summarize text each 150 words

This text has been adapted from an article published on the Pew Research Centre website.

The Pew Research Centre is an open source website. It carries out research on a range of topics and focuses mainly on the US. This research focusses mostly on social attitudes and opinions. The Pew Research Centre claims to provide unbiased views. Articles published on the Pew Research Centre website are not peer reviewed.

857 words

<K2 – 87.7

FK grade level - 11.1

FK reading ease - 44.7

Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News

GLOSSARY

Adapted from;

Mitchell, A., Sumida, N., Gottfried, J., & Barthel, M. (2018). Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Retrieved from https://www.journalism.org/2018/06/18/distinguishing-between-factual-and-opinion-statements-in-the-news/.

accurate (adj); correct, true. e.g. The article states that Germany is the largest country in Europe. However, that’s not completely accurate – Germany has the largest population, but both France and Spain are larger in area.

attribute (v); to say that a person, newspaper, TV channel etc is the source of a statement e.g. If a piece of information is attributed to a trusted person or news source, people are more likely to believe it.

channel (v); a television channel usually broadcasts to a particular audience e.g. Al Emarat TV is a popular channel among adults in the UAE. However, Majid TV Kids is the channel that children love.

critical (adj); very important e.g. If you are a journalist, it is critical to check your news before it goes into the newspaper or is published online.

differentiation (n); seeing the ways in which two or more things may be different e.g. Differentiation between what is true and what is not on internet websites can be difficult. You really need to be aware how trustworthy the site and author is – and even then, you need to check the information on other sources.

inaccurate (adj); not correct, not true.

interpret (v); to understand something e.g. I suggested a restaurant for dinner but Maha said nothing. I interpreted her silence to mean that she did not like my idea.

reveal (v); to show e.g. These results reveal the growing problem with bullying in our schools.

In today’s fast-paced and complex world, news consumers must make rapid judgments about how to understand news statements – statements that often come with very little background information and through media which give little or no explanation (such as some social media channels). A new Pew Research Center survey of 5,035 U.S. adults examines a basic step in understanding news statements: whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it. An example of the factual statements used in the study includes the statement “President Obama was born in the United States”. “Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” is an example of an opinion statement from the study.

The results from the survey, conducted between Feb. 22 and March 8, 2018, reveal that even this basic task is a challenge for many people. The main section of the study, which measured the public’s ability to distinguish between five factual statements and five opinion statements, found that a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. However, this result is only a little better than guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong. Even more significant is that some groups of Americans do far better than others.

One group which proved considerably better than average consisted of people who regularly read or watch the news and who are aware of current political events. For example, 36% of Americans with high levels of political awareness correctly identified all five factual news statements, compared with about half as many (17%) of those with low political awareness. Similarly, 44% of the very digitally savvy (those who are highly confident in using digital devices and regularly use the internet) identified all five opinion statements correctly versus 21% of those who are not as technologically savvy. And though political awareness and digital savviness are related to education these two factors predict higher scores in the study even when education levels were accounted for.

Trust in those who are reporting the news also matters in how that statement is interpreted. Almost four-in-ten Americans who have higher levels of trust in the information from national news organizations (39%) correctly identified all five factual statements, compared with 18% of those who have not much or no trust. However, one other trait related to news habits – the public’s level of interest in news – does not show much difference.

At this point, then, the U.S. is not completely detached from what is factual and what is not. However, with the vast majority of Americans getting at least some news online, the fact that some population groups in the ability to sort news correctly are of concern. Amid the massive amount of content that flows through the digital space hourly, the brief dips into and out of news and the country’s heightened political divisiveness, the ability and motivation to quickly sort news correctly is all the more critical.

The differentiation between factual and opinion statements used in this study – the capacity to be proved or disproved by objective evidence – is common. However, “facts” are sometimes defined differently, for example in debates, as statements that are true. While Americans’ sense of what is true and false is important, this study was not intended as a knowledge quiz of news content. Instead, this study was intended to explore whether the public sees a clear difference between news that is based upon objective evidence (facts) and news that is not.

In a separate part of the study, respondents were shown eight different statements. However, this time, most saw statements attributed to one of three specific news outlets: one with a left-leaning audience (The New York Times), one with a right-leaning audience (Fox News Channel) and one with a more mixed audience (USA Today). Overall, attributing the statements to news outlets had a limited impact on statement classification.

The study went one step further for the initial set of statements. If respondents identified a statement as factual, they were then asked if they thought it was accurate or inaccurate. If they identified a statement to be an opinion, they were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with it.

When Americans see a news statement as factual, they overwhelmingly also believe it to be accurate. This is true for both statements they correctly and incorrectly identified as factual. For example, 92% of those who incorrectly classified “Democracy is the greatest form of government” as a factual statement said it was accurate. However, small sections of the public did call statements both factual and inaccurate.

When Americans incorrectly classified factual statements as opinions, they most often disagreed with the statement. For example, 22% of those taking part in the study classified the statement “President Obama was born in the United States” as an opinion and, of these people, three quarters disagreed with this “opinion”. When correctly classifying opinions as such, however, they expressed more of a mix of agreeing and disagreeing with the statement.