One month after saying I was going to write more, here goes. This one has been in my head for a while, but I never could quite put words exactly to my idea. So this is a little more “stream of consciousness” than usual.
Something that I have never understood is people getting mad at a platform/publication for their “opinion” content. It seems to me that most people gloss over the word opinion in the very section in which they are clicking or the very article that they are reading.
I’m all for commenting on content posted by someone in a public forum. That is fair game and part of the whole shebang when you put your opinion out there. I’m all for criticizing a platform when that platform is being used for some illegal purpose. Publishing the opinion of someone you may disagree with is not, however, illegal.
I think that part of the complaint when a bad/disagreeable op-ed article gets posted by a reputable media organization is that the organization is platforming bad/disagreeable information. While I do agree that the objective of a news organization is to publish the news (hence “opinion” being its own distinct section), the lines between news and opinion are blurred in our current media landscape, anyway. If you aren’t able to distinguish that a given article is “news” or “opinion”, I would encourage you to not read that article.
We must, as a society, be able to read something and not just accept it wholesale. This is not the same as saying that you should wholesale distrust what you read. We should, however, be able to take a deep breath, ponder the information in front of us, weigh it against our current knowledge (which we are able to assess the strength of beforehand), and come to a conclusion. That conclusion may be that the current article is a farce!
There is this idea that part of having a holistic knowledge of a certain topic or situation is digesting information from “both sides”. I don’t expect everyone’s opinion to be the “mean” or “median” of the two sides. But we should, at the least, listen to the “other side”’s argument(s) if for nothing other than knowing what that “other side” represents as the opinion(s) they hold.
I know that this is where the conversation around “bias” usually begins, especially when discussing what is and is not, should and should not be published by a particular media organization or the media writ large. I have more to say on this (and this may be a topic for a future blog post), but for now I think it is a pretty intractable problem; I don’t think that there is a way to realistically cover every single news story, no matter how small or large (even “small” or “large” implies some level of bias, no?) in an unbiased manner.