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By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

McALLEN, Texas |...Years ago, when I was making my way through Journalism School at U.T.-Arlington, my professor would always stick to the lesson and never stray into intellectualizing what he was teaching. Stay with the news, the news you are reporting, he would say. Stay on it, with it.

That was rough at first, mainly because I had ventured into the field because of my interest in writing.

But daily journalism, for newspapers, is a study in what that same professor called the "small sky of vocabulary." There are plenty of words you never see in a newspaper story. Writing for magazines and book form is to use the entire sky.

Which is where intellectualizing comes in.

As a reporter, you can wax poetic on certain stories, but never on others. A Sunday Edition piece on the national politics of Mexico allows for some freedom of expression, i.e. the free use of adjectives; a story about a father who up and decides to drown his children is quite another thing altogether.

These days, there is so much opinion writing on our politics that news stories they accompany are taking second-billing. Donald J. Trump is convicted in criminal court and that story flails out. Right behind it comes a current of opinion pieces to buttress the event.

Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records for tax purposes goes the straight news story. One asking if the verdict will it sink his candidacy for president follows right behind. Another asks if the recently completed case was honest and not political weaponization by Trump's enemies. Yet another ventures into whether he will go to prison.

The list is long, limited only by the angles members of the working press can come up with.

Lost in it all is the idea of what we used to call traditional reporting being the mainstay of a newspaper and of discussion at the dinner table. Today, the mounds of opinion-writing dominate conversations in bars and restaurant, some of it not fit for the dinner table at home.

Is that a bad thing?

No, not entirely. Free-flow partisan news is the new kid on the block. A minute or two with a right-wing website or publication confesses its purpose. Same for the left-wing efforts. Once, all you had was the no-nonsense evening news on network TV - ABC, CBS and NBC, all three regulated by the FCC.

The free-wheeling you face today comes from Cable-TV, which is not regulated by broadcast license government standards. FOX News is solely on cable-access and it is considered "entertainment." That also goes for CNN and Newsmax. Websites are regulated only their platform providers who avail it for a price. A jillion bloggers also play into this, many of them without any journalism education, and many more doing it on free platforms such as this one, Blogger.com.

It has led to "news" coming at people as if a hard, ceaseless rain.

The networks won't intellectualize news. They may offer an opinion segment, but even that will be straight and no-nonsense. You are more likely to get it on news-oriented show like 60 Minutes.  

And it may not even be intellectualizing; it could easily be straight-up, "entertaining" silliness, as offered by a host of news-like channels on Youtube.com, another growing weed field of amateurs.

Is this monsoon of news our current problem?

To a very large extent, yes.

Who knows how many of us track the day's news as if it all matters, doing it hour by hour, day after day? Americans have always been loyal consumers of their free press.

The problem today is that the once-trusted free press has been joined by a wild collection of foghorns out to persuade and not to inform.

And, well, who needs that, I know...

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