Tendentious

By Deane Barker • • tags: definition •
Updates
This content has been updated 1 time since it was first published. The last update happened .

Definition: partisan; having a point of view

This is often applied to journalism, particularly the coverage of politics or issues that have a political aspect.

Why I Looked It Up

From Making Sense of Science: Separating Substance from Spin, the author discusses media coverage of science news:

Reporters eager to avoid tendentiousness or editorializing – that is, eager to give both sides – can wind up in a kind of analytical passivity that leaves them with he-said-she-said stories that simply shift the burden of interpretation to the readers, who are even less equipped for the job than they are.

Update

Added on

In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern:

Much of what Petrarch and his followers claimed for the novelty of their approached was tendentious, self-congratulatory exaggeration.

Links from this – Making Sense of Science: Separating Substance from Spin January 25, 2022
A solid look at how science works, and how the media and the public interpret it. The book can get depressing. Science is not exact. It’s vague, and sometimes not reproducible, and complicated to understand. The media tends to prey on this for headlines and clicks, and the public doesn’t know what...
Links from this – The Swerve: How the World Became Modern June 1, 2023
This is a book about a poem. It follows a book-hunter in the 15th century named Poggio, while he manages to save the last remaining copy of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, which is an explanation of Epicurean philosophy. The poem makes lot of secular claims. In the middle of the book, they’re...