This document discusses the difference between facts and opinions. Facts can be proven, while opinions represent someone's feelings or beliefs. Bias and opinions are often not clearly stated but must be detected based on language used, information included or omitted. The document provides examples of McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee, labeling some statements as facts and others as opinions.

2.  Fact: something that can be proven
 Opinion: something that someone
feels/believes
 Often, opinion is not clearly stated in writing.
Bias is the unstated point of view that reader
must detect.
 Based on language use and information used and
left out.

3.  Persuasive (“loaded”) language
 Misquoting a source
 Selective facts
 Distorting or stretching the facts
 Flawed research

5. “Joseph McCarthy made a
public accusation that
more than two hundred
„card carrying‟ Communists
had infiltrated the United
States government”
(“McCarthyism”).

6. FACT

7. “the House Un-American- Activities
Committee (HUAC) had been formed
in 1938 as an anti-Communist
organ” (“McCarthyism”).

8. Fact

9. “His zealous campaigning
ushered in one of the most
repressive times in 20th-
century American politics”
(“McCarthyism”).

10. Opinion

11. “Senator Joseph McCarthy, with his
reckless charges of spies and „consympsy‟
occupied the front pages, while behind the
scenes J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the
F.B.I., presided over and manipulated a vast
internal security bureaucracy issuing
periodic bulletins intended to fan the
flames of the domestic cold war” (“The
Demons of Salem, With Us Still”).

12. Opinion

13. “When he [Arthur Miller] was
finally summoned to appear, the
committee chairman,
Representative Francis Walters,
let Mr. Miller know that things
might go easier for him if he
persuaded his fiancée, Marilyn
Monroe, to pose for a photograph
with the chairman” (“The Demons
of Salem, With Us Still”).

14. Fact