there was no tangible risk of the fringe party to have an opportunity for execution. As current polls indicate the AfD as the second-most popular party, the argument of insufficient risk is no longer widely used by opponents to the ban.”
• “Some opponents to a ban insist that any proceeding is likely to outlast this year’s state election cycles, and that it will not bring results in the short-term.”

On the other hand, there is the view that the primary role of the journalist is to directly cultivate opinions. Before the allied occupation during which journalistic principles were majorly reformed, there was less regard in Germany for non-opinion journalism, in part probably motivated by the understanding of press freedom according to the political construct Meinungsfreiheit (“freedom of opinion”), rather than the freedom of information dissemination as was in the Anglo-American tradition. Indeed, even into the Weimar Republic, these concepts were still termed collectively as “Meinungsfreiheit” in the constitution. Many journalists viewed restraint in expressing opinions as an unnecessary forfeiting of their freedom. The few non-opinionated forum-like publications such as Berliner Tageblatt had too low of a circulation to make substantial societal impact. Similar sentiments exist in the modern day. For instance, there was online outrage aimed at a New York Times article titled Israeli Women Fight on Front Line in Gaza, a First, which reported on the effects of the war since 7 October on gender dynamics:

.@nytimes
trying to spin the genocide as ‘girl power’. You think we’ll forget this stuff but we won’t. We will always remember that whilst Palestinians were being murdered in their tens of thousands, you ran puff pieces for their murderers.

@TadhgHickey on Twitter (officially “X”)

Here, the critic sees no value in the journalist acting as a conveyor of facts over explicitly directing maximal mobilisation against Israel in their pieces. Indeed, the article gives some context by mentioning “the intelligence and military failures of Oct. 7”, “global scrutiny of the campaign’s high civilian death toll”, and “More than 24,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, have been killed since the start of the war, according to Gaza health officials.” But in the critic’s eyes, the piece is an effort to legitimise Israel’s brutal war on Gaza because the piece makes no criticism of the Israeli state. This much resembles the aforementioned Weimar-era understanding of professional journalistic work as ardent activism. It is the view that the audience should be explicitly told what opinions they should derive from the story.

Implications and Merits

I don’t question the efficiency of sometimes promoting opinions one considers merited, in cultivating informed, ethical judgements. But I think — like the occupation authorities in post-war Germany despised — that an overemphasis on this type of journalistic engagement would not be optimal for the goal of cultivating informed, ethical judgements, for it limits useful observations on a given topic to the imagination of the author, makes audiences prone to ideological zeal, and reduces the reach of journalistic content.

The first point — that the (good) opinions of the author are so central and must be constantly repeated. To me this is illogical. One might idealise the opinion landscape as one in which, given the “perfect” opinions, people would simply latch on to them for the issues they’re interested in; that this is the informational precondition to optimal societal progress. But this assumes the worth of judgements derived from a set of facts to be objective across people. If this is true, then the “opinion warrior” approach would be perfectly reasonable. But on any given issue, the personal implications and potential positive action pathways differ across people. Therefore it is impossible to devise a concise set of opinions that is broadly of high relevance. I think that to insist on relentlessly reiterating one’s opinions embodies an unjustified sense of superiority against the capability of ordinary people to make further useful judgements via critical thinking. It hampers thinking outside the box.

Secondly, it is fact that no one is infallible. A preponderance of regard for opinion based on reputation and charisma is at best unnuanced, at worst extremely dangerous.

Lastly, relentless assertion of opinion is also psychologically inapt. Without commentary, people of opposing opinions would not find the pieces as repugnant. If the proponent of an opinion genuinely believes in it, then it is counterproductive to attempt forcing the opinion up opponents’ throats at every opportunity without allowing for the possibility of higher voluntary engagement. This results in a highly secluded, servile readership. The publication then becomes mere entertainment. (Those two last sentences are perhaps arrogant. I shall learn more about journalism in future.)