the cassandra pages

Fact vs Opinion

During a recent long drive, my husband and I listened to some podcasts. One of them was an interview with a researcher from the Pew Research Center, talking about a recent survey Pew has conducted to determine Americans' ability to distinguish factual statements from opinion statements.

The differentiation between factual and opinion statements used in this study – the capacity to be proved or disproved by objective evidence – is commonly used by others as well, but may vary somewhat from how “facts” are sometimes discussed in debates – as statements that are true.¹ 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 distinctions between news that is based upon objective evidence and news that is not.

The statements presented were political; five were written to appeal more to Democrats and five appealed more to Republicans. A lot of testing was done beforehand to make sure that respondents understood exactly what was being asked of them:

In the survey, respondents read a series of news statements and were asked to put each statement in one of two categories:

1. A factual statement, regardless of whether it was accurate or inaccurate. In other words, they were to choose this classification if they thought that the statement could be proved or disproved based on objective evidence.

2. An opinion statement, regardless of whether they agreed with the statement or not. In other words, they were to choose this classification if they thought that it was based on the values and beliefs of the journalist or the source making the statement, and could not definitively be proved or disproved based on objective evidence.

So what were the results?

...a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong.

Do you find that disturbing? I do. But I'm not surprised, either.

The people who did the best on the test were those with a high level of political awareness (36% identified all five factual news statements) and those who were "digitally savvy" (44% identified all five opinion statements correctly.)

 And though political awareness and digital savviness are related to education in predictable ways, these relationships persist even when accounting for an individual’s education level.

And as you can imagine, political bias also played a part in skewing the responses. This was shown when respondents were matched with their party affiliations, and made clearer when they were asked if they agreed or not with the statements they called "opinion." But that really wasn't the entire point of the survey -- it was to determine if the respondents could distinguish between a factual statement and an opinion at all. That's a critical thinking skill. For instance:

Overall, Republicans and Democrats were more likely to classify both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed most to their side. Consider, for example, the factual statement “President Barack Obama was born in the United States” – one that may be perceived as more congenial to the political left and less so to the political right. Nearly nine-in-ten Democrats (89%) correctly identified it as a factual statement, compared with 63% of Republicans. On the other hand, almost four-in-ten Democrats (37%) incorrectly classified the left-appealing opinion statement “Increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is essential for the health of the U.S. economy” as factual, compared with about half as many Republicans (17%).

and further:

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, though small portions of the public did call statements both factual and inaccurate.

 

This is a failure of the educational system, and it certainly has a profound effect on electoral politics, as well as explaining some of the reasons why we're in this current predicament. People without critical thinking skills can be easily and successfully manipulated, as they are now being, by politicians, foreign governments, and biased media. The truly frightening part is how long it would take to correct such a failure - and how little political will there is, and has been, for an educated, critical, and independent electorate.

If you want to try the test yourself, it's online here.

 

"We Will Take America Without Firing a Shot" --Nikita Khrushchev

Like many of us, I watched Trump's performance in Europe, and then with Putin in Helsinki, with astonishment that quickly gave way to anger and revulsion. His spineless Republican defenders in Congress and the media did break ranks to a greater degree than usual, with remarks like "“The dam has broken,” from Senator Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee. After the backlash of criticism, Trump did his usual halfhearted backtracking, which only confused things more. Though a lot of critics hope otherwise, I doubt that even the extraordinary and shameful spectacle of an American president siding with a Russian dictator against his own intelligence community, and America's allies and friends, will bring about the downfall of this seemingly interminable nightmare of a presidency. What does that say about us?

At this point in life, as I watch what's going on, I wonder about the fleeting quality of collective memory. My childhood was shaped by two things in particular: the fact that WWII was still vivid for my parents' generation, and by the reality of the Cold War that became equally vivid for mine, as we hid under our desks or lined up against school corridors during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Eastern Europe fell under the so-called Iron Curtain, and China rose as a Communist power in the east.

My father, a tank driver in Patton's army in WWII Europe, had fought against fascism to keep Europe and the rest of the Western world free; he landed at Normandy the day after D-Day, was in the Battle of the Bulge, liberated concentration camps, spent long months in a hospital in Belgium, and was fortunate to survive. I wept when I visited the memorials in England's cathedrals to the Americans who had helped defend Britain, which would almost certainly have fallen to Hitler if our country had not entered the war, and to Britain's own astonishing courage in defense of their homeland.

Therefore it was perhaps not surprising that I was deeply offended by a photograph from last week of Trump sitting in Winston Churchill's leather chair, with a smug smile on his face, looking like a latter-day Napoleon. Neither Churchill nor Franklin Roosevelt, a man of great personal courage and the architect of compassionate American progressivism, would have anything but contempt for him.

But after insulting the European heads of states, and threatening the alliances and friendships that have endured to defend and support democracy since the end of WWII, Trump marched on to Helsinki, incredibly calling the European Union "our foes." His news conference with Putin, and his behavior during their completely opaque summit, convinced me that he is not only a dangerously erratic sycophant, but a puppet, carrying out -- wittingly or unwittingly -- Putin's careful and deliberate undermining of the western alliance, its governments, and its democratic institutions.

And so it was not surprising, either, that I was deeply offended, astonished, and grief-stricken by what happened in Helsinki. I remember the Civil Defense drills of my childhood, and being certain that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Nikita Khrushchev had taken off his shoe and pounded it on the podium at the United Nations. This was the man who once said the chilling words, “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within....” In the 1950s, those words were met with outrage and defiance. Today, they sound not only prophetic but like a description of current reality.

My father's Civil Defense helmet, just like this, lived in our coat closet throughout the 50s and 60s - I doubt if today's young people can imagine town- and city-wide air raid drills in America, but they were normal for a number of years then.

Yes, there was glasnost, the Berlin Wall came down, Eastern Europe became free again -- but a great deal has happened since Putin came to power with his new cadre of thuggish oligarchs. How have we possibly moved in half a century to a point where millions of Americans, let alone elected American politicians, are defending and excusing the president for choosing someone like Putin as their friend while dismissing our own intelligence agencies, dismantling the State Department, and repudiating the country's most cherished values and the principles on which it was founded? The only answers are ignorance and gullibility, refusal to learn from history, racist fear of the latest version of "otherness", blatant self-interest, and subservience to power. None of those human characteristics can be blamed on the Russians -- but they are all being skillfully exploited by them.

Barack Obama gave a good speech in South Africa, but it was too long for most people to digest, and far too obscure - if he wants to really help, he's got to name names and say clearly and succinctly exactly what is happening without surrounding the uncomfortable truth with erudite words. Obama too often uses lofty rhetoric that sounds positive and makes us feel good, but doesn't address fully the historical sins and great flaws and hypocrisies of America itself. Tragically, what could be called hypocrisies during Obama's administration have become cornerstones of policy during Trump's.

Many people besides myself feel that Helsinki was a watershed event. But will it actually result in a final push toward ending this disgraceful presidency and turning around a ship that is about to crash onto the rocks, or will this episode too be glossed over and forgotten? Only John McCain, who no longer has anything to lose, was brutally honest about the grave danger and permanent damage that may result from Trump's actions. I urge you to read his whole statement:

“Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.

“President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand up to Putin. He and Putin seemed to be speaking from the same script as the president made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.

“It is tempting to describe the press conference as a pathetic rout — as an illustration of the perils of under-preparation and inexperience. But these were not the errant tweets of a novice politician. These were the deliberate choices of a president who seems determined to realize his delusions of a warm relationship with Putin’s regime without any regard for the true nature of his rule, his violent disregard for the sovereignty of his neighbors, his complicity in the slaughter of the Syrian people, his violation of international treaties, and his assault on democratic institutions throughout the world.

“Coming close on the heels of President Trump’s bombastic and erratic conduct towards our closest friends and allies in Brussels and Britain, today’s press conference marks a recent low point in the history of the American Presidency. That the president was attended in Helsinki by a team of competent and patriotic advisors makes his blunders and capitulations all the more painful and inexplicable.

“No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant. Not only did President Trump fail to speak the truth about an adversary; but speaking for America to the world, our president failed to defend all that makes us who we are — a republic of free people dedicated to the cause of liberty at home and abroad. American presidents must be the champions of that cause if it is to succeed. Americans are waiting and hoping for President Trump to embrace that sacred responsibility. One can only hope they are not waiting totally in vain.”