hard news
hard news noun: factual reportage of events which are socially or politically significant and of a serious nature, as opposed to the reporting of entertaining, humorous, or gossipy accounts of relatively inconsequential events.
Noun
hard news (uncountable)
- Factual reportage of events which are socially or politically significant and of a serious nature, as opposed to the reporting of entertaining, humorous, or gossipy accounts of relatively inconsequential events.
- Under Editor Murray J. Gart, 56, former chief of the Time-Life News Service, the Star stressed hard news and straightforward reporting over fancy writing and instant analysis.1981 August 3, Janice Castro, David S. Jackson, “Press: Washington Loses a Newspaper”, in Time, archived from the original on 16 Nov 2010
- Even in the late 70's […] women's news was regarded as, by definition, soft news. Today, issues like sexual harassment and the difficulties of single parents are understood to be, in every sense, hard news.1993 October 24, “News About The Magazine”, in New York Times, retrieved 06 Dec 2010
Examples of hard news in a sentence
- Ed Bradley, who died yesterday of leukemia at age 65, […] covered hard news and soft features with equal commitment, grace and skill, and many of his stories and interviews were impossible to forget.2006 November 10, David Bianculli, “Ed Earned his ‘60 mins.’ of TV Fame”, in New York Daily News, retrieved 06 Dec 2010:
- These digital grazers have shown again and again that they aren't interested in hard news, but rather entertainment, self-help, awe, and outrage dressed up news.2014 May 15, Derek Thompson, “What the Death of Homepages Means for the Future of News”, in The Atlantic:
Antonyms of hard news
Questions about hard news
- What does hard news mean?
- Hard news means factual reportage of events which are socially or politically significant and of a serious nature, as opposed to the reporting of entertaining, humorous, or gossipy accounts of relatively inconsequential events.
- How do you use hard news in a sentence?
- Ed Bradley, who died yesterday of leukemia at age 65, […] covered hard news and soft features with equal commitment, grace and skill, and many of his stories and interviews were impossible to forget.
- What part of speech is hard news?
- Hard news is a noun.
Words near hard news in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hard news (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “hard news.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hard_news. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.