A few years ago at a casual job I had, a colleague learned I was a journalist and told me they wanted to be a “conservative opinion writer,” and started testing out a few of their opinions on me.
I told them they had a ways to go between where they were at that moment stacking shelves, and writing content that would be consumed and regarded as think-piece level discourse appealing to a particular
political demographic.
They didn’t believe me for a number of reasons, and that’s OK, because I didn’t care. I told them as much.
In polite society this makes me an asshole, but a sharp stop on the torrent of unsolicited opinion was needed.
That was one interaction, years ago. But unsolicited opinion is everywhere, and I think we should all re-learn keeping feelings to ourselves.
Don’t believe me? Social media is the domain of the unwelcome brainfart; everyday conversation is littered with inappropriate conjecture that is out of context with everyday niceties; legacy media leans on it too much.
More of us need to be told that opinions aren’t profound and don’t need to be shared for the sake of it, even just to test the efficacy of a thought.
In my own wheelhouse in the media landscape, I’d go as far as to suspect that a large part of the decline of the industry has come with the proliferation of opinion pieces. Apologies to those who sign my own paychecks, but in any given edition of Pique Newsmagazine there are three explicit opinion pieces (Opening Remarks, Pique’n and Maxed Out) and at least another two columns written in an opinion style. That’s a lot of pages, and a lot of ink for the opinions of a few in a weekly community paper.
Open the webpage of any major news outlet and you’ll find opinions and comments from dozens of people on a daily basis. Tune in to television news and you’ll find pundits and opinionators engaged in verbal diarrhea on the issues of the day. Go to social media and you’ll be awash in it. The few times I’ve picked up a physical newspaper these days I’ve often been horrified to find opinion printed on the front page—a space that should be preserved for news, and news alone.
In an era where the “fake news” label is thrown around with impunity, and disinformation is a real and recognized threat to social harmony, the proliferation of opinion in media makes it fertile ground for all the worst impulses in society, and a target.
Anybody and everybody can say whatever they like and add the trite addendum that it’s “just my opinion,” but we need to understand what an opinion at face value is: Feelings formed into a stance molded by opaque factors and unknown motives. We don’t live in each other’s heads and most of us lack the ability to properly share our feelings. Why, then, do we think we can properly articulate an opinion for mass consumption?
In consuming media, we need to take more time to understand opinions are free, and that makes them cheap. If we start thinking of opinions as cheap, we can treat them as such. Facts take time to collect and confirm, making them expensive and giving them value. It has long been my OPINION that legacy media debases itself by depending on opinion to generate content and engagement with audiences, who deserve more than the thoughts of a nobody the reader has no reason to trust, be it me or someone else.
On a personal level and more aligned with the opening lines of this unsolicited opinion piece you are reading, we should stop asking ourselves whether an opinion is the right one and who to share it with—we should ask whether it needs to be shared at all.
Similar to the observation that when we are stuck in traffic, we are the traffic—we should acknowledge that when we complain about how loud and divisive discourse is—we are the discourse.
And no, this isn’t an attempt to tamp down on freedom of speech. It’s a suggestion from one person with no authority that more of us should go back to keeping opinions to ourselves, to stop letting intrusive thoughts win, to cease the outbursts and push back (quietly and internally) on the lessons learned over the past few years that every opinion is valid and worth sharing. They are not.
Less opinion, less comment and less conjecture in public life may do us some good.
I’ll start.
