Does Opinion Have A Point?

Writing Life

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a piece on opinions and op-eds — part of some reflecting I’ve been doing on journalism history. At the partner site

Inner Life

,

Joshua Doležal

has a very thoughtful piece on the “Profzi Scheme”-ishness of digital education.

Best,

Sam

DOES OPINION HAVE A POINT?

What is an opinion?

You know the joke about opinions; I don’t need to repeat it here. 

An ex of mine claims that opinions have a “rubbery chew” to them.

More and more of media is drifting in the direction of opinion — that’s been the trend of, let’s say, the last 50 years and it seems only to be accelerating. Social media is basically all opinion — just a 24/7 barrage of opinion. The staid anchors of old-time network tv (and their kabuki exercises in expressing how they really felt through a flicker of an eyebrow, an intonation of their voice, while remaining studiously neutral in everything they said) were replaced by the excitable hosts of cable and then by what my high school teachers called ‘the bloviators’ who ranted and raved somewhere on the polar axis between FOX and MSNBC. In the digital era, publications proudly own their ‘slant’ and a new style has developed that is avowedly first-person, without the careful circumspection of the inverted pyramid and of news ‘objectivity.’

Usually this is understood as a negative, and there is much to deplore about it. Instead of the dignified sensibility of old news — the detachment that to some extent is needed to report out any story; the elegantly balanced prose — media feels increasingly like some dysfunctional family gathering, with everybody shouting over one another, with less and less consideration of ‘facts.’ 

There are three different ways to understand what an ‘opinion’ is in the journalistic sense. 

• One is that an opinion is basically a sort of policy statement. In this framing, an opinion is closer to a press release; and journalism closer to politics. An op-ed isn’t so much meant to be read as to convey a stance. An ‘editorial’ is inherently meant to do this. The leading opinion writers — I’m thinking of people like Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman — often seem to be writing for an audience of one, whispering their sage advice into the ears of the powerful. As a form it works similarly to the monologues of some of Shakespeare’s counselors — the readership has the  sense of being privy to the deliberations of great ones. (And many less prominent op-ed writers make use of similar devices.) I’m not saying it’s not an effective form — it can be; and can every so often have real-world impacts — but it tends to be a bit suck up-y to power and to be somewhat one-dimensional. Opinion shouldn’t just be some policy proposal that nobody is ever really going to look at. 

• Another approach to opinion-writing is that it is a form of persuasion. This is the gist of Zola’s “J’accuse,” which is still the most famous op-ed ever written, and the ethos underlying most opinion pieces. The idea here is that there is a public that needs to be guided and needs to have the right information on the critical issues of the day. Facts can be assembled, various arguments deployed, and, in the end, there is a certain call to action — the public encouraged to change its opinion on something or other and, as often as not, to change its behavior. (Most of Nicholas Kristof’s pieces, for instance, follow this format.) There’s something very Greco-Roman about this whole approach — the op-ed writer standing in the forum, haranguing the people, and then effecting the critical social change through the combination of cold reason and impassioned oratory.

  And there is something deeply satisfying about opinion in this form — it aligns with a vision of civic life that we learned early on in school — but I also recoil from it slightly. First of all, there is the inherent imbalance of the form. The speaker is doing the persuading, but ‘the public’ never quite gets the right of reply (except maybe in some testy letter-to-editor). And then there is the feeling that this isn’t actually how the world works, or how people make up their minds — that the exercise is largely performative, the call to action never really acted upon. Which is not to say that a great op-ed calling attention to some issue isn’t worthy — just that it goes against the grain of writing as an activity. No matter how wonderful or important the piece, the reader likely won’t spring to the internet to donate to a cause or enlist themselves in some movement; they’re likely to turn the page to the next person trying to persuade them of something even more important and worthier. 

• And then there is opinion as a form of expression, as a ‘thinking out loud.’ This is the approach that I prefer and which drives many of the pieces on this Substack. The ideas for these sorts of pieces tend to start out as a tickle — just some slight annoyance about the world as it is, some glancing observation about one’s own journey that may be of interest to others. Nicholson Baker says that a thought is about three feet tall, and that seems like the right proportion for an op-ed — an impish, intriguing idea that you want to share with other people. David Brooks, who really is a master of writing this way, claims (following a Christian parable) that a writer is a beggar telling another beggar where they found bread: something occurs to you that has been quietly helpful in understanding your own life or the world around you and you offer it up to readers, not as a call to action, not as a clinching argument, or even as advice, but simply sharing something of where you have gotten to on your journey for others who may be on parallel trajectories. 

For those who are uncomfortable with the proliferation of opinion in contemporary media (opinion largely taking over from reported work; subjectivity replacing the prized detachment of an earlier generation of journalists), thinking about opinion from this third perspective may be helpful. It doesn’t always have to be performative and it doesn’t always have to be right. It really can be as languorous and as natural as conversation, as thinking in print.