Journalists are no strangers to disagreement: the job regularly involves reporting on conflicts, putting one party’s point of view to another, or engaging with audience challenges around bias and veracity.

So I was curious whether Buster Benson’s book, Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Disagreement, might have some lessons to offer for reporters.

Spoiler alert: I think it does.

In fact, it does it in at least three ways:

1. Helping identify why people might be disagreeing;
2. Describing what someone is likely to be disagreeing about;
3. Outlining the different strategies that are adopted in response to the disagreement.

Each of these can be helpful in different ways and at different times in journalism, from planning stories through to interviews and audience engagement.

Journalists (mainly) argue about facts — that doesn’t mean our audience or sources do

One of the key distinctions that Benson makes in his book is between three different reasons for disagreements:

1. People disagree over the facts
2. Or they disagree over what something means
3. Or they disagree over the best way to do something

He simplifies these as disagreements of the head, heart or hands (the head being facts; heart being meaning; and hands being practicalities).

Journalists, naturally, are trained to focus on the facts when reporting — but the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election (one of the reasons Benson wrote the book) highlighted a tension with audiences who appeared to be disagree with reporters regardless of the factual basis for their stories.

Why? Because some weren’t disagreeing over facts: they were disagreeing over meaning. Voting to leave the EU or elect a leader who lied was, for many people, about what those actions meant — and many journalists either didn’t understand that, or weren’t equipped to address that distinction in their reporting.

Of course, it’s not helped when audiences themselves struggle to make the distinction. They might express their disagreement in the argument “that’s not true” rather than “that doesn’t make sense to me and my experiences/beliefs” (it’s not meaningful). 

But understanding the difference between what someone says and what they mean can at least provide a better starting point (and an obvious story angle: why do people feel like they’re in a recession, for example).

Disagreement comes from a ‘violation of expectations’

https://twitter.com/DianeKemp1/status/1514679768305836037

It would be good to see more research on this aspect of Benson’s book, but it still has a lot of resonance for journalists: people, he suggests, disagree in the first place because something violates their expectations, causing anxiety that they then seek to resolve. That might be an expectation about who they are, or what the world is like, or how things should be done.

We can identify these patterns in the way that people disagree with journalists:

• People dispute the facts that are reported (“This can’t be true, because it doesn’t reflect my own experience”)
• People attack journalists for not acting as they expect journalists should (“You are supposed to be impartial”; “Shouldn’t you be investigating this?”)
• And journalists are attacked for not acting how people think people should act (“Stop undermining our government and get behind our country”)

We can also see it in the way that interviewees respond to questions:

• They expect journalists to be neutral, so if we put a question to them which appears to be biased, that expectation is violated
• They perceive themselves in a particular way (a ‘good’ person, or at least doing things for good reasons) so questions which challenge that perception might trigger a negative reaction
• If they expect to be in control, they may respond negatively if a journalists asserts their own independence

And we can see it in journalists’ own behaviour:

• A journalist might expect someone in power to be held accountable — and object to them refusing to participate in a process of accountability
• A journalist expects editorial independence — and disagree if someone asks them to compromise that
• A journalist might be expecting to get a particular angle in their story, and be frustrated if the facts don’t match what they expected

Note that a disagreement isn’t inherently a bad thing, or invalid. A journalist has every right to protect their editorial independence; a source might justifiably object to a leading question; audiences might be right to point out that a journalist isn’t behaving as they should.

Two case studies of disagreement in journalism

Two case studies allow us to explore these processes in more detail.

The first comes from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, when a sports journalist faces disagreement on social media over their take on the trophy ceremony.

Although the tweet begins with facts, it ends with a point about meaning.

The reactions to the tweet can be traced to the different meanings that this piece of clothing (among other things) has for different people. It is an area where no one can ever be wrong, or right — or at least everyone can be right because meaning is subjective.

The second case study comes from May 2023, when a British broadcaster interviews a politician who describes asylum seekers as “asylum shoppers”.

The interviewer chooses to disagree — but not on the meaning (whether those seeking asylum are ‘shopping’ or not). Instead, he moves the interview to facts (that “they have the right” to seek asylum).

The politician disagrees on the facts and is caught out, eventually shifting from a factual claim (about what the Refugee Convention says) back to one of meaning (“That’s a key principle that we support”).

Note that the interview could equally shift in the opposite direction, from facts to meaning, with a question like ‘Do you think an immigration minister should know the law relating the asylum?’

In each case, understanding the territory being contested is key.

Anticipating audience disagreement

Anticipating or even expecting audience disagreement may well be something that journalism can do better — instead of taking audience trust for granted.

When a reader encounters something that doesn’t match their worldview, for example, they often reach for explanations – from questions of bias or missing information to whataboutism and conspiracy theories. Can those be anticipated and better explored?

VG’s transparency portal initiative — which “includes a list of FAQs about reporting, a blog-like feed of story-specific editorial assessments, a log of PFU code of ethics complaints involving VG, and a clearer system for organizing VG press releases” — is just one example that, crucially, appears to include measurement of its effectiveness .

VG’s development editor Øyvind Brenne argues that the rise of generative AI increases the importance of such initiatives.

“If you are in Afghanistan, covering [a war story], I think you have to describe how you got there, what you saw…I think that people, without that kind of information, can maybe think that everything’s just generated from other sources.” 

Looking at journalism through the categories of head-heart-hands also highlights the fact that journalism spends less time reporting on practical steps than it does on reporting facts or meaning (in the form of analysis, expert interviews and reaction). 

Fact- and meaning-driven stories are reactive; practically-driven stories, in contrast, rely on a more proactive workflow that moves beyond events. It is the gap that Solutions Journalism has been trying to fill.

Understanding audience consumption behaviour

There’s a broader challenge here around the limits of our knowledge about how and why audiences ‘disagree’ with journalism.

While news organisations are aware of growing distrust of the media, and of the role of confirmation bias in audience behaviour, the strategies for adapting to those changes have been largely based on guesswork and habit (such as reverting to factual argument), rather than being informed by research.

There is a growing awareness, for example, that reporting misinformation and factchecking can have unintended effects, or might not be reaching their intended audiences.

Conversely, some promising research suggests that interactive formats such as ‘You Draw It’ are more effective in engaging audiences with facts they may disagree with.

We need more of that research. We know enough about the facts of the problem, and what it means for society. What we are missing, of course, is agreement around the practicalities of tackling it.