My world spun slightly out of orbit last week when The New York Times’s “Week in Review” was recast as the “Sunday Review.” Apparently succumbing to the influence of opinion-dominated cable TV, blogs and social media, the revamped section now devotes much more of its space to opinion journalism.
The old “Week in Review” mostly offered news analysis through the eyes of experienced journalists, adding a dollop of political cartoons to lighten the section’s heavy load of hard news. In the new “Sunday Review,” there’s what seems to be equal parts news analysis, opinion pieces, featured columnists and editorials. While Review does not suffer from social media superficiality, and the Times is careful to use the labels “opinion” and “analysis,” my colleagues at our Long Island public relations firm agree it’s another chink in the “church and state” wall dividing news and opinion.
Is it sacrilegious for the Times to so freely run commentary alongside news analysis? Should anyone care?
To be fair, some journalism professors noted that the NYT’s expansion of opinion journalism was much needed, as Americans are confronted with more news and need to make better sense of complex information. I disagree: I’m a great believer that we should be forced to think through our own opinions, making us better equipped to be active contributors to public discourse and advance solutions to some of the thornier problems.
More and more, it seems Americans don’t differentiate between impartially presented news and pointed opinion. Worse, many people don’t seem to care that they are forming their opinions based on someone else’s opinion, rather than a set of objectively presented facts. Combined that with the overall “dumbing down” of news, the thoroughly blurred lines between news and entertainment, and the reliance on social media for news, and we have a public that consumes plenty of information but may not be well informed.
Giving us some comfort that we are not just sliding down a slope to become sloppy-thinking-sloths is Columbia University’s dean of journalism who reports that the mix of opinion journalism compared to news in newspapers was even higher over a hundred years ago. Sounds a bit like back to the future.
While I won’t accuse the Times of anything more than being responsive to readers — promoting engagement rather than readership — the shift by CNN to more opinion and analysis to compete with MSNBC and Fox’s heavy dose of political opinion shows, was surely based on the reality of ratings.
The world will continue spinning on its orbit, even with these changes…I’ll adapt just as I did to ads on newspapers’ front pages. Bring back those Times political cartoons and all may be forgiven.