We need strategies to evaluate how we are doing

Survey after survey reveals that most Americans don't really distinguish between news and opinion, and most consider advertising to be a form of news. After all, an effective ad can certainly help consumers decide how and where to spend their money.

This "smooshing" effect is true for print but even more so for online content, and that is part of how social media quickly moved to the source of so much misinformation. Most of what we see online is some form of opinion, or at least propaganda. 

The inability to know or care that there is a clear difference between objective news/facts and subjective opinion writing might indicate that most people just don't care enough to do the sorting. It might be an indication of some educational failures. Or it might be that the news platforms themselves haven't done a very good job of being transparent.

I suspect the latter.

Most of the cable news networks pretend to be objective, but viewers get that and still opt for opinions more entertaining than mere facts, if ratings are to be believed.

"Objective journalism" was always an inexact phrase, heavily dependent on the gatekeepers who decided what to print and what to leave out of the daily paper. And perfect balance in reporting will never happen, partly because we are human and partly because some situations don't really involve balance or equally weighted positions.

We can depend upon Texas to provide the most extreme instances of, well, almost anything. But here is an excerpt from a news story about what can happen when everyone sees the political everywhere:

The Carroll school board had reprimanded a fourth-grade teacher after parents complained about a book on anti-racism in her class. And it followed the passage of a new Texas law that requires teachers who discuss “widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs” to examine the issues from diverse viewpoints without giving “deference to any one perspective.”

A superintendent advised teachers to remember the requirements of the new law, according to the audio from a training session. “And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust,” she said, “that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives,” which prompted a teacher to ask what would be the “opposing” view of the Holocaust.

The superintendent later partially withdrew that bizarre statement about finding reasonable opposing views (perhaps defending the murder of millions?), but beyond another chance to laugh about the silliness of those in charge, we at least can understand the knee-jerk reaction of a school superintendent trying to avoid any controversies.

But the fact that this became a 24-hour story reminds us that when all facts and history and biographies are subject to disagreement, we soon become unhinged and confused.

Maybe one reason most people find sports attractive is that there are actual scores, even though we can enjoy second guessing the coaches and the officials and the players. 

America can't figure out how to keep score right now about how things are going (well, it's tough to go wrong betting against the Broncos, but you get the idea). 

But deciding on winners and losers is too simple to be helpful. 

America needs some win-win results.