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The Pew Research Center did a survey to see how well people can distinguish factual statements from opinion statements. I find it interesting that, for these 10 questions, Democrats scored better on 5, and Republicans scored better on the other 5. Also interesting is that, for 8 out of the 10 questions, people who had higher confidence in the mainstream news media scored better than those who had lower confidence.
Keep in mind that the focus is on types of questions (factual type vs. opinion type), not on opinions about whether or not the statement is true. A factual type of statement could turn out to be false, but this doesn't change the fact that it is a factual type of statement. Similarly, an opinion statement might be true, but this doesn't make it a factual type of statement.
I suspect a bunch of you might want to dispute the research in various ways, but if the research is valid, then it does seem to offer some evidence of a strong correlation between trust in the mainstream media and an ability to distinguish factual types of statements from opinion types of statements. That might be an interesting topic of discussion for this thread.
But keep in mind that "a lot" is not the same as "total" or "complete". I have a lot of confidence in most of the mainstream news media sources (I think that, generally, they are honest people trying to do an honest job of gather facts and, generally, they succeed because each story is vetted by multiple people - unlike blogs and "journalistic rags" were there are few, if any, checks and balances before a story goes out into the public sphere.) This does not mean that I simply trust main steam media without a heathy dose of skepticism. I know that even under the best of circumstances there can be bias and errors, so if the story is something I care about, I try to seek out alternative viewpoints. I'm fairly certain that most of the people who said they had "a lot" of confidence in this survey would probably say something similar. Most of them are probably not "hook, line, and sinker" types of people. But, of course, I could be wrong.
Here is a link to a quiz you can take and check out how you compare to those who were in the survey sampling.
Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient.
You answered Factual statement
The correct answer is Opinion statement.
It is a factual statement, in my opinion.
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