Educate Yourself

Who would you trust to give you the truth about your car? Your mechanic who gets paid on commission; or your neighbor who’s driven the same mint-condition Camaro every day since 1978?

Who would you trust to give you the truth about your financial plan? Your Fidelity advisor who knows you’ve been considering switching to Schwab; or a friend who works in the industry, warned you to be prepared, but never pimped his own service?

Who would you trust to give you the truth about the wars in the Middle East? Gen. Patraeus or a journalist?

The first two examples are obvious. It’s the one that has no vested interest in the outcome of spilling that truth. The third one is much grayer. You might think it the journalist, who has devoted his life towards a profession that espouses no biases. But you’re about to find out that oftentimes journalists do actually have a vested interest in the message of their writings.

I studied journalism in college and spent two years as a professional sports writer. I will reveal to you what interests journalists have invested, how to separate various news pieces, and why being able to recognize all this is important.

The first thing you need to know about me is that I am an American conservative. I say this because it’s the personal values of a journalist that have an ability to dictate how he writes his pieces. So as I define the topic, it’s vital to know the definition of the source.

In sports, it’s simple. This is what the score was, this was the star of the game, this was the turning point. However, say you’re trying to get a one-on-one interview with a star athlete. You may slant the story to be more favorable to the star in order to attract other stars to intimately interview with you, thus advancing your career.

This is not a big deal in your community; but in covering a metro beat, you may find yourself in a situation where your writing has consequences. For instance, say a convenience store gets robbed. You arrive at the scene and the police tell you they’ve taken a man into custody for questioning. You talk to the store clerk, he says the man was milling about in front of the store with a hat pulled low over his eyes, and he was black. Now say you covered a robbery before where the lookout got off scot-free and happened to be black – or maybe another race – it may slant how you write your piece about the one man taken in for questioning.

But maybe you’re trying to right a wrong in your community by presenting specific stories that fall in line with your views and arguments. A news story is not the proper channel to do that in.

A news story is generally written in an inverted pyramid style. The most important aspect of the story is written in the lead paragraph, followed by the next most important and so on. That way, the editor can lop off less important junk from the bottom to fit the page. News stories are like Dragnet, “Just the facts, ma’am.”

The style of journalism for telling stories with an agenda is an op-ed column. You tell the story but highlight certain aspects that point out your logic of thinking. “Of course the man standing outside the store during the robbery was the only man arrested. He’s black!” Pointing out the apparent racism involved. Ah, did you notice how I changed “taken in for questioning” to “arrested”? This phraseology can mislead a reader without ever letting him know what hit him.

A related piece is the lengthier investigative piece, exploring a topic in-depth like I’m doing now. While it may seem like they’re just elongated news pieces, be careful. The writer has your complete attention and can pick and choose what information he presents to you, and he can without certain information that you do not have access to. (The Los Angeles Times is doing this right now with an Obama/Ayers/Khalidi tape that directly links the three.) The shear fact that he has picked that topic to dive deep into says something about what he thinks is important.

The final style of writing is a straight up opinion piece. It is brazenly one-sided and allows the writer to tell you exactly what he is thinking and why.

Opinion pieces are written from a specific side of the spectrum, and you can tell how an opinion writer shifts his views by carefully following all his columns. But most opinion writers do not tell you where them come from. That’s something you have to figure out.

Writers’ opinions are usually just under the surface, but you have to read carefully to see them. Once you recognize a few from each side, you should be able to pick up new writers’ stances fairly quickly.

Never take opinion pieces as the gospel. The writers have taken in the facts, processed them, determined what’s important to them, and written their takes. There’s so much filtering involved, you’d be compelled to label yourself lazy if you decided to accept an opinion piece as your view without doing your homework.

Finally, recognize biases. This is why I took the time to tell you I am a conservative in the beginning. I’m about to argue against a leftist medium. You deserve to know where I come from. Look at MSNBC. The network has so blurred the lines between news and opinion that there is no way to watch it as a pure news source without having the same leftist lean. On the other hand, the news network I ascribe to, Fox News, has straight news programs followed by separate opinion hours that are labeled as such.

So remember, journalists oftentimes do have a vested interest in what they’re covering. It’s a big reason they do what they do for so little money, and it’s a big reason I exited the profession. You can tell the good ones from the poor ones by their ability to properly identify their writings as news, op-ed, or opinion. These are important to recognize because of a good writer’s ability to write his opinions in a news style, again misleading an ill-informed reader.

It was Mark Twain who warned us in the warmest of ways, “Get your facts straight, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”