The thin red line between News and Opinion

There is an interesting column in the New York Times by Daniel Okrent titled - "A Few Points Along the Line Between News and Opinion".

The columnist chiefly talks about how some readers "...believe the news pages are the designated disseminator of views passed down from the Olympus that is the editorial page....".

He denies that "the sheer forcefulness of the editorial page's voice, which in recent years has been so assertively left, and which some people unfamiliar with The Times's operations want to believe is the source of the news staff's daily marching orders."

He explains away the way in which different departments and department heads work in the The Times and how they try to keep news and opinion seperate.

But whats interesting is that he attributes feelings of bias in the readers mind to their inability to distinguish between news sections and opinion sections. And for that he blames the way in which newspapers arrange each section and the names they give each one and also the look and feel of each section.

Actually, this opinion piece reminded me of our very own news papers and media in India. Though freedom of the Press is guaranteed in the contitution, I have not found one worthy investigative news in the papers or the media in a very long time, perhaps ever.

Its only recently that we have seen sting operations by the media starting up, like the Tehelka case and now the India TV case. Even these have bordered on questionable journalistic practices and have fallen prey to accusations of political bias.

Added to this, even the mundane daily news stories that hold forth the front pages, smack of political tilts. I have always felt, for example, that the major south Indian newspaper The Hindu, has always had leftist leanings. Moreover I have found their news reports laced with politically tilted lexicon that any casual reader would fail to distinguish as opinion and would consume as news.

I also recall a funny story where one of my friends uncle wrote to the newspaper's editor questioning the journalistic practice of the paper and suggested that if the paper persisted with its present style, it should atleast have the coutesy to rename itself to "The M.u.s.l.i.m" !!

But on a serious note, we dont seem to be very much bothered by the bias expressed by major news papers and media. And I am not sure why.

Take for example the major TV news channels in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. They are politically run and they dont even attempt to couch news with a political tilt. Instead its the other way round, they couch political tilt with some news !! In this case even for a casual viewer, the bias hits you in the face. But we just shrug it off as expected.

There are only two ways to explain away this behaviour - One, we are able to intelligently distinguish between news and news laced with political tilt or two, the society is so polarized that we practically enjoy news laced with political tilt.