Report: Americans are bad at telling news from opinion

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A recent Pew Research Study suggests that American's trust in media combined with low political awareness may account for why many find it hard to distinguish between fact and opinion in the news.

While many subjects were able to correctly identify some of the statements in a survey as fact or opinion, they had trouble identifying all of the factual statements correctly and all of the opinion statements with a 100% success rate. 

The individuals who could differentiate between the two types of content tended to have higher political awareness, were more familiar with technology and had a high sense of trust toward the news. An interesting finding suggests that political affiliation influences what people think of what they read. Democrats and Republicans were more likely to label a statement as factual if it aligned with their ideological beliefs, contributing to the results that readers might not always be able to correctly identify fact from fiction. 

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