Is that a fact?

 It can be difficult to tell the difference between fact and opinion. And some things we consider true may not be true to all people.

At News Decoder we are all about fact-based journalism. That means that the information in a news story comes from the authors having actually witnessed something happening, or they obtained the information from a documented or verifiable source. A fact-based story might also include opinions from experts and from people affected by a problem. Those opinions help put facts into context to get at truth. 

Truth isn’t fact. That’s a difficult concept to understand. It is a fact that 2+1 = 3. It is my opinion that if you bring one extra person on a two-person date, three people will feel like a crowd. It seems like a paradox, but truth can be disputed. For some people it is true that three’s a crowd. For others the more, the merrier. But News Decoder also publishes stories that are more opinion-based than fact-based. That’s because sometimes the fact about something is already well-known Russia invaded Ukraine, the climate is changing but all kinds of things can happen in the future and we want to know someone’s thoughts on that. Or an issue, like the benefits vs. dangers of social media, are so complicated, that people disagree about it and it is useful to get the thoughts of someone knowledgeable about the issue. Sometimes we can learn important lessons from other people’s experiences.