In college, I was given an assignment that permanently changed how I read and write.
The premise was almost absurd in its simplicity. There was a man and a woman in a kitchen. The woman was his wife. The man brought her her slippers. That was it. No plot. No backstory. Just that action. We were instructed to write the scene twice, using the same facts and the same sequence of events, but to convey two entirely different emotional realities using nothing but word choice, pacing, and detail.
One of my classmates chose “newlyweds” and “headed for divorce.”
In the first version, the man kissed his wife’s neck as she stood at the counter. He joked softly about how late she stayed up. He knelt to slide the slippers onto her feet, careful with the heel, telling her he didn’t want her to be cold. The kitchen felt warm. The moment lingered.
In the second version, the man dropped the slippers hard on top of the garbage disposal. “Here,” he snapped. He didn’t look at her. He walked out. The woman stood there, sweaty and furious, thinking about how even this — even this — had become another small act of contempt.
Same man. Same woman. Same kitchen. Same slippers. Different story.
The story facts were the same. What changed was how the reader experienced them. The writer decided where the camera lingered, which details mattered, which were omitted, and whether the reader was allowed inside a character’s thoughts.
That assignment taught me something most readers never learn explicitly: stories don’t persuade by changing what happens. They persuade by controlling how what happens is felt. Once you see that, you start noticing it everywhere.
Why Journalism Once Refused These Tools
Journalism didn’t strip out fiction techniques because journalists were incapable of storytelling. It stripped them out because storytelling is powerful.
The purpose of news is not to shape experience. It is to disclose reality. Those are different tasks and confusing them has consequences. Classic journalistic standards reflected this understanding. Reporters avoided interior monologue and omniscient narration. They disclosed material facts early. They attributed claims rather than implying them. The resulting prose was often spare, not by accident, but by design. The underlying assumption was simple: readers are entitled to judge events for themselves.
Fiction works differently by design. A novelist chooses what the reader feels before knowing everything else, and which facts are withheld until they will do the most emotional work. That isn’t deception in fiction. It’s the craft. And readers don’t merely consent to that craft. They seek it out. They want to experience events through someone else’s perceptions and emotions. Interiority and selective detail are the reason people read stories at all.
News is exactly the opposite transaction. When readers turn to news, they are not asking to be placed inside someone else’s head. They are asking to be told what happened. If they want argument or persuasion, they know where to find it. They turn to the opinion page, where rhetoric declares itself.
That distinction matters, or used to, because it protects reader agency. It allows readers to examine the facts and make up their own minds.
When fiction techniques appear in news, the problem isn’t stylistic. It’s a breach of that promise. The reader came for facts and was given experience instead—without being asked.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A recent Washington Post article distributed via MSN provides a clean example of how this boundary has eroded, not through error, but through skilled writing used in the wrong genre. I encourage you to read a few paragraphs of it.
The piece profiles a young transgender runner and opens like this:
But sports were never fair, Verónica thought as she rode a school bus to a track across town.
That single sentence does a great deal of work. It places the reader inside the subject’s mind. It frames the moral question before any policy or eligibility rules appear. The reader is guided to feel before being invited to evaluate. From there, the article layers familiar narrative tools: famous athletes with obvious physical advantages, economic deprivation made concrete through donated shoes, experience before framework.
None of this is false. All of it is effective. Too effective.
In fiction, this opening would be unobjectionable. In news, interior monologue is a category error. The reporter cannot know what the subject thought. More importantly, the reader did not come seeking guided feeling before disclosure.
Sympathy arrives first. Context follows later. But by then, the reader’s mind is generally made up, and frankly, it’s been made up for him.
The Techniques at Work (and Why They Matter)
Several fiction techniques are doing the heavy lifting here.
Interiority. Beginning inside a subject’s thoughts grants intimacy and authority instantly. In fiction, that’s expected. In news, it’s an unearned claim.
Scene before context. The story opens with a bus ride and pinching shoes, not eligibility rules. Once experience comes first, everything else is interpreted inside it.
Sympathy scaffolding. Analogies and deprivation cues normalize unevenness before the specific dispute is even named.
Asymmetrical specificity. This one matters most. When I worked in Development at Goodwill, the rule was explicit: you raise donations by telling the story of an individual, not a group. You name them. Groups are for statistics.
That distinction exists because it works. When news renders one side as a fully realized person and the other as abstract “concerns” or “critics,” it isn’t neutral humanizing. It’s a known persuasion technique applied asymmetrically. Used in fundraising, it’s honest. Used in fiction, it’s expected. Used in news, without disclosure, it quietly replaces independent judgment with emotional identification.
From Reporting to Persuasion: A Spectrum, Not a Switch
This isn’t a binary collapse from objectivity to propaganda. It’s drift along a spectrum.
It starts with straight factual reporting, moves through contextual framing, then narrative emphasis. From there it slides into narrative steering, where sympathy arrives before disagreement.
At the far end is strategic omission paired with fiction techniques, where material facts are withheld to protect the emotional arc. That final step is where journalism crosses a bright line. A fact is material if knowing it would reasonably change how a reader evaluates what they’re reading. Journalism is obligated to include such facts, especially when they complicate the story.
Verónica talks about choosing testosterone suppression even though it could potentially harm his running time. But in Washington state, high school athletic eligibility is based on gender identity alone. Testosterone suppression is not required, even at the state level. At the same time, any pathway beyond that, like out-of-state competition, college scholarships, elite development, does make testosterone decisive. A responsible coach would recommend a male athlete aspiring toward elite competition as a female to suppress his testosterone. None of this is mentioned in the article. Instead, the story strongly implies that Verónica wanted so badly to present as a girl (Spoiler: it didn’t work) that he risks his athletic future.
That tension is the real story here. Leaving it vague or absent preserves a tidy emotional arc at the expense of a complicated reality. This isn’t about tone. It’s about truthfulness. Leaving out these crucial points lies to the reader.
Journalism has always modeled itself, implicitly, on sworn court testimony: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Telling part of the truth while withholding what would change its meaning is misleading, even if every sentence is technically accurate.
The problem here is not argument. It is not opinion. It is not even polemic. Declared polemic is at least honest. The reader knows where the writer stands and can resist accordingly, deciding what to believe for himself because he recognizes this is an argument.
Disguised persuasion is different. When fiction techniques are smuggled into news, the reader lowers their guard. They believe they are being informed when they are being guided. Often with this sort of story, someone else makes the reader’s mind up for him.
Overt bias preserves resistance. Covert narrative persuasion dissolves it.
Journalism fails not when it allows opinion to exist, but when it conceals persuasion inside a form that promised restraint.
This shift is no longer treated as a deviation. It is being taught. Many journalism programs now emphasize impact, understanding, and meaning-making over verification and disclosure. Storytelling is framed as responsibility, not temptation. Shared training produces shared instincts. When those instincts prioritize narrative coherence over disclosure, old standards start to feel obsolete.
That’s how guardrails disappear: not by being broken, but by being redefined.
How Even Smart Readers Get Taken In, and How to Resist It
The readers most affected by these techniques aren’t naïve. They’re experienced and skeptical. They’re smart and often well-educated either through wide reading or formal university training.
But narrative persuasion doesn’t bypass intelligence. It bypasses argument. It has slipped past me before. It still does, occasionally. I use my husband as a sanity check because external calibration matters when persuasion is subtle.
And this isn’t just news. Narrative nonfiction, political messaging, true crime, documentary film, and many other genres use the same machinery openly and effectively.
The best defense isn’t cynicism. It’s genre awareness. If something claims to be factual, ask whether it’s using tools designed for story. Notice who is individualized and who is abstracted. Ask what facts would complicate the emotional arc and whether they’re present. Remember the techniques listed above and make it a habit to look for those when deciding how to take an article.
The question isn’t whether you agree. You might agree naturally. You might not. But if the piece is not keeping the promise of giving you the straight facts, and all the facts, it is not keeping its implicit promise.
Back to the Slippers
I keep thinking about those slippers at the beginning. Same facts. Different meaning. Technique made the difference.
Fiction earns the right to use that power because it declares itself. Opinion earns it by announcing its aims. But news forfeits the reader’s trust when it borrows that power without warning.
Nearly every journalist and every lawyer I have ever met were frustrated novelists. They are people drawn to story, motive, and meaning. That impulse isn’t a flaw. It explains why these professions attract talented writers. But it also explains the danger. When the novelist’s instinct is indulged inside professions that promise fact rather than experience, restraint starts to feel artificial. Story rushes in where discipline once stood.
Journalism doesn’t need fewer storytellers. It needs good storytellers who are honest and remember why that instinct was once kept on a leash.
Readers don’t need to be protected from facts. They need to be given them, early, plainly, and in full, and trusted to do the rest. That’s respect. That’s honoring the reader’s dignity.
That was once the promise of journalism. It’s a promise worth insisting on again.
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