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Originally Posted by Lenny  I don't know so much about being able to discern between opinion and fact in the papers (to me, if it's an editorial then it's opinion, and the rest of the paper is fact), but online a lot of people can take things very wrongly. |
Lenny... this is where a discussion we had earlier about literary criticism comes in handy, I think. One of the aspects of such criticism is to detect ways the text manipulates one's response to a thing. Just as an actor putting stress on different words in different readings of the same line can entirely change the meaning of that line, so can the subtlest of alterations in phrasing alter how a person perceives what is being purveyed. Sometimes this is an unconscious bias, sometimes quite deliberate. But the bias is always there. And in the media -- especially when it comes to news reporting -- it is so pervasive that one really has to sift through the way something is reported as well as the "facts" reported, to avoid being influenced by it in either overt or subtle ways. The editorials are seldom any more biased or opinion-based than the actual "reportage" -- they are just more openly so.