2 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2020
    1. And borderline statements have elements of both factual and opinion statements – they can be based in objective evidence, but claims are vague enough that they can neither be unambiguously proved nor disproved by factual evidence, in part because such evidence is often conflicting, incomplete, contested or involves making predictions.

      Im not sure how I feel about the use of borderline statements. I feel like they may have further confused the survey taker because of the ambiguity in the borderline statements. I am also not certain that the use of borderline statements led to any significant discovery. I suppose that they may have worked as a control, so that they might be able to more distinctively understand how a person chooses fact or opinion, but this is not made super clear in the findings.

    1. Likewise, Americans with a lot of trust in national news organizations have an easier time separating factual from opinion statements than those with less trust.

      In the first chapter of the textbook for the year, we read about why we have statistics, and a big reason for that was because we "can't always trust our gut". I think that this snippet is interesting because I would think that the less you trusted news outlets, the more vigilant and unbiased you would be in disseminating fact and opinion. However, this data seems to project to me that those who don't trust national news outlets say so because they don't trust a particular outlet(s), which may skew their decision-making.