Once upon a time, people believed that newspapers maintained a firewall between news and editorials. The first was governed by the big “W’s,” which confined the articles to reporting What, When, Where, and Who. Only on the editorial page were readers to find the editors’ or individuals’ opinions, and they were identified as such. Perhaps it never existed in reality. Perhaps a pristine pure reporting of the news is not even possible, given the role of editorial decisions about what is and what is not included in newspapers. Even so, today’s news media go well beyond the inevitable judgments made by individual editors who must determine what information goes into the limited space at their disposal.
