Some have described different forms of news as neighborhoods. There's the hard news, the sports, the features and much more. These neighborhoods exist in different sizes with different properties with their own rules and standards, all within the larger city of journalism. Sitting among all of these communities is a slightly different neighborhood — opinion journalism.
I recently saw a LinkedIn post that newspapers should eliminate their opinion sections. It argued that they contribute to perceptions that many newspapers are biased, and opinions risk alienating certain partisan readers. Other discourse tells newspapers to stick to one neutral reporting, allowing readers to form ideas by themselves. Though excellent reporting should always be a newspaper's principal focus, that doesn't mean we should expunge opinion.
The omnipresence of social media and the internet offer separate spaces for people to opine, meaning there's no shortage of opinions to be found on the internet. So why would newspapers bother with opinion sections when we no longer live in an age where people have few options for authoritative viewpoints?
Opinion journalists have extensive experience in certain fields with deep, specific knowledge. Journalists are some of the most well-informed people in the world because that's our job — getting access to information. People ask why we should listen to The Washington Post Editorial Board's political endorsements, for example, forgetting that those people are incredibly educated and in tune with the happenings of the world around them.
Beyond bringing a unique knowledge to the table, opinion journalists also seek to inform just like news reporters, offering new insights on exhausted topics. Research shows that opinion journalism also enables the democratic process by facilitating civic debate and helping contextualize, analyze and explain the news in a way that traditional reporters don't have time to. Good opinion journalism is not random people spouting off irrelevant and ill-informed viewpoints.
The argument that opinion pieces blur the line of news and opinion ventures into a separate problem of media literacy. Opinion writing is supposed to have bias, and when we encounter articles that aren't clearly labeled, we have to be able to employ critical analysis and skepticism.
There's even virtue of opinion in college journalism. Even though columnists don't hold the same level of expertise as professional columnists, our commentary comes from focused interests and specific education thanks to our majors and concentrations. One of our most important jobs is to serve as a check on our university by having the power to comment on its decisions and actions in a way that our reporting desks can't.
It's true that there are low-quality opinion pieces. There are articles that are just fluff or regurgitations of opinions we all agree with or have heard before, and there are columns with weak arguments and poor writing. But that doesn't mean that a few bad opinion pieces invalidate opinion journalism as a whole. A Reddit user explained it perfectly — it's like asking what the value of food is and only considering Kraft microwave dinners. There is undeniable value in well-written, thoughtful and informed opinion pieces.
Instead of automatically cutting opinion out of news organizations, we can demand higher quality columns and hold newspapers accountable for keeping subjectivity out of their reporting. We have to find ways to hold newspapers to a higher standard in an era of misinformation, biased reporting and lazy opinion journalism. And if you're personally against opinion journalism and prefer to read opinions found elsewhere, that's okay too — as autonomous readers, we have the free will to choose which neighborhoods we walk in.
