Am I the only person who gets tired of straight up hard news? I mean please don’t get me wrong, it’s important, it’s crucial to the spread of information – but my God sometimes I get so tired of writing it…and reading it. The same is true for watching CNN, you know the news castor voice? Where everything sounds the same, with that token pause and the exact same rhythm so the audience can pay attention…does anyone else tire of that?
Maybe it is because I’m 21 years old, a college student and so not into politics, but hard news sometimes gives me a major case of the yawns. The way the headlines are written, the way everything is so violently structured, call me a crazed individualist but I like people to recognize my writing when it is placed next to the work of any other Tom, Dick or Sally. I want people to pick something up and say “There goes that crazy Heather again.”
I think that often time’s people confuse journalism with hard news…sorry pals but there are journalists out there who don’t necessarily aspire to write for The Times or The Post or the Herald. I often think that opinion pieces are underrated when it comes to their intellectual value.
I am certainly not saying that the entire layout of papers and websites should be changed to highlight opinion pieces rather than news, I’m not crazy – I’m just saying lets give opinion pieces the credit they deserve. They are viable works of literature and have absolute value when it comes to seeking the truth. Opinions are great things, they make people passionate and involved and motivated.
If I didn’t have some of the opinions that I’ve got I would say I would be half as good a person and less than half as good a writer. My opinions give me fire, they make me ask the questions that lead to the articles that are important. I mean, granted, if I write an piece that is riddled with my personal bias then okay it should appear under the big bold easily read letters of OPINION. But sometimes I think that people get down on opinion writers for being less journalistically inclined than hard core news gatherers.
I beg to differ.
I mean what makes people interested in those headline news articles so many people want to so drily write? Can’t it be argued that someone’s opinion is what eventually leads them to pick up a newspaper and see what’s inside? We read about George Bush because we want to see either a) what is that good for nothing son of a bitch doing to screw the country this time? or b) what is that prime example of a human being doing to protect and defend our United States…and anything between the two. People read the news so they can form opinions of their own, so how can people look down their noses at people that have the courage to write what their opinions actually are?
Journalism is not just one thing, it isn’t just news. It is news, and entertainment, and opinion, and sports and strange pieces that appear in magazines and newsletters everywhere. Journalism is communicating something you think is important to a large group of people. It is not an upside down pyramid with quotes, facts and names thrown in only where the most calculated of journalistic equations require them. An opinion piece is just as much journalism as a hardcore front cover news piece. A documentary is just as much journalism as a serious clip fro CNN. The point is they are just different genres of journalism, none more important than the others, just all of them working together to get to the truth.
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