Posted on 06/18/2018 2:24:32 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
A new poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center suggests people are having difficulty telling the difference between fact and opinion.
People participating in the Pew study were provided five statements, including spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. Federal budget, and five opinion statements, including Democracy is the greatest form of government.
They were also two statements that were ambiguous.
Just 26 percent of the adults surveyed correctly identified all five factual statements as factual, according to the study.
And just 35 percent identified all five opinion statements as opinion.
Pew also found that participants were more likely to classify both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed most to their side.
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.
At the same time, 37 percent of Democrats identified the statement increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is essential for the health of the U.S. economy as factual and not as opinon. Only 17 percent of Republicans viewed this statement of opinion as fact.
ETC...
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
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!
You should see it in college. Ya keep reminding students that Wikipedia isn’t a reference.
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.
The woman who was PAID to give her opinion paid heavily.
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.
That has to be true: I read it on the INTERNET!
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.
Libs claim there is no objective truth. We see the results.
Barack Obama and his editor must be the one Democrat who got Obama’s birthplace wrong.
Ask them if we are born genetically identifiable as male or female.
The media has deliberately conflated the two.
Here’s a fact, your opinion is worth crap.
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.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.