When I worked as a reporter for a local newspaper, people would sometimes ask (or complain) about something that had appeared in our opinion pages. "Why’d you endorse that guy for governor?" "Does that columnist have to be so mean?"

My answer was always simple: "I’m the wrong person to talk to."

As a member of the news staff, I had nothing to do with the opinion section, which was written by different people and overseen by a different editor. I found out what our opinion section said the same way everyone else did: by reading the paper each day.

But those distinctions aren’t always obvious if you don’t work in a newsroom. A 2018 survey found that, while three-quarters of Americans could usually tell news from opinion in their go-to news source, fewer than half could do so with articles

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