The Atlantic – by Alexis C. Madrigal
Americans over 50 are worse than younger people at telling facts from opinions, according to a new study by Pew Research Center.
Given 10 statements, five each of fact and opinion, younger Americans correctly identified both the facts and the opinions at higher rates than older Americans did. Forty-four percent of younger people identified all five opinions as opinions, while only 26 percent of older people did. And 18-to-29-year-olds performed more than twice as well as the 65+ set. Of the latter group, only 17 percent classified all five facts as factual statements.
An earlier study by the American Press Institute also found that older Americans were more confident than younger ones in their ability to discern fact from opinion.
The research tacks against the idea that younger people who are extremely online (or “digital savvy,” in Pew’s terms) might be more exposed and/or more susceptible to misinformation. But the real correlation with poor performance is exposure to television news, which has fallen off among young people but remains very high among older people. This shouldn’t be surprising, if we consider the evolution of American media over the past 60 years. Someone born in 1958, now 60, witnessed two revolutions in media before the internet: talk radio and 24-hour cable news. Both blended facts and opinions in new and unprecedented ways, and they matured with the cohort of Americans who are now over the age of 50.
In 1987, the Reagan administration repealed the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine. That paved the way for the rise of right-wing talk radio, brilliantly chronicled by David Foster Wallace for this magazine. Describing a talk-radio host, John Ziegler, Wallace noted that it was not his job “to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible.” He has only to be “stimulating.”
Sound familiar to anyone? While talk radio caters to all tastes, the medium developed to serve an audience Pew described in 2004 as “a distinct group; it is mostly male, middle-aged, well-educated and conservative.” That cohort is now over 50, and its members spent decades listening to radio hosts stimulateby mixing facts and opinions in whatever proportion was necessary to keep them from turning the dial.
At the same time, as James Fallows wrote in his blistering 1996 critique, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, television talk shows became shoutier and nastier—“squabbling replaces dialogue”—through the ’80s and ’90s, eroding the commitment to facts that is at the center of journalism. On television, reporters offered opinions, and opinion writers proffered facts; both took the Washington game more seriously than the actual state of affairs. Fallows argued that the real world and its facts became narrowed into a set of partisan consequences. In this context, facts are true only insofar as they lead to the right political team scoring points.
These trends deepened with the mid-’90s launch of the 24-hour cable channels Fox News and MSNBC. They had to be entertaining and capture a niche, which turned out to be a partisan worldview. Fox News has experienced tremendous success blending partisanship with a mélange of fact and opinion.
The internet, of course, became like the previous iterations of the media, but more so. While the bulk of coverage is close to the political center, the far-right media grew to serve ever-larger numbers of older Americans, mostly with the same undifferentiated mix of fact and opinion that talk radio pioneered. “Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day [2016] shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system,” wrote a team of Harvard scholars, “using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.”
In short, for decades now, older people, especially conservatives, have experienced an erosion of the line between fact and opinion in every media form. The only surprising thing about the new research’s results is that every group’s performance was not worse.
I have to call bullshit on this writer. And “Harvard scholars” have got to be some of the worst brainwashed..
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Agreed Koyote! Plus 2 of the questions they called opinion are actually facts:
“Immigrants who are in the US illegally are a very big problem for the country today” That is a FACT!!!
“Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” That is also a proven, verifiable FACT!!!
So the older people actually realize the BS Pew is putting to them and call them on it. Pew turns it around and claims older people cannot tel fact from opinion.
Well, here is an suggestion for them: GFY Pew, you den of liars and scoundrels!
Pew Research stinks!
‘Tis all in the name.
Fact or opinion?
Distraction #1- keep us busy with trivialities which appear important but have little to do with the sreamroller approaching the remainder of our lives, The Bill of Rights, common law and decent morals.
Which means of course the purveyors of this survey are all over 50 … 😉
Of course those with the least life experience are going to be more sage and make better decisions and see things clearer. That is why my grandson drives and I sit in the booster seat in the back.
What a crock of shit composed of communist propaganda that literally defies reality.
Seems like another eugenics disguise to dis older people so they can more easily be marginalized/eliminated. They will make elders appear more like a burden, an inept pain in the ass, rather than an asset.
Their “facts and opinions” study is also sneaky in that it will extract personal info and likely use it to their advantage. All points are fully statist, upholding the farce of the oppressors. So damn many layers to this.
Used to be a time when most elders were revered, their voices accepted as wisdom. They were also acknowledged for what they gave to life and to their progeny. Hope we can rescue things back from the child-tyrants who have appointed themselves as directors of traffic, with carte blanche to beat up old people. Well, thank goodness there are still plenty of young ones who love their elders and won’t turn on them.
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76% of the brainiacs surveyed believe “democracy” is the greatest form of government vs 61% of brainiacs over 50 years old.
What did George Carlin say…?
“Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of ’em are stupider than that.”
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
“76% of the brainiacs surveyed believe “democracy” is the greatest form of government vs 61% of brainiacs over 50 years old.”
bullshit.
what a damn lie…………….
Would depend on questions and what is considered right answer
How many genders are there?
Is white privaledge real?
Do police serve and protect the public?
Does rule of law still exist or are you guilty as soon as #me too says you are?
Does iq affect affluence off citizens and prosperity of country?
Did world trade centers collapse from being hit by airplanes expecially wtc 7 building?
Do we live in rape culture?
Can you believe mainstream non fake news?
The young would answer the right way us older well we are too stuck in our old ways and life experiences to answer same way
Ikko, the questions you pose show you are not “stuck” in your old ways. Neither am I, nor many other elders.
Once again, I guess it comes down to the individual, regardless of age, so I won’t have any Harvard study painting me as experiencing “an erosion of the line between fact and opinion.” The only “erosion” I have is when the soil in my backyard washes away after a big rain storm.
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