I will be very happy if we ever reach a time when people are no longer naïve enough to say: ‘It must be true, I read it in the newspaper’, but I am not holding my breath. While complete falsehoods and fabrications may well be the exception, opinions being expressed as facts is a very common phenomenon. And, of course, even when factual information is presented, how it is presented can be very significant. For example, consider the difference between: ‘The team achieved an impressive success rate of 82%, a slight improvement on last year’s major achievement of 81%’ with ‘The team failed in almost 1 in 5 cases for the second year running’. The facts are the same, but how they are delivered is very different, of course. Presenting information in a written form (especially to a mass audience) is not a politically neutral or value-free undertaking.
But it isn’t just newspapers that this applies to. The written word tends to have more power and influence than the spoken word in most situations. Putting something in writing can deliver the message more forcefully and therefore more effectively in the majority of situations. So, we have to be careful to make sure that we are not allowing the written word to influence us unduly …
