A penny for your opinions

You know what they say about "assume." When you assume, you make an - well, a mule out of u and me.

Sometimes we're donkey-like in assuming readers and editors are on the same page. So with political passions surpassing sanity levels, much thanks to the World Wide Web and talk-show hosts, we're going to risk telling you newspaper stuff you might already know.

On Fridays and Saturdays and at other times when space is available, The Press publishes columns called My Turn. These are opinion pieces submitted by Press readers. Generally speaking, they address controversial subjects of local interest. Sometimes these pieces are penned by people with particular insight into a topic, and whenever possible we cite them as such in the tagline at the conclusion of the column. Most of the time, though, they're written by citizens simply wishing to engage the community in worthwhile discussion.

We receive occasional complaints from readers who protest that statements in these opinion pieces are not always factual. The same goes for letters to the editor. A recent example called to our attention by several readers: A My Turn column that stated President Obama is Muslim.

We've got three questions for you.

What face do you see on a U.S. penny?

Who is the current president of the United States?

Are you dead or alive?

We think the answers to these three questions are all facts: Lincoln, Obama and alive, in that order. But this being North Idaho in the year 2010, with elections a mere two months away, we acknowledge that someone out there will disagree with us on all three counts.

So is our president secretly Muslim? We see no evidence that he is, and, frankly, we wonder about those who insist he is. Mr. Obama says he isn't, and that's good enough for us. We care more about how he's going to balance the budget than who he prays to anyway.

But we also think readers are entitled to believe what they want and to express those beliefs as emphatically as they wish. If it's in a My Turn, a guest column or a letter to the editor, no matter how insistent the writer is, no matter how much she or he allegedly documents, it's opinion. Will the sun set tonight? Yes it will, and that's a fact. Was Obama's stimulus package a trillion-dollar bomb? That's a matter of opinion.

The onus, in our humble opinion, is not on the person stating the opinion but upon the reader to discern fact from fiction. What you read in news columns should be factual and verifiable, to the highest degree possible knowing humans write those stories and all humans make mistakes. But the opinion columns? Entertaining though they may be, they're not worth more than that penny you're holding, the one with President Obama's face on it.