It can often be very frustrating to be in the news industry.

I recall many times, when I was a city desk clerk on the news side, that I would answer a call from someone who was convinced that our reporters left out key facts in articles. Many times, I’d find that the person had only read the first couple of paragraphs of the story, or had just glossed over the paragraph containing said facts. Other times it might be that we weren’t reporting something an Internet crank had claimed that turned out to be false.

One time I even had someone argue with me about whether it was day or night. (It was night; my guess is that he took a nap in the afternoon, woke up and thought it was the next morning. When he didn’t find his paper on his doorstep, he called our circulation desk, which closes at 5 p.m. Not getting an answer after several hours, he called the newsroom, despite the fact that we could do nothing for him since we have no access to subscriber information. I was the lucky person who answered the phone around 8 p.m., and after calmly trying to explain to him over and over that the people who could help him had already gone home because it was night and him again angrily telling me that it had to be morning and they should be at work answering the phones, I asked him if there was a window near him. He said yes, so I told him to go and look out the window to see if it was light or dark outside. Heavy sigh, then I heard footsteps walking away. A minute later, CLOMP, CLOMP, CLOMP, and the phone disconnected. I think about that all the time. 🤣)

I spent the bulk of my career on the news side of things, producing, writing, and editing, plus I have a master’s degree in mass communication research, so I’m not pulling things out of thin air. One of the things I was determined to do once I made my way to the opinion side was to be a bit more stringent on fact-checking (a letter that was printed containing spurious Thomas Jefferson quotes was a major impetus). While allowances are made for hyperbole and clear opinion (more leeway is given in columns, which are clearly labeled as opinion on the page and online), stating something as a fact that just isn’t is not kosher, which is one of the reasons I sometimes have to insert “weasel words” like “seems” and “apparently” into letters to make it clearer that it’s what the writer believes even if it’s not necessarily so.

I’ve given writers many suggestions to ease their way: Attribute statements to their source. Give me their sources so I can fact-check them and/or add attribution. Wait at least a few hours (preferably overnight), then read your letter again before sending it to make sure that you said what you meant to say. Have your significant other read what you wrote to make sure you’re not going to embarrass the both of you.

But ya know, it doesn’t really matter. Why? Because people read what they want to read into whatever they read.

Which is why you might see a comment like this on one of my columns: “Do you not find it interesting Brenda effectively says pedophiles have no control over their horrific sexual preferences?”

Uhhhhhh … apparently I support pedophiles because I noted that sexual preference is one of those things humans really have no control over??? Really? OK, I really meant to use the word “orientation,” but my stroke brain still occasionally has trouble grasping just the right word, even though the average person would understand what was meant; this particular person would still see what he wanted to see. Never mind that nowhere in that piece, or in anything else I’ve written, have I ever expressed support for pedophiles because there is nothing in this world that would ever make it OK for a predatory grown person to make advances on someone whose brain hasn’t even finished developing. (Imagine that, someone who is 15 is still underage; saying that at least they weren’t 5 is just making excuses. Looking at you, Megyn Kelly.) And yes, I speak from horrible lived experience, as do so many others.

It’s also how you get someone claiming that DOGE was all over a letter that appeared one day when it never appeared in any of the letters printed that day at all, nor was there even an oblique reference to it (heck, I gave the dude the benefit of the doubt and checked an entire week’s worth of pages and found nothing like what he described).

Sigh.

Can we just agree to read the words that are there without inserting your own and re-interpreting what’s there to your tastes? That’s just far too reminiscent of the dishonest “debate” tactics of Charlie Kirk and the like (in scare quotes because they don’t actually abide by debate rules and are used primarily to make opponents look uninformed for social-media clicks).

A big part of this is confirmation bias, the tendency to accept only that information that conforms with one’s own biases and confirms what one already believes. But add to that the shift in the decision of just what is news from the journalism industry to the audience.

The Pew-Knight Initiative released in May the results of a study that captured the changing dynamics in news consumption, writing, “The journalists and editors we interviewed agree that in the digital age, the power to define news has largely shifted from media gatekeepers to the general public. And discussions with everyday Americans confirm the idea that its definition varies greatly from person to person, with each bringing their own mindset and approach to navigating a dizzying information environment.”

Further, the initiative found, “People decide what news means to them and which sources they turn to based on a variety of factors, including their own identities and interests.” They also found that 55 percent of Americans believe “it’s at least somewhat important that their news sources share their political views,” despite the fact that many believe news shouldn’t be biased or opinionated.

Well, news shouldn’t be opinionated. That’s one of the reasons we at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette have a clear demarcation between the news and opinion sides, as do most responsible media outlets, and clearly mark opinion pieces.

That doesn’t mean opinion can’t be newsy, and based on provable fact. John Brummett is one of our best writers of reported opinion, having spent decades as a sports reporter, then political reporter, before turning to opinion. When he makes an analysis, you can be assured that it comes more from his research, interviews and knowledge than from his political leanings (he’s center left at most, despite some cranks constantly accusing him of being paid by the DNC, even though he poor-mouths Democrats as much as he does Republicans, and with good reason). Yes, he has a soft spot for some Dems, but he also admires several Republicans (that’s part of being human, ya know). That has nothing to do with how he does his job, nor should it.

Lack of media literacy is another factor in this disconnect some readers show between what’s on the page and what they think they read. For example, although countless media-bias scholars rank the Democrat-Gazette as center-right, we consistently get accusations of being far left (doesn’t help that the word “Democrat” is part of the masthead, but that’s the name of the paper that our right-wing former publisher owned before buying the assets of the liberal Arkansas Gazette and merging the two in 1991, ending the newspaper war here). Since joining the opinion side in July 2011, I personally have been credited with guiding coverage and non-coverage of all sorts of things, though news and opinion are completely separate, and we don’t confer over coverage. The most mixing there is is when I solicit permission to run letters about news articles/newsroom operations from the newsroom leaders. Heck, I don’t even influence what my fellow opinion writers write about; I just make it ready for publication.

Is it any wonder I get cranky? I mean, seriously, if I had the power to do all the things I’ve been accused of, I’d be making the big bucks … and I’m just not.

True, I can’t help what people read into what I or anyone else at the paper writes. There will always be those who take things wildly out of context, cherry-pick, re-interpret things to mean something else, or just make things up out of whole cloth. I mean, I still can’t get people to understand the differences between news articles, advertisements, editorials, columns and letters even though I’ve been explaining it since I started at this paper (if I had a nickel for every person who called in about an “ad” when they meant a news article, and vice versa [helpful hint: learn the differences so that you don’t get transferred from person to person till someone finally figures out what you’re talking about], I’d likely be able to fully furnish my house, build a big shed in the backyard and probably at least start the addition I want: about five feet or so onto the back to accommodate a small en suite in my bedroom, a dedicated laundry room and a bigger kitchen … oh, and soundproofing so I don’t have to hear neighbors so clearly).

Still, we’re gonna keep on keeping on, providing readers with actual news and informed opinion, clearly marked. That’s the job.

But if we could at least try to exist in the same reality for at least a few seconds at a time, that would help.