- I am an 11 year old who is 9 feet tall and have won a Nobel Prize for my work in physics.
- Elephants are big.
Which one of these is a fact? English is unusually elegant in this regard. A fact does not mean true, it means something that can be shown to be indisputably true or false -- something that is falsifiable. The first statement is the fact. Because the second statement has no defined or falsifiable meaning it is an opinion. An elephant may be big compared to a mouse, but they're infinitesimally small compared to a planet. What does big mean?
In the New York Times' Watergate article [1] you'll find every statement made is a fact. Compare this to their writing on contemporary issues, particularly ones that are politically charged, and you'll find it's a night and day difference. The articles generally severely lack for facts and what facts are provided are often in the form of quotations which, in turn, are often non-factual.
Of course facts alone are not the end of the story. Facts can be misleading: 'Uber drivers were engaged in 47,341 more accidents including 27 more fatal accidents than all the licensed taxi drivers in New York.' That implies one thing, yet it omits a rather critical piece of information - how many miles did both drive? And there is also a bias in the stories that are covered. A news organization that chooses to only cover stories that reflect positively upon one side of an issue, or those that reflect negatively upon the other side, would be actively misleading their readers even if each story was independently factual and in no way misleading.
So aiming for factual reporting is certainly just a benchmark rather than the finish line. But it's really pretty easy to do, and it's something that'd leave us with magnitudes greater reporting quality than what we have today.
