Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Informative & Persuasive

Last week my granddaughter, P.K., and I were discussing writing. She is a freshman in high school and was relating to me what she was being taught. “There are two basic types of writing,” she said. “Informative and persuasive. ‘Informative’ states the facts, while ‘persuasive’ expresses an opinion, and they are separate.” Right on, I thought, and then I wondered when that dictum for students of writing changed.

For example, last week, I read an article on the front page of The Sacramento Bee. I would assume that if an article was on the front page of a newspaper, that article would be ‘informative’. Since I was visiting in the area, I had no preconceived notion if the Sacramento Bee was basically liberal or conservative, pro-Trump or anti-Trump. The title of this news article was “US will put asylum-seekers in tent cities.”

Was this going to be an informative news story or a persuasive opinion piece disguised as a news story? In the first sentence the writer of the article described President Trump’s television address as being “filled with tough election-season rhetoric.” Okay, well at least the writer, Franco Ordoñez, was not attempting to fool anybody into thinking that he was pro President Trump.

In the next sentence he spoke about the caravan of “migrants from Central America, including women, children, and the elderly, as well as men.” Whoa, big fella! In all the pictures that I have seen of this migrant caravan, the vast majority were men, young men. In a recent article from the Washington Examiner it was estimated that three quarters of the caravan were young men – with families and unaccompanied children making up only about 20-30%. Even the New York Times in an article about a week ago stated that “adult men traveling without children are the single largest contingent,” and Fox News has reported that 80% of the migrant caravan are men under 35 years old.
In the next paragraph señor Ordoñez continues his subtle editorializing by putting only certain of Mr. Trump’s words in quotes. Apparently he has a problem with “invasion” of migrants, troops that are assigned to “harden” the border, considering a rock thrown by a migrant as a “firearm,” and “endemic abuse” of the asylum system.  Here it appeared to me that the writer was again wandering from “informative” to “persuasive,” as I doubt that the author ever learned that using selective quotation marks in a news story was a part of “informative.”
Finally Mr. Ordoñez abandons any supposition that he is merely writing an informative news story when he refers to a recent ad as a “racially divisive political ad.” Admittedly I have not seen this ad, and I am pretty certain that the vast majority of the readers of The Sacramento Bee have not seen this ad either . . . but if your news is only from The Bee, you are probably convinced that the ad is truly “racially divisive,” even though that is merely the opinion of Franco Ordoñez, whoever he is!
Now let’s be clear. My comments are my opinion, meant to be hopefully “persuasive”. I am not pretending that what I write could masquerade as factual “informative” news. However, “opinion slanted news” masquerading as real front page news is not the same, and to my way of thinking the piece by señor Ordoñez is just another example of ”persuasive” pretending to be “informative!”
One final question: Does opinionated news pretending to be factual news fit into the category of “fake news?”

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