Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News
Some news statements are more likely than others to be correctly identified as factual or opinion
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- Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News
- Political awareness, digital savviness and trust in the media all play large roles in the ability to distinguish between factual and opinion news statements
- Republicans and Democrats more likely to see factual and opinion news statements as factual when they favor their side
- Republicans modestly more likely to correctly identify factual statements when attributed to Fox News
- Few classified all factual and opinion statements correctly, though a majority got more correct than incorrect
- Some news statements are more likely than others to be correctly identified as factual or opinion
- Statements not clearly factual or opinion seen more as opinion
- Political awareness
- Digital savviness
- Trust in news media
- News interest
- Those with high political awareness more likely to correctly identify factual and opinion news statements
- Digitally savvy Americans much more likely to correctly identify factual and opinion statements
- Those with a lot of trust in national news organizations more likely to correctly identify factual and opinion news statements
- Republicans and Democrats more likely to correctly identify factual news statements when they favor their side
- Republicans and Democrats more likely to incorrectly classify opinions as factual when they favor their side
- A follow-up classification of factual and opinion statements
- Americans overwhelmingly see accuracy in statements they both correctly and incorrectly deem as factual
- Americans often disagree with factual statements they incorrectly label as opinions
- Democrats’ and Republicans’ ability to correctly identify factual statements modestly influenced when attributed to Fox News
- Margins of error
- How Americans were asked to classify factual and opinion news statements
- Example of news outlet attributions for second set of statements
- Analyzing the impact of news outlets on classifying factual and opinion news statements
- Americans with high news interest somewhat more likely to correctly identify factual statements, but no more likely to do so for opinions
- How the study asked Americans to classify factual versus opinion-based news statements