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The survey suggested that people are in different realities. For instance, 63 percent of Republicans correctly said the statement “Barack Obama was born in the United States” was a fact. Meanwhile, 37 percent of Democrats incorrectly identified the statement “increasing the federal mini- mum wage to $15 an hour is essential for the health of the U.S. economy” as fact, not opinion.
“Overall, Americans have some ability to separate what is factual from what is opin- ion,” says Amy Mitchell, Pew’s director of journalism research. “But the gaps across population groups raise caution, especially given all we know about news consumers’ tendency to feel worn out by the amount of news there is these days, and to dip briefly into and out of news rather than engage deeply with it.”
Another contributing factor to confu- sion is the way news articles often lose their context when spread on Twitter feeds and other social media, Jamieson said.
Opinion and news stories live in the same space, sometimes clearly marked, some- times not.
One Facebook feed, for example, linked to a Los Angeles Times article with the headline, “In a strikingly ignorant tweet, Trump gets almost everything about California wildfires wrong” and gave no indication that it was an opinion piece.
For many people, the editors and news producers who were once media gatekeep- ers have been replaced by opinionated uncles and old high-school classmates who spend all their time online. Russian trolls harnessed the power of these changes in news consumption before most people realized what was happening.
“The truth,” Ward says, “is no match for emotional untruths.”
News organizations have never been particularly good at either working togeth- er or telling the public what it is that they do. The first collective effort by journalists to fight back against Trump’s attacks came
this week, when a Boston Globe editor or- ganized newspapers across the country to editorialize against them. That collection promptly was assessed by some as playing into Trump’s hands by suggesting collusion on the part of “mainstream media.”
In an ideal world, Ward says, people would have an opportunity to learn media literacy. And he’d have fewer uneasy cocktail party encounters after he meets someone new and announces that he’s an expert in journalism ethics.
“After they laugh, they talk about some person spouting off on Fox or something,” he says.
He has to explain: That may be some people’s idea of journalism, but it’s not news reporting.
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David Bauder reports on media for The Associated Press. Follow him on Twitter at @dbauder
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