How to tell if what you’re reading is bullshit (including this)

I’ve been doing a piss-poor job of writing on here (only three posts in! Who knew procrastination could so swiftly follow the adrenaline-fueled first post!?), and I think it’s because I knew that I wanted to write this before writing anything else — it’s a pretty foundational part of the STL Media Works project. It’s not going to be St. Louis specific. It is going to cover a lot of ground that you, a presumably savvy consumer of media in the Midwest, have already trod. But hopefully you’ll find something that gives you pause.

Your media diet almost certainly includes several servings of bullshit. How do I know? Because you’re reading this, a blog whose only avenue of promotion is Twitter, which is to bullshit what stagnant water is to dysentery on “The Oregon Trail” — unless you bypass it all together, you’re gonna get in trouble. And some of what you’ll read in this very article could be bullshit, but that’s kind of the fun part.

Here’s the thing: reading bullshit isn’t inherently bad. There’s a wide, wide spectrum of it, and unless you can read through it all mindfully and discern what’s merely a bad take and what’s an outrageous lie, your brain is going to break — the relationship between consuming media and knowing something true will become watery. Most importantly, you’ll hamper your ability to engage with what you’re reading, and the whole point of journalism is to make the reader engage with the real-life thing being reported.

So, in the spirit of writing on the internet, I’ve made a list of things you can ask yourself to help. These will, I hope, help you determine where on the bullshit spectrum the thing you’re reading or watching or listening to lies.

Why am I reading/watching/listening to this?

You know the feeling of being halfway through an article before you realize that you’re reading an article? That’s a failure to ask this question. Asking yourself why you feel compelled to click on something (or, I suppose, why you didn’t turn the page or change the channel) provides a few important safeguards against bullshit infiltration: it keeps you from reading junk just to sate some affirmation deficit you have (like when I click on a recap of the Cardinals game after a win, or, if you’re a lefty, you find yourself reading anything from Talking Points Memo); it helps fight back against mind-control content distribution tactics; it gives you an objective — to finish the article — which helps fight the shallow, headline-hopping inertia that, at least for me, is particularly hard to escape. If you can answer this first question to your satisfaction, it becomes a lot easier to see the rest of the content with clear eyes.

Why does this exist?

Journalism has always relied on niche audiences to be economically viable (all the way back to the Seven Sisters days), and that’s a good thing — again, you want an engaged audience — but there’s trouble to be had there too: pandering. Good journalism exists to challenge its reader, even if it’s about something they generally agree with. Any journalism that doesn’t do that is likely bullshit. Attacks are generally bad. Endless praise is usually bad. Coverage of some shocking incident that’s used to “show the larger trend of X” is bad, like, at least half the time.

Now, there’s an important caveat that I can’t stress enough: This DOES NOT mean that good journalism can’t be fun, or silly, or even somewhat vapid. Being a person is tough work. Sometimes the challenge is simply to get through the day with a smile on your face; journalism can help with that too.

Who is the person writing this?

Treat journalists like authors. In high school English class, your teacher probably made you spend a class or two talking about the biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald before diving into “The Great Gatsby,” or you covered a chronology of the Trojan War before reading The Iliad. You do that because it helps you answer all kinds of questions about the thing you’re reading — knowing that Fitzgerald moved from the Midwest to the East Coast as a young man helps you understand what Nick Carraway is talking about when he’s riffing on life in New York City.

Journalists are authors—for all our grandstanding about objectivity and passion-free, methodical reporting, we bring our past experience, our ideas, our background knowledge, and our life experiences into everything we do. And if someone has a long history of great work, you probably know the thing you’re reading is good too. If they have a long history of bullshit, then you know they’re probably not going to break that habit any time soon. Good journalism is a conversation, and knowing your journalists makes it less like small talk and more like a two-drinks-in chat between two people with mutual respect.

Who are the sources?

One of the first things they teach you in journalism is to not make “appeals to authority” — that is, don’t treat someone as knowledgeable just because they happen to be powerful or have an opinion. Unfortunately, we do this all the time anyway.

Good journalism tries its best to put sources in context (what their motivations are for being interviewed, what their possible agenda might be, who they’re connected to, how the story might impact them), and you should always be wary of sources that are taken out of context. Even when good journalists source anonymously, they should be as specific as possible — “a senior administration official with direct knowledge of the conversations” is a fun one that keeps popping up — and they should always try to reinforce it with as much on-the-record reporting as possible.

Also, look out for anything that talks to one or two people and then treats them as spokespeople for an entire group of people. This was a challenge that was handled…adequately…by the Washington Post in their profile of Belleville’s nutjob radio host a couple months ago. It was handled less-than-adequately by the New York Times in their recent assessment of Mizzou’s enrollment problem.

And, last but not least…

FOLLOW THE LINKS!!!

A pretty incredible side effect of the mostly bummer-inducing transition to reading almost everything on a computer screen is that journalists can now shove links to a bunch of different articles inside their articles — it’s like we get to eat the world’s fattest information burritos, where a bunch of random delicious things are all wrapped up in one convenient, eatable little tortilla pouch.

OK, so that wasn’t a perfect metaphor, but it’s getting close to lunch. The point is that the reporting process is now more transparent than ever, and journalists should try to link as much as they can to be as transparent as possible. Readers can use the primary sources to evaluate what they’re reading more thoroughly — if something appears to be good, serious reporting, but if it links to a bunch of debunked studies or dog-whistle opinion pieces or some other junk, then you know it’s probably bullshit.

I’ll end by repeating the point I started with — reading bullshit isn’t inherently bad. What’s bad is reading indiscriminately. That’s the slippery slope that leads to you spreading conspiracy theories, or attacking perfectly legitimate arguments you don’t happen to agree with, or retreating so deeply inside your own echo chamber that you can’t really have an honest conversation with anyone about anything you’re reading or watching or listening to. And we all lose when that happens. Read smart, friends.