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Op-Ed: When did the words ‘What we know’ become newsworthy?

What if readers guess that “what you know” is pathetically little if anything at all?

It’s ironic that “What we know” even exists in the Age of Disinformation, let alone in alleged journalism.

Just when media credibility is at a well-deserved all-time low, the world needs to know what these evolutionary outtakes know. Sure, it does.

The expression “What we know” has been festering along like a stagnant style guide since a bit before the pandemic. It’s now a sort of default expression used by people who should have found their way out of kindergarten by now.

Like the never-to-be-sufficiently-despised word “resilient” which effectively means “lots of people suffering for a long time for no reason and we’ve only just noticed now”, it persists. Good old “what we know” is also supposed to mean something and couldn’t prove it on a bet.

For those who don’t spend years or decades trudging the news, some explanations are due.

“What we know” was a briefly interesting expression coined I think maybe back in the 1950s and 60s as “here’s what we know”. It quite rightly got discarded as redundant, which it always was.

In modern headlines, it’s filler. It has no right to be anywhere in the news.

As content, the expression is useless.

The expression itself is meaningless. Are they supposed to be describing what they don’t know, and use a bit of old verbal tat to help readers spot the difference?

It’s lousy SEO. It clutters up text and adds a lot of fluff to a search. “What we know” is hardly helpful in a search.

Let’s clarify – You’ve got the entire English language to work with, and you come up with this useless slop?

This isn’t mere pedantry, although god knows it deserves it.

The expression “what we know” assigns an instant overvalue to anything It implies that it’s critical current information,

For example – Man blows his nose in ancient Samaria – What we know.

What’s so much worse about this is that it implies that you should know.

Don’t you know about the guy blowing his nose in ancient Samaria?

You poor deprived fool, you.

If you have never had a style guide bestowed upon you as a professional writer – The signs of “content eczema” are pretty obvious. This is filler content.

They may be struggling to make 150 words or whatever the count is supposed to be. So this flaky itchy useless stuff is used to create a count.

Says a lot about the state of a sector where that sort of thing is the priority rather than any actual information.

Now the good news – “What we know” is also an instant guilty verdict on the reportage.

Imagine a headline like “Homelessness – What we know”.

What if readers guess that “what you know” is pathetically little if anything at all?

Think about it, hacks.

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Written By

Editor-at-Large based in Sydney, Australia.

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