Leonard Pitts laments the loss of accepting "facts" in political discourse today. This has become a campaign of his. It was the theme of a speech he made at KU after receiving the William Allen White journalism citation award.
He's on to something. If you show me some cold stone facts that refutes my opinion or point of view, I should at least concede the point. That doesn't mean an entire argument is lost, just that perhaps the other argument has validity, too.
But today is seems like people aren't interested in truths. We are interested more in shouting out our world view, even making stuff up (like death panels) to poison the debate and drown others out.
It's like a video game where total destruction is the goal.
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Somebody was saying recently "If the facts don't fit the opinion, change the facts." I've heard this or something similar from members of the county commission, the city commission and the chamber of commerce.
Is it the businesses, the people, or our local politicians who have trouble diffentiating between facts and opinions? I often wonder about our own newspaper. They do have an opinion page, but there have been many times where the writer's (or editor's?) opinions were inserted into news stories.
How do we start clearing this up? What can we do to make sure we are getting the straight scoop and not coffee shop rumors?
When I was growing up, the opposite of fact was fiction and not opinion. Opinion may have been offered on certain factual events or stories. However, we had separate sections in the library for fact and for fiction.
Later, they moved toward political correctness by changing the categories to fiction and non-fiction.
Still, we understood that opinion was integrated into either of the two. hence, in HS we could have held a discussion and offered our opinion on the Watergate Scandal, the Presidential election of 1964 or whether we felt the punishment for Sisyphus, according to Greek mythology, was too harsh.
If you have to change the facts to fit the opinion they are no longer facts. For that reason, if the opinion does not match the facts it must be fiction.
There is nothing wrong with having an opinion as long as it relates to the facts.
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