Pew study finds Americans can’t tell fact from opinion

The Hill ^ | 06/18/18 | Joe Concha

[Verginius Rufus]

Obviously our schools need to do a better job teaching geography if 37% of Republicans don’t realize that Kenya is part of the United States!

[CodeToad]

You should see it in college. Ya keep reminding students that Wikipedia isn’t a reference.

[treetopsandroofs]

Ah yes, this again, the reason this was surveyed and published:

Nine-in-10 Democrats correctly identified the statement “President Barack Obama was born in the United States” as factual, while only 63 percent of Republicans saw it as factual.

[treetopsandroofs]

The woman who was PAID to give her opinion paid heavily.

[Peter ODonnell]

Applying a strict legal test, the statement about Obama being born in the U.S. is not factual, but opinion.

The evidence that he has supplied to prove the assertion is incomplete and would not pass a strict legal test. Therefore no reasonable person could conclude that he was born in the United States (although to be precise, it is equally opinion to believe he was not born in the U.S.).

Reducing the statement about illegal immigrants being a problem to opinion rather than fact is probably not a very good test of anything, the “opinion” as they call it tends to be a self-evident fact. I would accept it as a fact myself.

[lightman]

That has to be true: I read it on the INTERNET!

[shanover]

The education of people has done this................

Government run schools: mission accomplished. The media can now report anything they want and the sheep will approve and be compliant. Even Orwell would be shocked by his own predictions.

[Henry Hnyellar]

Libs claim there is no objective truth. We see the results.

[fluffy]

Pew seems to have done a poor job of defining what they meant by "factual" statement, and it looks like many in this thread are making the same mistake.

"President Barack Obama was born in the United States" is a factual statement, but not necessarily a true statement. The truth of the statement is separate from whether it's a statement of fact or opinion.

[a fool in paradise]

Barack Obama and his editor must be the one Democrat who got Obama’s birthplace wrong.

[a fool in paradise]

Ask them if we are born genetically identifiable as male or female.

[a fool in paradise]

All of the survey questions were dumb

[TBP]

The media has deliberately conflated the two.

[jmaroneps37]

Here’s a fact, your opinion is worth crap.

[AndyTheBear]

To those who have studied logic and ethics Pew looks extremely foolish.. They are using a very sloppy epistemic distinction. Consider a claim like:

slavery is evil

It may be considered "opinion" (along with all other ethical claims) by somebody whose metaphysical view precludes ethics being objective. For those who hold that it is a self evident truth that people have God give rights however, then some ethical statements may be considered "facts" with the caveat that our knowledge of any fact beyond those we can clearly and distinctly comprehend in a Cartesian manner is at best non-precise and at worse inaccurate.