Dear journo, That isnt your call to make. You report the facts and let READERS DECIDE.
“You report the facts and let READERS DECIDE. “
I was having a conversation with my editor at the Tallahassee Democrat. (I wrote 50+ commercial articles, meaning to highlight the paper’s advertisers.) I asked why the paper continued to carry the cartoon Doonesbury when every survey they sent out said their readers didn’t like it. She said, something like, “Our readers are all idiots and we have to tell them how to think.” Really, it was something that startling. It also highlighted why the paper has been on a two decade decline in readership.
At the time I worked for an Israeli owned firm in town. One morning two of the American Jews were having a conversation outside my office. These were professional people deeply connected with universities and uber-liberal. There had been yet another article the previous Sunday on Rosewood, a “black” town in Florida that was attacked by the KKK in the ‘20’s and eliminated as a town. (These articles where a regular, appearing about twice a month at the time.) One of the Jews said he had cancelled his subscription to the Democrat because he was tired of reading about how he was such a racist. “Really,” he said, “we had nothing to do with this and every article implies we did just because we’re white. I’m tired of it.”
How about doing what journalists are supposed to do: collect facts, get a wide range of opinions, count actions more than rhetoric, and look at data -- economic data, polling data, black unemployment, stock market data, and foreign policy -- because all trends are positive!