Newspapers have become more opinionated. Not’s not my opinion, it’s a fact as proved when I spent a long time in the British Library’s newspaper section going through past opinion columns.
In this sense, opinionated means ‘having more opinion columns’. Back in the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s there were just a handful of opinion columns, by the early 2000s newspapers appeared online, but as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine records shows, Comment lacked its own navigation on the Guardian just a decade ago.
But has the sentiment and tone changed too – are papers becoming more opinionated?