@MartinMorrison, I don't think you've quite got it, though of course I always appreciate being told to replace one verb with another, in the interests of conformity. Newspapers, whether you like it or not, privilege one story over another just by writing about it. The idea that you could just neutrally go around, reporting whatever you saw, and letting the reader decide; it wouldn't necessarily be chaos, but it would be incredibly boring. So you have to take as read that journalists will prioritise the importance of some stories over others, and the interesting turn happens when it becomes impossible to prioritise, so that a story that would in a normal week be page one fetches up on page nine.
25 July 2011 10:52pm
@MartinMorrison,
I don't think you've quite got it, though of course I always appreciate being told to replace one verb with another, in the interests of conformity. Newspapers, whether you like it or not, privilege one story over another just by writing about it. The idea that you could just neutrally go around, reporting whatever you saw, and letting the reader decide; it wouldn't necessarily be chaos, but it would be incredibly boring. So you have to take as read that journalists will prioritise the importance of some stories over others, and the interesting turn happens when it becomes impossible to prioritise, so that a story that would in a normal week be page one fetches up on page nine.