When they say the control was not given an op-ed to read, do they mean no reading material was provided, or that they were shown a neutral article? I suspect t

When they say the control was not given an op-ed to read, do they mean no reading material was provided, or that they were shown a neutral article? I suspect that the increased exposure of op-eds comes from newspapers not being printed any more. It used to be that they were isolated onto two pages inside a newspaper. The editorial page and the "opposite-editorial" page. When reading them you knew you they were expressing the opinion of the writer. (I used to think the abbreviates stood for "opinion".) On the internet the boundary between news and opinion blurs. The front of www.nytimes.com right now has opinion articles prominently featured at the top of the page. They know that readers don't browse a site the way they do a printed newspaper. If they want something to be read it has to be one of the first things they see. But more frequently readers enter an article directly through shared, aggregated, or searched for links. "Click here to read this in the New York Times" doesn't tell you if what you're going to is a news report, op-ed, reprinted press release, or paid advertisement masquerading a news. You may be halfway through the article before noticing the tag that indicates what section it's in, if you notice at all. The effect of this is that readers are either not able or not willing to differentiate between opinion and unbiased news. Combined with mistrust of journalism after lying scandals, conflicts of interest, and fake news, readers are likely assuming everything they read is an opinion. When facts are inscrutable then the truth of what you know becomes indistinguishable from the truth that you feel.