One example that I like to point out is the myth of the uneducated voter. Ahead of our last presidential election, many mainstream news outlets reported that educated individuals were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Similarly, uneducated individuals were more likely to vote for Donald Trump.
How much education an individual received is ultimately a matter of opinion. In the world of education, different people will place value in different things. Education levels are also too variable to effectively establish that individuals are either educated or uneducated. This makes this yet another flawed either-or argument.
Technically speaking, it is acceptable to say that you feel that people were more likely to vote for Hillary if they were better educated. Similarly, you could make the same comment in favor of Trump. If you made the claim that this had been established as fact, you would be lying.
Many media sources went in between these two. In a sense, they treated their opinions as facts. They even explained to us how they knew it was fact. Apparently, reporters take education for granted and never learn to properly differentiate between schooling and education. They assume that schooling history directly correlates to education levels. Their cutoff for educated individuals is whether or not an individual has graduated college.
There are a lot of legitimate facts in their arguments. Because of this, people think that the education levels of voters was established. As anyone who knows anything about education will tell you, this is more opinion than fact. Nobody is required to confirm to popular but flawed opinions regarding to how the schools relate to education. Unfortunately, the media appeared to have an unethical motive. By sharing this opportunity alongside pseudo-factual backing, they were trying to sway the opinions of voters.
Let me put this another way. It's a lot harder to identify a paragraph as either fact or opinion. This is because paragraphs frequently include both. There's less included with a sentence, but sentences also frequently include both. In some cases, even a single word can have components of both fact an opinion.
After initially posting, I thought of another good example of the media going between fact and opinion. This example was a C-SPAN poll. The media reported that Obama was ranked as the 12th best president according to this poll. Technically speaking, this could be viewed as a factual statement. It is a fact that C-SPAN had a poll, and it is a fact that Obama ranked 12th in the poll. The poll being cited, however, was based off of the opinions of those taking the poll.
One of the reasons this poll stood out to me was because of how a lot of people responded. I saw many comments defending Obama's presidency by insisting Obama was the 12th best president. They were citing this poll, but shared the collective opinions as fact.
While I'm at it, why don't I mess with the wording a bit? Look at the following sentence:
C-SPAN established that Barack Obama was our 12th best president.
Is this sentence fact or opinion? It's not that simple. Let's start with the idea that you can't truly establish something that is ultimately a matter of opinion. The idea that the poll established that Obama was our 12th best president is a lie. It's based on the idea that a poll named him the best, which is a fact. The idea that C-SPAN is credible enough to establish something like this is a matter of opinion. The validity of this specific poll is also a matter of opinion. The poll itself was based off of the opinions of those who participated. In this one sentence, I just identified a lie, a fact, and three opinions.
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