You read the news most days. But what are you actually looking at? A page can hold many different things. Some report what happened. Some share what a writer thinks instead. Most people feel sure they can tell these apart. Let's test that feeling.
Your guess
In a 2018 study, people thought about their favorite news outlet. Was it easy to tell news from opinion there? How many said yes?
Sources
Media Insight Project (American Press Institute / AP-NORC), 2018 — the public's confidence in telling news from opinion, and journalists on labelling
Gabielkov et al., "Social Clicks: What and Who Gets Read on Twitter?" (2016) — about 59% of shared links are never clicked
Pew Research Center, State of the News Media — US newspaper advertising revenue from its ~$49B peak in 2005 to under $10B by 2020, and circulation revenue overtaking it
Wojdynski & Evans — recognition of sponsored content; fewer than 1 in 10 readers identify it as advertising, even when labelled
Sumner et al., "The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases," BMJ, 2014 — 462 press releases and 668 news stories; 40% exaggerated advice, 33% exaggerated causal claims, 36% exaggerated inference to humans
Starbird et al. (University of Washington) — misinformation and corrections on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing
Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman & Combs (1978) — judged frequency of lethal events; Tversky & Kahneman (1974) — availability
Boykoff & Boykoff, "Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the US Prestige Press," Global Environmental Change, 2004 — 52.7% of articles gave roughly equal attention
Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics — anonymity and prompt, prominent corrections
Associated Press standards — on the record, on background, off the record
Gallup / Knight Foundation, 2018 — 86% call quick, open correction of errors very important to trust
CDC / National Center for Health Statistics, "NCHS - Leading Causes of Death: United States" (dataset bi63-dtpu, series through 2017) — https://data.cdc.gov/d/bi63-dtpu — measured source for the heart-disease-versus-accidents comparison
Michelle A. Amazeen & Bartosz W. Wojdynski, "The effects of disclosure format on native advertising recognition and audience perceptions of legacy and online news publishers," Journalism, 2018 — https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918754829 — the actual source of "fewer than 1 in 10" (currently miscredited to Wojdynski & Evans)
Media Insight Project (American Press Institute / AP-NORC), "What the public expects from the press (and what journalists think)," 2018 — https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/public-expects-from-press/ — source of the 73% favorite-outlet figure
Media Insight Project (American Press Institute / AP-NORC), "What Americans know, and don't, about how journalism works," 2018 — https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/what-americans-know-about-journalism/ — source of "nearly 8 in 10 journalists say their news organization should make the difference between news stories and opinion content more distinct" and the 50% op-ed figure
Marcus Errico et al., "The Evolution of the Summary News Lead," Media History Monographs, 1997 — the content-analysis work that dates the inverted pyramid decades after the telegraph and disputes the telegraph-failure origin story
Nieman Lab, "The Wall Street Journal says it wants to help readers identify opinion pieces...", February 2021 — https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/02/the-wall-street-journal-says-it-wants-to-help-readers-identify-opinion-pieces-but-the-campaigns-real-audience-may-be-its-own-newsroom/ — dates the WSJ opinion-labelling campaign
Starbird, Maddock, Orand, Achterman & Mason, "Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing," iConference 2014 — https://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Starbird_iConference2014-final.pdf — the 90,668 / 2,046 counts belong to Rumor 1 only
Read end to end and corrected: August 10, 2026. Numbers checked: August 10, 2026.