Long ago and far away, back when I was an eighth-grader at Horace Mann Elementary school in Bayonne, N.J., I was given an aptitude evaluation and tested high for “persuasion.” I don’t remember what methods they used to determine what our defining character traits were — traits that might indicate what lines of work we were best suited for. But I do remember that my own defining characteristic was this one, slightly poetic, word.
I was dubious. A few years later, when I was a student at Douglass College in New Brunswick, N.J., I trekked across town from the all-female campus to study history and philosophy with some of the acclaimed faculty of the broader Rutgers University. In a seminar with Houston Peterson, who published a collection of 50 essays on subjects from Samuel Johnson to Virginia Woolf in 1954, I got top grades but was warned that while I had done a fine job of explication I had failed to express my own opinions. Opinions? What did opinions have to do with it?, I wondered.
I learned.
And, as it turned out, the art of persuasion has indeed played a notable role in my career as a writer and editor here at The Star. At least when it comes to writing editorials over the years, arguing for affirmative changes or against positive evils. Whether or not anyone has taken what I have written to heart over the years, I can’t be faulted for trying. It’s in my nature.
It remains to be seen whether the average American citizen living today continues to make a distinction between persuasive editorial writing and news reporting. The distinctions have been thoroughly blurred by the cable news channels, many of which present a harangue of persuasive verbiage on the same footing as a sober-minded, as objective as possible news story founded on facts and solid sources.
This is true not just of Fox News (which has not once managed to persuade me of anything), and, say, some of the programming on MSNBC, which in my opinion does a far more responsible job of fact checking but still is less than responsible when it comes to marking a clear delineation between the two kinds of information sharing.
There ought to be disclaimers. Maybe it should be against the rules to use the word “news” if what you are serving the viewer is persuasion. Or maybe we need unmistakable visual flags of some sort, on these shows: “opinion” versus “news.”
Or maybe citizens would be better off focusing on newspapers for their news. Turning to actual journalists working at actual newspapers. It’s much easier to remain calm and determine which section you are reading when you are sitting in front of a newspaper with a cup of coffee and no one ranting at you red-faced.
But that’s just my opinion.