Contrarian Tropes in Journalism
Contrarian journalism is characterised by articles and books making counter-intuitive claims, or attacking what is said to be the conventional wisdom (a phrase due to J. K. Galbraith) on a given topic. A typical contrarian trope takes the form "everything you know about topic X is wrong".
A critical article by Alex Pareene in New York Magazine listed a number of examples, including:
- Amateurs are more knowledgeable than experts (attributed to James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds)
- Boys are the biggest victims of sex discrimination (attributed to Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men)
Slate magazine has collected a set of parodic proposed contrarian titles appearing on Twitter. Writer Juliet Lapidos observed, "Maybe it's contrarian for us to say so, but some of these are quite brilliant."
- The New York Yankees deserve to be loved, but not for the reasons you think.
- Wings: Better than the Beatles, or just different?
- What's the giraffe's most distinctive feature? Hint: It's not the neck.
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Famous quotes containing the words tropes and/or journalism:
“It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.”
—Harold Evans (b. 1928)