Opinion is the subjective assessment in relation to a certain topic. And the personal opinion is, logically, the valuation of an individual.
The reader may think that all opinions are personal. Not exactly, since we have opinions that are not ours (they do not belong to us) but we have copied them from others. It is not easy to have your own personal opinion, that is, that we value something ourselves without imitating or reproducing the ideas of others.
Opinion differs from knowledge. It was the ancient Greeks who differentiated the doxa (opinion) from the episteme (knowledge). Opinion is internal, subjective, variable, most of the time interested and does not have to have a foundation. On the contrary, knowledge is objective, with a general, concrete nature and has some type of proof to support it.
If someone says I like cakes, it is a particular idea, it is a simple opinion and there may be others totally contrary. That is why it is said that all opinions are respectable. If someone says sweet cakes have sugar, they are not giving an opinion, they are information.
In the journalistic field, an attempt is made to clearly distinguish what is opinion and what is information. An example of the first case would be the newspaper column, where the writer expresses his assessment of a current issue. An example of the information is the news, which must be rigorous and answer a series of questions: what happened, when, how and where. Opinions should not be incorporated into the information, at least explicitly or directly, since it is inevitable that indirectly or between the lines the journalist conveys his personal opinion.
Throughout a day we hear all kinds of opinions. In principle, all are respectable, although there are some that have a foundation and a rigor and other opinions are more capricious. If someone says that they dislike such a famous person and do not give any data or information to argue it, they are expressing their personal opinion, but it would have more value and more sense if they accompanied them with the reasons they have for that famous person to dislike them.
In the media we talk about opinion makers, prestigious people who have a defined criterion on an aspect of reality. Their opinions are listened to by citizens and are taken into account, considering them valid, attractive or original.
