a lot of people stopped making a distinction between the two.
That's probably another source for the trouble we've got with the so called fake news, because a lot of said "news" actually isn't news, but well written opinion pieces.
Or poorly written crap opinion pieces. In the end, it doesn't really matter if it's well-written or not, if something is opinion posing as news, it contributes to the problem.
I don't think that's particularly relevant in this context. Of course I can only speak for myself and what I said, but I can speculate on what I think the parent of my post was thinking, and both are something roughly like "this is just one more example of an ongoing thread of reporting, both 'editorial' and 'news', which is pushing a specific narrative regarding the tech industry and popular perception of same".
In that regard, that this specific article is an op-ed is an insignificant detail.
Even more so when the author writes it as though he was reporting "news" and not just an opinion. I mean, you get stuff like this:
Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at Google, Facebook and Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted.
Note how that's presented as an affirmative statement of an absolute fact.
and
Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.
OK, nice use of the weasel word "some", but still, this read like he's reporting facts, not an opinion.
You really have a strange standard for opinion pieces.
> Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.
I don't know about you, but I am totally ready to accept this "opinion" as fact. Smartphone/internet/social media addiction is a topic commonly discussed on HN.
Just because you don't agree with "some people" doesn't mean you can pretend that the things Brooks are talking about are just his opinion and not something that is objectively happening. Is your real problem with this that he used the word "some"? He does on to detail who "some" people are in the article.
I don't even really know how to respond to this because I literally have no idea what you're trying to say, or how it addresses anything I said above.
I guess I'll just say this:
I never said I disagree with any specific point in the article, and what you quoted there was simply an example of how the author of TFA poses something (which might or might not be true) as "news", in a way that could blur the line between a "news piece" and an "opinion piece". I was just addressing an issue somebody else raised earlier about the blurring of news and opinion, by pointing out that the author directly contributes to this problem by the way he wrote his article.
Whether those statements are true or not isn't actually relevant to this specific point. They may be relevant to the broader issue of whether or not the "tech backlash" is real, but that isn't what I was commenting on there.
> I was just addressing an issue somebody else raised earlier about the blurring of news and opinion, by pointing out that the author directly contributes to this problem by the way he wrote his article.
I guess I just really strongly disagree that the sentence you quoted constitutes "blurring the line." It says that some people think something and then went on to detail who these people were. Further more, David Brooks is possibly one of the most well known columnists for one of the most well read newspapers in the world. It's labeled "Opinion" and "Op-ed Columnist" at the top. It has an editorialized title, "How Evil is Tech?" It's so clearly NOT news. Nitpicking this one sentence to say that somehow David Brooks is masquerading as news is absurd.
GP fails to distinguish between news and editorial, which this article is.
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