Column: Two worlds of content — discourse in the balance

Being in the newspaper business makes the word “advertising” one of the most commonly used words in my vocabulary. For anyone reading this, you’ve probably become conditioned to expect advertisements before YouTube videos, news articles and almost anywhere else your eyes gaze. Maybe the only time we are free of advertisements is when we are asleep or dead.

Ever since the creation of early newspapers in America, our assumption is that most content is directed toward selling us some product or service. The economic pervasiveness of advertisements has forever altered public discourse in a negative way.

In one of my favorite texts of all time, critical theorist Walter Benjamin wrote a brief essay on advertising versus criticizing. While I read it as a first-year sitting in my Ehringhaus dorm room, I didn’t realize the impact it would have as my current role as opinion editor.

“Today the most real, mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement,” Benjamin wrote.

Because we are conditioned to expect advertising, when we are confronted with a new idea, we assume people are trying to sell it to us. I know that is certainly the language of the conversations I have with writers and with myself before something publishes. We expect there to be negative reviews, just like an advertiser expects not everyone will love their product. But the hope is that enough people are convinced by the argument that they “want” your argument to happen and spend time to see it through.

We in opinion writing might label this as a “call to action,” which is a euphemism for creating an incentive or avenue for people to buy whatever idea we are selling.

This world of advertisements, as Benjamin points out, leaves little room for criticism — which he defines as “a world where perspectives and prospects counted.” 

If we, as an opinion page, are simply trying to sell you on an idea, and not ask you to value the arguments honestly, then we are not doing our job.

On the same side of that coin, our jobs as opinion writers become much more difficult when readers only see our editorials as advertisements for ideas. I cannot speak for every opinion writer, or even every writer on my desk, but I hope you never just bought into something we wrote without thinking more deeply about the topic.

A writer is nothing without their audience. There are plenty of good opinion writers who are never given the proper audience engagement to create an impact. There are also plenty of awful opinion writers who have audiences that buy whatever they are selling and leave the world all the worse for it.

My ideal reader isn’t someone who always agrees with me, but someone who rejects the conditioning to assume I am selling this idea, and, instead, engages earnestly with whatever is written.

Pinning all the blame on the author or the reader misses the point of quality opinion writing. We all exist in an advertising-dominated world, which has its benefits, but we cannot allow it to demolish our ability to engage with an idea.