Stylistic Editing - Harmful Manipulation or Harmless Preference?

Edits, rewrites, and outright rejections are all part of being a journalist; they’re something everyone expects when entering the realms of writing. Editors want reporters and they want individual and diverse articles - if that wasn’t the case, they could give the workload to a single person and have them teach others below them the “right” style.

This is what editors will have you believe, anyway. In truth, the alternate reality of a single person delegating and teaching is in practice, merely hidden as the “editor” role is played by the publisher, the top dog.

Publishers know exactly what they believe and think, and who can blame them? They’re human, they have opinions and they’re entitled to share them. Some, however, through luck and hard work, find themselves in a position to share these opinions on a phenomenally large scale.

Publishers of major news outlets are able to give the workload, be it driven by fact or opinion, to one single employee, the editor - whose job is to delegate and to teach. Editing often takes the guise of fact-checking, surplus-removing, grammar-correcting miscellany, but in reality it’s often a stylistic edit, making sure things are written the way the publisher wants.

This can be taken two ways - style meaning tone, or style meaning agenda. It’s no surprise or secret that employees must meet the publisher’s agendas, but tonal grooming is not so universally acknowledged. The diversity of tone masquerades as a diversity in readability, but is nothing more than diversity of personality. The publisher wants his editor to mold these personalities to backup the agenda.

It’s my opinion, or agenda if you wish, that the two strands of style are not exclusive. Rather, they serve each other and, in turn, the publisher. Agenda filters down to the journalists and returns stronger.
More weight is given to a cause when it has multiple followers in powerful positions, such as journalists.

A view is taken as fact when read through the eyes of a trusting member of the public, and fact is distorted by view when spoken through the mouth of the publisher, his editor, and their journalists.