These are some interesting points, thanks for bringing them up! A couple thoughts on some of the examples here:

College student debt - agreed, wording should be "graduates" not "students".

Animal species - the wrong source is used here, thanks for pointing that out. The source for the 30-50% answer should be http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/ele..., which refers to this Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6970/full/nature0...

Illiteracy - my understanding of functional illiteracy is in line with how Wikipedia defines it, and I think it's a reasonable phrasing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy

Mental health in prisons - this feels a little like splitting hairs here, but the US Dept. of Justice source defines "having mental problems" as "a recent history or symptoms of a mental health problem...A recent history of mental health problems included a clinical diagnosis or treatment by a mental health professional. Symptoms of a mental disorder were based on criteria specified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition". So the wording of the question seems reasonable to me, in accordance with the Dept. of Justice (and including diagnosis by a professional).

On a larger scale, I agree the project is of course biased, both in terms of the questions selected and the multiple choice answers, as is stated right on the site. And I don't know if that is a bad thing. As is mentioned, the point of the site is to highlight things that are consistently misrepresented in the media, and to compare actual data to the common misconceptions that result from this misrepresentation in the media. To do that, the answer bins do need to involve what we believe to be these misconceptions as options.

Above all though, the point is to motivate discussion around these questions, and hopefully this project can help do that. Thanks again for your comment, we will fix those mistakes I mentioned above right away. Cheers!

user:	annaflagg
created:	August 13, 2013
karma:	2