Report the facts keep your opinions to yourself

Gaston de ROSAYRO

Today we discuss what facts and opinions are, and why journalists must distinguish between them. I will try and advise you on reporting both facts and opinions, and suggest ways of dealing with rumours, speculation and lies.

Your job as a reporter is to report facts and the opinions of others and to leave your own opinions out of the story. The term for introducing your own opinion into a story is called editorializing - try not to do this.

Students often have a lot of difficulty separating fact from opinion. They often miss opinion that is embedded in a factual statement and will put their own opinion into their news writing. Trying to help students separate opinion from fact can be difficult and is an ongoing battle. I could bellow on endlessly and give worksheet after worksheet and would only see slow change.

If I, however, go through the students' own writing, pull out examples of opinions they have written disguised as fact, pull out some examples of sentences containing fact, put them on an overhead and discuss them individually or as a whole class, they seem to grasp the concept much more quickly. These mini-lessons on fact versus opinion provide an excellent opportunity to discuss credibility and its importance to a journalist and a news organisation.

Journalists are constantly faced with problems of reporting facts and opinions. They must be able to distinguish between them. This is important in both gathering and writing news. It affects how you deal with anything you are told and also how you pass the information on to your readers or listeners.

We will explain shortly why it is so important for journalists to be able to recognise certain kinds of facts and opinions and distinguish them from each other.

However, first we will explain what facts and opinions mean in the world of the working journalist.

A fact can be defined as something said to have happened or supposed to be true. However as a journalist, you need to know how reliable statements are before you can report them as facts. This determines how you present them to your readers or listeners. There are three kinds of facts which you have to deal with as a journalist. There are facts which have been proved to be true; facts which are probably true though they have not been proved; and facts which could be true, although they appear to be lies.

Proven facts are facts which are proved and accepted as true by everyone. They include such statements as "The world is round" or "Mahendra Percival Rakapakse is President of Sri Lanka." You could check these facts out for yourself, but they are so universally accepted as true that you do not need to. Of course, facts can change. It is a proven fact that Mahendra Percival Rajapakse is President at the time this paragraph is being written, but he will one day be succeeded by somebody else. When he is, the fact will become untrue, but for the moment it is a proven, accepted fact.

You can rely on proven facts and report them to your readers or listeners with confidence. They do not depend for their truth on who said them, so you do not need to attribute them.

Then there are probable facts which are statements which it seems reasonable to believe are true, but you are not able to prove yourself, either because you do not have access to the information or because you do not have time to dig for proof - but not because you are too lazy to check. Probable facts include statements by people who are in a position to know the truth and who have no obvious reason to tell a lie. If the Finance Minister tells Parliament that Rs. 10 billion was raised from taxes last year, you can treat this as a probable fact.

These are not, however, the same as proven facts. Although they are probably true, there is a chance that they might be wrong, either because a mistake has been made or because someone lied.

Because this doubt exists, we must attribute probable facts to the people who provide them.

And of course there are probable lies. People occasionally make statements which seem on the surface to be untrue, but which might just be true. A claim that "The Minister of 'Malley Pol' has secretly married a sixteen-year-old tele drama starlet" may seem highly unlikely, but it just might be true.

You must always check such statements before using them, and never use them without confirming them first.

Once you have checked that they are true, you do not need to attribute them.

They have become proven facts. Of course, if you find they are untrue, you must not use them.

If you have to report a known lie - for example, when reporting evidence presented in a court case - you must attribute the statements and you should also present the alternative counter view where and when it is given. We will talk more about this shortly. Opinions are different from facts. An opinion is a conclusion reached by someone after looking at the facts. Opinions are based on what people believe to be facts. This can include probable facts and even probable lies, although few people will knowingly give an opinion based on a proven lie.

One person's probable fact can be seen by another person as a probable lie. This is one reason why people have differences of opinion. Although an opinion can be any statement of what a person believes to be true - as distinct from a proven fact - for journalists there are two main categories of opinions.

There are verifiable opinions which are conclusions which can be verified, shown to be true or shown to be false. People who predict the results of horse races draw conclusions from what they know about horses and racing. They may say that Cotton Hall will win the impending race. It is their opinion. Once the race is over, that opinion is proved to be either correct or incorrect, depending on whether Cotton Hall wins or loses.

Although people usually base their opinions on facts, there is always a danger that they can reach the wrong conclusion. They might have based their opinion on facts which are themselves untrue such as Cotton hall's fitness. They might have failed to consider a relevant fact such as the ground being muddy and Cottton Hall not being a mud-larker runs best on firm ground. Or they might have reached the wrong conclusion because of a gap in the logic they used to think it through such as Cotton Hall having a strong name, so was bound to win.

You must always treat verifiable opinions as if they could be wrong. You must always attribute them to the person who gave them.

It is worth mentioning here a special category of opinion we call expert opinion. Experts can give their opinion on an issue, based on their special knowledge of the facts. A pathologist gives an expert opinion when he or she tells an inquest that she believes a person was killed before being thrown in a river. The pathologist has examined the body and found very little water in the lungs. Unless there is proof of what happened, this must remain an opinion and be attributed to the pathologist. The opinion may later be verified when the killer confesses and describes what happened.

The best kind of expert opinion is one in which the expert keeps their own personal feelings out of their conclusions. They look at the facts as they see them, and draw a conclusion based only on those facts.

However, even opinion from an impartial expert must be attributed, so that your readers or listeners can judge the likely truth or otherwise of what they say. Next week: Opinions and judgements.

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