Page 15 - Sharing Posts: The Spread of Fake News

That is a major concern. The country is potentially at risk if
ideology becomes more important than truth and if the two sides
cannot agree on what is objectively true or false. A democratic
political system, after all, is based on the notion that facts about
a given issue are knowable. In this view, voters choose candi-
dates at least in part because they have
accurate information about the facts of
the issues in the campaign—and accu- “Everyone is entitled
rate information about each candidate’s to his own opinion, but
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stance on those issues. If voters cannot not to his own facts.”
trust that the information they receive is — Scholar and politician Daniel
correct, then making an informed choice Patrick Moynihan
is diffi cult. As twentieth-century scholar
and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan once put it, “Everyone is
entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” As many
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experts see it, people are increasingly feeling entitled to their own
facts—and that is a problem for democracy, for journalism, and in
the long run, for all of us.

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