{"id":496,"date":"2007-06-28T00:57:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-28T06:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=496"},"modified":"2007-06-28T00:57:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-28T06:57:00","slug":"facts-and-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/06\/facts-and-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Facts and opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he famous line of C.P.Scott<\/a>, editor and the proprietor of the Guardian<\/span> – “comment is free, but facts are sacred”<\/a> – is immortalised not just in the Guardian<\/span>‘s op-ed<\/a>, but also in SacredFacts<\/a>, Richard Sambrook<\/span>‘s blog.<\/p>\n

Scott was in his seventies when he wrote the essay from which the line is taken, back in 1921. But the division between fact and opinion wasn’t accepted by everyone at the Guardian<\/span>.
<\/p>\n

George Dibblee<\/span> was for many years the business manager of the Guardian<\/span>, whilst Scott edited it. In 1905, on the death of its then proprietor Edward Taylor, Dibblee was appointed one of the paper’s trustees. Taylor had recommended the Guardian be sold to Scott for \u00a310,000. Dibblee and his fellow trustees shifted that price to \u00a3242,000. Perhaps not surprisingly, Dibblee left the Guardian<\/span> when Scott bought it. Perhaps more surprisingly, he took a fellowship at All Souls<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dibblee used his time as an academic to write a book on the press called simply The Newspaper<\/span> (1913). He argued that news and opinion were all but inseparable, because opinion shaped a newspaper’s editorial agenda and priorities: <\/p>\n

As far as the public is concerned, there is very little distinction made between the function of newspapers as newsgatherers and their duties as purveyors of opinion. This arises from a very simple case. While news is nominally an impersonal thing, as a matter of practice it is far from being so. In obtaining it the faculty of selection is required in the highest degree by the newsgatherer or ‘story writer.’ Selection again is strenuously required in determining the competition between one item of news and another. Finally the presentation of news in words and paragraphs leaves a wide opening for individual preferences and inclinations. Thus it comes about, naturally enough, that the same series of habits, which govern the conduct of avowed opinion in a newspaper, habits summed up briefly in the term, the policy of a newspaper, express themselves, not so consciously but even more effectively, in its news columns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The famous line of C.P.Scott, editor and the proprietor of the Guardian – “comment is free, but facts are sacred” – is immortalised not just in the Guardian‘s op-ed, but also in SacredFacts, Richard Sambrook‘s blog. Scott was in his seventies when he wrote the essay from which the line is taken, back in 1921. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,50],"tags":[182,389,265],"class_list":["post-496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-journalists","tag-guardian","tag-journalism-history","tag-journalism-values"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}