One can question whether journalism includes "the editorial page" or that the news and opinion should be clearly segregated. The recently departed lead anchor of Univision, Jorge Ramos, believed that the person delivering the news had a responsibility for interpreting it; the new owners did not agree. What are college level journalism professors telling students as to the eternal question of how to best focus a news story?
Back in the early 1980s when I was at LMU, the focus was on interpretation and explanation. The communications professors I had argued that while truth existed, every journalist interpreted the available facts based on either their own perspectives or on the corporate line at whichever company they worked.
For many years, I disagreed with these professors, and, in some ways I still do. I can remember hearing Thom Hartmann or Amy Goodman saying on air that the news stories being told needed to have some context, and I thought they were talking gibberish.
Then came the U.S. elections of 2016 and 2024 and the aftermath of 2020, and I began to see what these people were pointing out. Listing new executive orders and new policies without giving the context of those policies, including the past histories of if these policies were ever tried before and what happened when they were tried, gave more creedence to the idea that the policies hadn't been tried before which wasn't true.
Now, I'm not for journalists necessarily giving their own opinions of a news story; rather I support the idea of explaining the policy and what the history tells about its success in the past (if it was tried earlier) and how likely, according to experts in the field, given policies will be in the future. Public radio (which is now on the chopping block) tends to do this very well; for commercial stations, it's a hit-and-miss depending on the views of the station owners.
The problem, beyond journalists substituting their own opinions for actual research, is that most people are willing to listen to 30- and 60-second bites on individual stories and then make up their minds right away. That can, and has, led to careless decision-making in the past.
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