What Turns Reporters On?

 

Has the focus of today's news reporting regressed or progressed?  Perhaps no one should know better than journalists. For those who equate news with an aggregation of fact, here is an interesting commentary from a former political speech writer turned opinion editor and columnist:

 

"Reporters, especially though not exclusively political reporters, are more interested in the meaning of facts than in the facts themselves.  They're concerned with interpretation rather than accuracy, with 'narrative' rather than detail, with explaining rather than disclosing, with who's happy or angry about a story rather than whether it's true, with what's likely to happen next week or next year rather than with what happened yesterday."  --Barton Swaim, columnist in a Wall Street Journal "Bookshelf" review of Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury.

 

PS--For more on the definition of news, see "What is news" on this web site.

                                                  -- Jeff Bogart