As Orin quoted below, the NPR ombudsman writes:
American newspapers traditionally and scrupulously segregate fact-based reporting from opinion by designating pages for each. Radio and television try to ensure that opinion remains secondary to reporting. Conclusions should be drawn warily. Bloggers tend not to care if they, and their readers conflate opinion and fact. It’s part of the appeal of the blogosphere. . . .
Can the MSM adopt any blog values to attract the younger audience? Or should we wait and see? Perhaps these younger people will outgrow these youthful informational indiscretions and come to their senses — and back to media that can serve them best . . . .
I would think that younger people (and older people) would prefer media that soundly analyzes what it’s writing about, rather than drawing unhelpful analogies. American newspapers theoretically segregate fact reporting from opinion (though not as well as I might like). But on the opinion pages, facts and opinions are indeed mixed, not so much “conflated” as integrated into pieces that analyze and comment on facts. And in many magazines (such as The New Republic or the Nation or the National Review), even more of the pages are opinion pages — analysis and commentary based on the facts but expressing the author’s opinion.
The proper analogy to many blogs is opinion magazines. We don’t purport to offer unopinionated fact reporting, any more than the Nation purports to offer unopinionated fact reporting. We try to get our facts straight, but our value to readers is precisely in the commentary (often opinionated) and not in the scrupulously objective uncovering of original facts. There are exceptions, but what I describe, I think, is the rule.
There is no “informational indiscretion” here, whether that phrase is used seriously or half-jokingly. Faulting us for not adhering to the standards — or perhaps the aspirations — of NPR simply betrays a misunderstanding of the medium. We don’t bill ourselves as an NPR, and our readers don’t expect it. Readers expect us to be analogous to the essays on NPR, or in other sources of opinion. And I think they get precisely what they expect.
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