Fake News, 

Propaganda, and 

Plain Old Lies

Fake News, 

Propaganda, and 

Plain Old Lies

How to Find Trustworthy 

Information in the Digital Age

D O N A L D   A .   B A R C L A Y

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield 

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any 

electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, 

without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote 

passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barclay, Donald A. author.

Title: Fake news, propaganda, and plain old lies : how to find trustworthy 

   information in the digital age / Donald A. Barclay.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. | Includes bibliographical 

   references and index. 

Identifiers: LCCN 2017051583 (print) | LCCN 2017053314 (ebook) | ISBN 

   9781538108901 (electronic) | ISBN 9781538108895 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Fake news. | Journalism—History—21st century. | Online 

   journalism.

Classification: LCC PN4784.F27 (ebook) | LCC PN4784.F27 B37 2018 (print) | 

   DDC 070.4/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051583

 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of  

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper  

for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To my lovely family:

Alexandra, Emily, Tess, and Caroline.

Love to you all.

Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xv

1  Credible Information: Why It Matters, What Are Its Limitations 

1

2   Fake News as Phenomenon: (Almost) Nothing New under  

the Sun 

29

3   Tricks of the Trade: Techniques That Lower Your  

Information Guard 

57

4  Logical Fallacies: More Tools of Deception 

91

5   Evaluating an Information Source: Nine Essential  

Questions Everyone Should Ask 

101

6  Power in Numbers: Negotiating the Statistics Minefield 

117

7   Scholarly Information: Identifying, Evaluating, and  

Understanding It 

147

8  Help Is Where You Find It: Resources for Evaluating Information 

181

Final Thoughts 195

Notes 199

Index 213

About the Author 227

vii

Preface

WHY READ A BOOK BY A LIBRARIAN?

As a topic of debate and discussion, fake news really blew up during the 

homestretch of the 2016 US presidential election. A search of the New York 

Times database from July 1, 2016, to December 31, 2016, turns up 319 articles 

in which the phrase fake news appears. An identical search covering the same 

time span turns up 151 such articles in the Wall Street Journal. Tallying up the 

number of social media posts about fake news during the last half of 2016 is 

impossible, but all the evidence points to the fact that the topic was as big on 

social media as it was in the traditional news media. And remains so.

At the time when now-familiar phrases such as fake news and alternative 

facts started regularly appearing in the media (social and news), at least part 

of the population reacted with surprise if not shock. For me, however, the 

stories about fake news came as no surprise. As someone who has worked 

as an academic librarian since 1990 (and who, prior to that, spent four years 

teaching research-based college writing), teaching people to think critically 

about how they evaluate, internalize, and apply information has been a major 

part of my job for most of my working life. Information literacy is something 

I have pondered, studied, practiced, and written about for going on three 

decades.

For those not familiar with the jargon of the library profession, informa-

tion literacy (a phrase that was coined in 1974)1 describes the efforts of librar-

ians to help people think critically about what they read, hear, and see. Of 

ix

x 

P R E F A C E

course, even before the phrase information literacy entered the professional 

lexicon, librarians were actively engaged in teaching people how to negotiate 

increasingly complex information environments. Evidence exists of library 

instruction dating back to the 1820s at Harvard University.2 Courses on using 

libraries emerged at a number of colleges and universities after the Civil War. 

Until well into the twentieth century, however, librarians largely focused 

their instructional efforts on giving tours of library buildings and teaching 

the use of the local card catalog. Beginning in the 1960s, the role of librarians 

in instruction was broadened due to such factors as increases in the sheer 

size of library collections; the emergence of such technologies as microfilm, 

photocopiers, and classroom projection; and new educational emphases on 

active-learning techniques like self-directed learning and group participation. 

Rather than teaching people how to locate items in a given library, practitio-

ners of information literacy recognized that all learners must be equipped 

with the transferable skills required to identify, organize, and cite informa-

tion. Even more importantly, information literacy embraced teaching people 

how to critically evaluate the credibility and appropriateness of information 

sources; as it turns out, information literacy has always been about teaching 

the very skills a person needs to navigate today’s complex information land-

scape, a landscape that includes wide swaths of fake news.

In the digital world, information literacy is a far more complex subject 

than in those times when almost all information came in a physical package of 

one form or another. Before the web really caught on in the mid to late 1990s, 

the average person’s hunting ground for information was located entirely in 

the nondigital world and, by the standards of the twenty-first century, was 

rather limited: subscriptions to a local newspaper and perhaps a handful of 

national magazines, whatever books were included in one’s personal library, 

the content of television and radio broadcasts, plus the collections of the 

nearest academic or public libraries. In so limited a universe of information, 

achieving information literacy—while still a challenge—was less daunting 

than it is in a digital world where information overload is the one constant, 

and the old standards of objectivity and factuality seem to have been tossed 

into the same waste bin containing the pay phone and the foldable road map.

Anyone who wishes to make sense of so crowded and chaotic a landscape 

would do well to seek out a seasoned guide. Perhaps a guide like me: an infor-

mation professional who started his career in a nondigital world, transitioned 

P R E F A C E  

xi

to the digital world, and has devoted thousands of hours to helping people 

like you become independent, information-literate thinkers.

THE IMPACT OF FAKE NEWS ON INFORMATION LITERACY

As a librarian and an author, I see the explosion of interest in fake news as 

both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that the interest in fake news has 

created a great opportunity for teaching people to become more information 

literate. Historically, schools and colleges have treated information literacy as 

something of an orphan subject, never providing it with the type of perma-

nent administrative home enjoyed by service courses like freshman writing or 

introductory mathematics. As the domain of librarians rather than teaching 

faculty, full-fledged courses in information literacy have been few; instead, in-

formation literacy was something for the librarians to “cover” during a fifty-

minute visit with a freshman writing course full of unmotivated students, 

most of whom did not understand that what the librarian was yakking about 

had the potential to improve both their grades and their lives. Since fake news 

(the topic) started making headlines, however, the situation has improved, 

with interest in information literacy hitting new highs.3 Colleges and univer-

sities are suddenly offering courses on fake news, including for-credit courses 

taught by nonlibrarian faculty. Outside of educational institutions, ordinary 

people are seeking guidance on how to sort out trustworthy information from 

the torrent of unreliable chatter. Truth is, this book would not exist if the fake 

news phenomenon had not created a demand that the publisher of this book 

believes will translate into sales and profits.

The fake news phenomenon is also, in some ways, a curse. For one thing, 

fake news became—almost instantly—an extraordinarily politicized term 

with multiple meanings. This makes approaching fake news from anything 

like an objective point of view almost impossible. In January 2017 I published 

what I intended to be a fairly objective article on the topic of fake news only to 

immediately see comments accusing me of political bias.4 Perhaps the worst 

outcome of the fake news phenomenon would be if all the sound and fury sur-

rounding it turns out to be nothing more than a flavor-of-the-month moral 

panic that is forgotten as soon as the world turns its attention to the next 

cause or crisis to come barreling down the path. What would be most unfor-

tunate about such an outcome is that the need to be information literate is 

not going away just because the hubbub over fake news happens to fade. The 

xii 

P R E F A C E

problem of untrustworthy information will always be with us. Untrustworthy 

information existed long before the birth of social media platforms that are 

not yet old enough to get a driver’s license (much less buy a drink), and it will 

likely be around for centuries after those platforms have been forgotten by all 

but the most dedicated historians of technology.

ORGANIZATION AND PURPOSE

Chapter 1 of this book begins with a hypothetical example: What if social 

media as we know it in 2017 had existed in 1964, the year the surgeon general 

of the United States released his report on the health impacts of smoking? 

Would the success society has enjoyed in improving human health through 

reduced smoking have survived a full-on social media onslaught, or would 

the antismoking efforts of the last fifty years have never gotten off the ground? 

This then leads to a consideration of why making decisions on the basis of 

good information matters—in spite of the fact that information, as a human 

creation, has its limits. Chapter 2 provides definitions and examples (historical 

and contemporary) of propaganda and fake news and considers what aspects 

of the fake news phenomenon are actually new versus those which have been 

around since long before the Digital Age. This chapter also describes how 

technology can be used to create deceptive information. Chapter 3 describes 

some of the most common tricks used to pass off deceptive information as 

credible, while chapter 4 focuses on the misuse of logical fallacies. Chapter 5 

lists and illustrates nine questions everyone should ask when evaluating infor-

mation. Chapter 6 looks at how statistics are used to illuminate as well as to 

obfuscate and offers practical suggestions for understanding credible statistics 

and spotting the misuse of statistical information. Chapter 7 examines the 

special case of scholarly information, covering the (often underappreciated) 

importance of scholarly information, the basics of the scientific method, and 

the strengths and weaknesses of scholarly information. Finally, chapter 8 lists 

and describes online tools to help information seekers evaluate the credibility 

of the information they encounter.

The intention of this book is to transcend the current furor over fake news 

by providing readers with durable techniques for evaluating information in 

almost any form and for almost any purpose, whether it be educational, per-

sonal, or professional. If I do my job well, nobody will look at this book ten 

years from now and say, “Oh, that’s so 2017.” While writing this book, I en-

P R E F A C E  

xiii

deavored to take as objective an approach as is humanly possible, understand-

ing that perfect objectivity is not possible. It is certainly not my intention to 

paint any one group as the villains of the fake news phenomenon. As a stu-

dent of the history of information, I know all too well that lies, exaggerations, 

and deception are not the exclusive domain of any one party, creed, or calling. 

There is plenty of blame to go around. My hope is that by having written a 

book that is worthy of the reader’s trust, this book will appeal to, and serve 

well, anyone who cares about the trustworthiness of the information they 

encounter, including parents and teachers who want to help children become 

information-literate students and citizens.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all of my library colleagues around the world for their 

dedication to providing those they serve with access to information and for 

their efforts in helping people evaluate the information that informs their 

academic, professional, personal, and civic lives.

Thank you, Caroline, for reading the chapters as I wrote them and for your 

brilliant advice and clearheaded insight (especially regarding statistics).

xv

1

Credible Information

Why It Matters,  

What Are Its Limitations

FAKE NEWS TO THE FORE

On December 3, 2016, a twenty-eight-year-old man from North Carolina 

walked into a Washington, DC, pizza parlor, pointed a rifle at an employee, 

and then fired three shots (none of which hit anyone.)1 He wasn’t trying to 

rob the place. Following his arrest, the man told police he was investigating 

a conspiracy theory that claimed (without the backing of even one shred of 

credible evidence) that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the 

restaurant. That particular conspiracy theory was one of many fanned by a 

worldwide fake news phenomenon. By the final months of 2016, fake news it-

self had grown to become one of the biggest non–fake news stories of the year.

While the phrase fake news rose to prominence in 2016, fake news is really 

just the latest name for the ancient art of lying. Since the dawn of language, 

humans have used lies for many purposes: blaming, persuading, winning ar-

guments, exerting dominance. Lying can even be used as a form of entertain-

ment, as evidenced by the many forms of comedy—such as tall tales, pranks, 

and absurdist humor—that depend on the bending or breaking of the truth. 

To lie is, in essence, to supply others with misinformation. Fake news, lies, 

rumors, fibs, propaganda—all are synonyms for misinformation. The conse-

quences of misinformation can range from the trivial (because your car’s GPS 

system slightly misinformed you about the best route to your destination, you 

1

2 

C H A P T E R   1

drove a mile farther than necessary), to the alarming (three bullet holes in a 

pizza joint and a lot of terrified citizens), to the tragic (more than once in hu-

man history, propaganda has begotten genocide).

If anything good has come from the recent furor over fake news, it is 

that fake news has highlighted the importance of making sure that the in-

formation we take in and, especially, the information we share is credible. 

Perhaps more than at any time in history, people are at least discussing 

the importance of evaluating information before allowing it to drive their 

decisions, whether those decisions be who to vote for, what car to buy, or 

whether it is a good idea to take a rifle into a pizza parlor in the pursuit of 

imaginary pedophiles.

EVALUATING INFORMATION: AN ESSENTIAL SKILL IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Centuries from now it is likely that people will refer to the age in which we 

live as the Digital Age, just as we refer to earlier ages by such names as the 

Industrial Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Stone Age. The 

reason for this, of course, is that digital technology has so filled today’s 

world with information as to make information the defining characteris-

tic of the times in which we live. Millions now make their living working 

with information, just as millions once made their living working with raw 

materials like steel or wood. In the twenty-first century, even production-

oriented fields like agriculture, mining, and manufacturing employ modern 

information technology to improve productivity and increase profits. While 

living in a world filled with easily accessible information can be a wonderful 

thing, the problem for people who must use information to make impor-

tant decisions impacting their private and public lives is that not all the 

information is credible. The challenge, therefore, for those of us living in 

the Digital Age is to develop skills for evaluating information, the skills for 

separating information that is credible enough to be useful from that which 

is not. Helping readers develop the skills for evaluating information is, in a 

nutshell, the purpose of this book.

C R E D I B L E   I N F O R M A T I O N  

3

S M O K I N G   A N D   H E A L T H :   

A N   A L T E R N A T I V E   H I S T O R Y

Imagine that you are a resident of the United States and that the 

date is Saturday, January 11, 1964. Less than two months have 

passed since the shocking assassination of President John F. 

Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. It is almost certain that you know about 

the assassination due to the heavy coverage it received in both 

the print and broadcast media. In particular, the coverage of the 

assassination by the national television networks—of which there 

are only three—was unprecedented in its depth.

In about a month from this date in 1964, the Beatles will appear 

on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. US news coverage of 

the Beatles has been, thus far, so scant that it is quite possible 

the names John, Paul, George, and Ringo mean nothing to you. 

Not yet, anyway.

What stands out about this particular Saturday is that Luther 

Terry, the surgeon general of the United States, has chosen it 

to release a 387-page document entitled Smoking and Health: 

Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the 

United States.2 Though not the first nor the last scientific report 

on the harmful effects of smoking, Smoking and Health emphati-

cally and authoritatively connects the dots between smoking and 

a number of serious health conditions, including emphysema, 

heart disease, low birth weight, and lung cancer. Terry opts for 

a Saturday release so as to not cause any ripples in the stock 

markets. A Saturday release also ensures that the report will be 

covered in the Sunday newspapers, an important source of infor-

mation for Americans in 1964.

Now imagine further that the digital technology of 2016 had ex-

isted on the day Smoking and Health was released. How might 

social media and other forms of digital communication respond?

4 

C H A P T E R   1

Even before anyone has had time to read the entire report, Smok-

ing and Health is being mocked as a nanny-government affront 

to individual liberty. Tweets and Facebook posts lead the attack 

(see figures 1.1 and 1.2). Satirical memes soon follow (figure 1.3).

Next are the many click-bait news stories with enticing headlines 

like

Have You Seen the Ten Reasons Why Cigarettes Cannot Possibly 

Cause Cancer? You’ll Be Amazed. . . .

Five False Conclusions Contained in the Surgeon General’s Report. 

Smoke Out the Facts. . . .

Within a few weeks, pro-smoking activists are promoting a heav-

ily edited attack video in which US Public Health Service staff 

appear to admit that the surgeon general’s report is based on 

fake science and the connection between smoking and cancer 

is a complete fabrication. Even though the video is thoroughly 

discredited, it receives over five hundred thousand views on 

YouTube while generating tens of thousands of disparaging 

comments from outraged smokers.

FIGURE 1.1

Tweeting about Smoking and Health. National Archives photograph.

C R E D I B L E   I N F O R M A T I O N  

5

FIGURE 1.2

A Facebook user weighs in. New York Public Library photo. U.S. Govern-

ment Document.

FIGURE 1.3

The surgeon general gets the meme treatment. Donald A. Barclay

6 

C H A P T E R   1

Howard Cullman, a director of the Philip Morris company, bluntly 

says of the findings published in Smoking and Health, “We don’t 

accept the idea that there are harmful agents in tobacco.”3 Soon, 

ostensibly scientific articles reporting results contradicting the 

conclusions of Smoking and Health begin to appear in “preda-

tory journals”—nominally scientific, online-only journals that will 

publish almost anything in exchange for payment. While at first 

glance these articles appear to be legitimate, they are not based 

on genuine scientific research and their findings are either exag-

gerated or simply made up. Many suspect that Big Tobacco is se-

cretly funding both the wave of fake scientific articles and a good 

part of the social-media churn slamming the surgeon general’s 

report. Some accuse Big Tobacco of using machine-generated 

tweets and Facebook posts to make the opposition to Smoking 

and Health seem more widespread than it actually is.

Because 1964 is an election year, both houses of Congress re-

spond to the growing digital uproar by holding hearings. During 

testimony, representatives and senators from tobacco-growing 

states, as well as their colleagues who receive campaign financing 

from Big Tobacco, are especially hostile to the surgeon general 

and the team of medical advisers who contributed to Smoking 

and Health. Sensing an opportunity, presidential candidate Barry 

Goldwater (a lifelong nonsmoker) repeatedly denounces the link 

between cancer and smoking as a communist-inspired hoax. 

With an eye on the opinion polls, President Lyndon Johnson (an 

on-again, off-again smoker) distances his administration from 

the surgeon general’s report, choosing instead to expend his 

political capital on addressing the growing crisis in Vietnam and 

shepherding civil rights legislation through the House and Sen-

ate. After all the uproar, Smoking and Health is filed away and 

forgotten. Across the country and around the world, cigarette 

smokers cough sighs of relief.

Of course, there was no digital social media in 1964. Rather than 

being filed away and forgotten, the scientific findings reported in 

C R E D I B L E   I N F O R M A T I O N  

7

Smoking and Health were widely accepted (in spite of the best 

efforts of Big Tobacco to spread disinformation and discredit le-

gitimate scientific research). Thanks to the many antismoking ini-

tiatives launched in the wake of Smoking and Health, the United 

States saw smoking rates for adults drop from 42.4 percent in 

1965 (the peak year for smoking in the United States) to 16.8 per-

cent in 2014.4 The transformation of cigarette smoking from an 

accepted part of daily life to a borderline-taboo habit was a major 

public health victory that directly led to millions of people living 

longer, healthier lives while saving the nation billions in health 

care costs associated with smoking and secondhand smoke.5 

Even among present-day smokers, it is hard to find anyone who 

believes it would have been for the best if the scientific facts 

championed by Smoking and Health had been buried under a 

landslide of uninformed popular opinion. And while there are 

those who believe smoking is an individual choice that should 

not be controlled by government regulations, very few actively 

long for a society in which the population still smokes like it was 

1964.

The box contains an exercise in alternative history; the point of this indul-

gence is simple: facts and truth matter. Information matters. Matters enough 

that it can change the world. Though some glibly claim that we now live in 

a “post-truth world,” the reality is that if human beings, both as individuals 

and as members of a larger society, are going to make the best possible deci-

sions regarding just about everything that affects their lives, they had better 

base these decision on credible information rather than on wishful thinking, 

fantasies, or outright falsehoods.

INFORMATION, DECISION MAKING, AND PRACTICAL REASON

The study of information is a broad and complex topic with branches reach-

ing into such academic fields as computer science, philosophy, and the 

8 

C H A P T E R   1

social sciences. Something as seemingly straightforward as the definition of 

information is, in fact, complex and controversial enough to spark intense 

philosophical debates. The approach throughout this book, however, is to 

consider information through the lens of practical reason, which has been 

defined as “the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the 

question of what one is to do.”6 Through this lens, the practical purpose of 

information can be seen as helping human beings decide what to do and, by 

extension, what to believe. While in some ways such an approach to informa-

tion is overly simplistic, it lends itself to the real-world needs of information 

seekers who are trying to make the best possible decisions based on the best 

possible information.

I N F O R M A T I O N   A N D   T H E   I N C I D E N T 

C O M M A N D E R

For a dramatic example of the way credible information informs 

decision making, consider the case of a professional firefighter 

who has been appointed the incident commander (i.e., the per-

son in charge) of a growing wildfire. The fire has already spread 

to two thousand acres on a hot and windy summer day, and in 

order to safely and effectively respond to this fire, the incident 

commander must make the best possible decisions based on 

accurate and up-to-date information touching on a number of 

factors: 

■

The fire’s current perimeter and rate of spread

■

Topography of the area in which the fire is burning

■

Amount, types, and dryness of the fuel in the area

■

Current and expected weather conditions

■

Location of roads, structures, and water sources

C R E D I B L E   I N F O R M A T I O N  

9

■

Whereabouts of civilians and firefighters

■

The type and number of firefighting resources currently avail-

able, additional resources on the way, and when those addi-

tional resources will arrive

While this is just a partial list of information an incident com-

mander needs, it dramatically illustrates the fact that good deci-

sion making calls for credible information. If, for example, an 

incident commander were falsely informed that a fire was burn-

ing in sparse grass on flat ground when it was actually burning 

in heavy chaparral on a 60 percent slope, any decisions based on 

that faulty information could be disastrous, possibly even fatal, 

for firefighters and civilians alike.

SOME REALITIES OF INFORMATION

Becoming adept at evaluating information means understanding and accept-

ing the fact that information, though powerful, has its limits. As a product 

of human thought and human effort, information is often problematic and 

always less than perfect. Anyone who approaches the evaluation of informa-

tion with the idea that any information that falls short of perfection must be 

rejected is bound to be disappointed.

With that in mind, the realities of information described in the following 

pages are

■

the credibility continuum

■

information, knowledge, and skill

■

tricky facts

■

information, interpretation, and opinion

■

the expertise factor

10 

C H A P T E R   1

The Credibility Continuum

For the purposes of evaluating information, it is vital to understand that 

credibility exists on a continuum rather than in separate spheres of true and 

false information. Indeed, those who approach the evaluation of information 

with a binary mind-set—“It’s either true or it’s false, no middle ground”—are 

setting themselves up for failure.

You will sometimes hear people speak of “bad information.” That phrase 

is problematic because thinking of information as either bad or good is overly 

simplistic. Yes, there is bad information of the sort that is completely made 

up out of whole cloth:

■

Albert Einstein invented the xylophone.

■

The fourth letter of the English alphabet is z.

■

The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.

And, yes, there is good information that is as 100 percent truthful as anything 

created by fallible humanity can be:

■

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.

■

π, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is approximated at 

3.14.

■

Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1928.

If all information fit neatly into the categories of “good information” 

(completely true) and “bad information” (completely false), then evaluating 

information would be relatively easy. The problem is that we inhabit a world 

in which vast amounts of information fall somewhere in between the two 

extremes of the credibility continuum. The challenge facing anyone evalu-

ating information is not, in most cases, deciding between true or false, but 

rather where on the credibility continuum a piece of information lies and, in 

the end, deciding when any given piece of information is credible enough to 

fulfill a given information need.

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11

T H R E E   C O M M O N   I N F O R M A T I O N 

F R U S T R A T I O N S

Information can frustrate in a number of ways. The three frustra-

tions listed here are so common that almost anyone who seeks 

information is bound to encounter them, usually sooner rather 

than later.

Intentionally Falsified Information

Human beings intentionally create false information. This, in 

essence, is what the fake news furor is all about. The reasons 

for intentionally creating false information vary widely. German 

industrialist Oskar Schindler famously falsified information to 

save the lives of Jewish inmates of Nazi concentration camps. 

Stockbroker Bernard Madoff notoriously falsified information to 

defraud thousands of investors. The Onion creates fake news 

stories for comedic purposes (and to earn advertising revenues). 

The list of reasons for intentionally creating false information 

goes on and on. Whatever the motivation of its creators, inten-

tionally false information has the potential to sow confusion and 

spread misinformation.

Unintentionally False Information

False information can be created unintentionally. For example, 

someone may honestly believe with every fiber of their being 

that they saw Elvis singing to Bigfoot at a rest stop on Interstate 

40; however, sincerity of belief does not make their Facebook 

post reporting Elvis in concert with Bigfoot a credible source of 

information. For a real-world example, there is the case of two 

physicists at the University of Utah who, in 1989, claimed to have 

produced energy using tabletop cold fusion and subsequently 

published a scientific paper outlining their methodology and re-

12 

C H A P T E R   1

sults.7 If the physicists’ findings about cold fusion were correct, it 

would mean limitless clean energy for the entire world. However, 

no other scientists were ever able to replicate the results docu-

mented by paper’s authors and the research has been discred-

ited. There is no evidence that the two physicists who conducted 

the experiment and published the paper were trying to deceive 

anyone; they simply made an error when measuring their results. 

Should they have been more careful? Yes. Were they being dis-

honest? No. Does it make any difference if the false information 

that misleads you was created by mistake rather than by intent? 

Not really.

Information That Is Not There

It can be extremely frustrating to learn that information you 

would very much like to have simply does not exist. Informa-

tion is not a naturally occurring substance like oxygen or water. 

Unless someone has made a record of something by writing it 

down, drawing it, mapping it, capturing it on camera, entering it 

into a database, or otherwise recording it in a fixed format, the 

information about that something will not exist. A scholar who 

studies the history of slavery might very much wish for a data-

base containing the age, sex, birth name, place of origin, native 

language, and tribal affiliation of every person ever forced onto a 

slave ship and transported from Africa to the New World. While 

that information could exist in theory, it does not exist in fact. 

Why? Because the data was never recorded in the first place. 

Those who profited from the slave trade could have recorded 

all that information—and a lot more—about the unfortunate 

individuals caught up in the horror of human slavery, but they 

did not put themselves to the trouble. A more modern example 

of missing information is the case of statistics on police shoot-

ings in the United States. Because local police agencies are not 

required to submit data on police shootings to the US Bureau of 

Justice Statistics, there is a dearth of reliable statistics on police 

shootings in the United States even though many people would 

like to have that information for both current and past years.8

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13

A second reason for missing information is that the permanent 

record of the information has been destroyed. The destruction 

of the Great Library of Alexandria (which was likely due to a 

series of events starting in the first century BCE and ending in 

the seventh century BCE rather than a single cataclysmic sack-

ing and burning) is often cited as one of the greatest losses of 

information in human history, in part because almost every 

item in the Library of Alexandria was unique. For a more recent 

example of lost information, the original high-quality video-

tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing were lost after having been 

erased and reused, leaving only a low-quality video record of 

the landing.9

A third reason that desired, potentially valuable information is 

missing is that it is unobtainable by human beings, either per-

manently or thus far. An example of permanently unobtainable 

information is the data that could be acquired through the study 

of living specimens of extinct dinosaur species. An example of 

information that might someday be obtained, but which has so 

far eluded humanity, would be the formula for a cheap, safe, and 

effective cure for the common cold.

A fourth reason that desired information is not available is that 

it is a secret. Information could be a government secret, such as 

classified information concerning the activities of the police or 

military. Information could take the form of a corporate secret, 

such as the rigorously guarded formula for making Coca-Cola. Or 

the information could be a personal secret known to only one or 

just a few individuals who refuse to divulge it. An example of the 

latter is the identity of the Watergate informant known as Deep 

Throat. After being kept secret for decades by Washington Post 

reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the real identity of 

Deep Throat was revealed by a family attorney to be former Fed-

eral Bureau of Investigation assistant director Mark Felt, who by 

the time his identity was revealed was suffering from dementia 

and near death.10

14 

C H A P T E R   1

Information, Knowledge, and Skill

The plot of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope, the original film in the 

Star Wars saga, hinges on information. Possession of the plans for (i.e., in-

formation about) the dreaded Death Star drives all the action of the film. But 

what if those plans had been in a code the rebels did not have the knowledge 

to break? What if the rebels had not possessed the engineering knowledge 

to identify from those plans the Death Star’s one weakness? What if Luke 

Skywalker lacked the skill (or, more accurately, space magic) to bulls-eye the 

Death Star’s Achilles’ exhaust port and send the fans of the film home happy? 

Any of these shortcomings on the rebel side would have resulted in a very dif-

ferent outcome and a very different movie. And the point? Merely possessing 

information is not enough to make practical use of it.

Considering the more down-to-earth example of the wildfire mentioned 

earlier, merely having access to credible information is not, by itself, enough 

to result in a successful fire-suppression effort. It requires the knowledge (ac-

quired through education and training) and the skill (acquired through prac-

tice and experience) of the incident commander—along with the knowledge 

and skills of everyone involved in fighting the fire—to translate information 

about topography, weather, firefighting resources, and so on into a successful 

fire-suppression effort. If, say, a singer from the Metropolitan Opera were put 

in charge of a wildfire and supplied with the exact same information supplied 

to the incident commander, it is extremely unlikely that the outcome would 

be a successful fire-suppression effort. The average opera singer simply lacks 

the knowledge or experience—lacks the expertise—to interpret and correctly 

respond to highly technical firefighting information. For example, while the 

fact that the area in which a fire is burning has a Haines Index of 5 is signifi-

cant to an incident commander’s decision-making process, that same infor-

mation most likely means nothing to an accomplished professional singer 

who has devoted years to mastering arias but no time at all to the study of 

wildland fire suppression. Even if our hypothetical singer actually understood 

the significance of a Haines Index of 5, that knowledge by itself is not enough 

to transform a singer into an incident commander capable of making sound 

decisions based on information about the fire.

Turning the tables, assume the incident commander and the opera star 

were both handed an identical set of information: the words and music to 

Puccini’s aria “Un Bel di Vedremo.” Even if the incident commander has the 

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15

knowledge required to read the musical notes on the page, it is incredibly un-

likely that he or she possesses the skill required to sing the aria at a high level 

of artistry. The Metropolitan Opera star, on the other hand, would be entirely 

likely to have both the knowledge and the skill (let’s assume our singer is a 

soprano) to render the aria at the level expected of professional singers.

It is easy to come up with many examples demonstrating why the applica-

tion of information requires knowledge and skill. Someone with no medical 

training could have access to every bit of information required to conduct a 

heart transplant, but without the knowledge to fully understand that informa-

tion and the skill to turn the information into action (not to mention millions 

of dollars’ worth of medical gear), a successful heart transplant is not going to 

happen. Complete information about how to fly a 747 does not automatically 

turn the person who possesses it into a competent airline pilot, especially if 

that information is in a language the would-be pilot cannot read. Information 

about an academic subject is vital to the scholar, but making effective use of 

that information requires both the knowledge to understand the information 

and the skill to organize and communicate that understanding in the form of 

a written document or an oral presentation.

Tricky Facts

The fictional character of Sergeant Joe Friday from the Dragnet radio/

television/movie franchise is famously associated with the catchphrase “Just 

the facts, ma’am.” Those who struggle to evaluate the credibility of informa-

tion get Friday’s point. Why can’t all information be boiled down to just the 

essential facts? Nobody wants equivocations, ifs, or nuances—give us defini-

tive, rock-solid facts. As frustrating as it may be, the truth is that complicated 

questions about complicated topics do not lend themselves to simple answers. 

And while facts constitute the crucially important building blocks of credible 

information, facts by themselves are not sufficient to address complicated 

questions. To better understand why this is so, it is important to understand 

how the sometimes-slippery nature of facts can limit their authoritativeness.

Without zooming off into stratospheric epistemological debates, for the 

practical purpose of evaluating information it is reasonable to say that facts 

are things that are correct or that have occurred. For something to be a fact, 

it needs to be verifiable through some rational process such as gathering evi-

dence, testing, observation, measurement, experience, and so on.

16 

C H A P T E R   1

Let’s do a fact check. How would you answer this multiple-choice ques-

tion?

The length meter is equal to

A.  10 millimeters

B.  1,000 millimeters

C.  10,000 millimeters

Even if 97 percent of the people reading this book chose answer A (10 milli-

meters) or C (10,000 millimeters), the correct answer is, nonetheless, B (1,000 

millimeters). That the length of 1 meter is equal to 1,000 millimeters is a fact 

that no amount of arguing, political activism, or beseeching of the heavens is 

going to change.

The type of fact represented by “1 meter equals 1,000 millimeters” is an 

incontrovertible fact. Incontrovertible facts are so well substantiated and so 

widely accepted that rejecting them amounts to irrationality. The world is 

filled with incontrovertible facts:

■

The atomic number of the element carbon is 6.

■

Most coffee is grown in the equatorial regions of the world.

■

John Milton’s Paradise Lost begins with the words, “Of Man’s First Disobe-

dience . . .”

Though incontrovertible facts may be plentiful, not everything presented 

as a fact is necessarily an incontrovertible fact. Indeed, when someone pres-

ents a piece of information as if it were an incontrovertible fact—as politicians 

and pundits are fond of doing—it should immediately sound an alarm and 

raise the question, “Is that fact really incontrovertible? Is it really so true that 

it cannot be denied or disputed?” Incontrovertible is, after all, the highest pos-

sible standard to which any fact can be held.

More common than incontrovertible facts are conditional facts. For ex-

ample, “Water boils at 100° Celsius (212° Fahrenheit)” is a conditional fact 

because, while that statement is true, it is only true so long as the atmospheric 

pressure equals one atmosphere (the atmospheric pressure—with slight 

variations—at sea level). Because most of the world lives at altitudes where 

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17

C O M M O N   K N O W L E D G E

Common knowledge is any fact so well-known and so widely 

accepted as the truth that the average knowledgeable, educated 

reader would know it without having to look it up. What consti-

tutes common knowledge can vary from one group to another. 

For example, while the fact that Antonio José de Sucre was 

Bolivia’s first elected president would be considered common 

knowledge in Bolivia, it is not considered common knowledge in 

the United States—unless you happen to be communicating with 

a US audience made up of people who study the history of South 

America. Similarly, Boyle’s law (the pressure of a gas increases 

as the size of the container decreases) would be considered com-

mon knowledge when communicating with most scientists and 

engineers but probably not when communicating with a general 

audience. An example of common knowledge that need not be 

cited in any situation appears earlier in this chapter: 1,000 mil-

limeters equal 1 meter.

Another characteristic of common knowledge is that multiple 

reference sources define or describe it in the same way. In for-

mal academic writing, it is not necessary to cite anything that is 

considered common knowledge, though it is a good idea to cite a 

source if there is a chance that something might not be common 

knowledge to your intended audience.

the boiling point of water is close enough to the sea-level boiling point so as 

to not make much of an impact on everyday life, people tend to think of the 

100° Celsius figure as an incontrovertible fact even though it is merely con-

ditional. In the high-altitude environs of Denver, Colorado, for example, the 

boiling point of water drops to approximately 95° Celsius (203° Fahrenheit), 

forcing residents there to adjust cooking times in order to ensure that foods 

18 

C H A P T E R   1

are thoroughly cooked. Another type of a conditional fact is one that changes 

over time or varies from country to country. Trained musicians know as fact 

that the musical note A above middle C (the note the oboe plays when an 

orchestra tunes up) has a frequency of 440 Hz. While this is true today, 440 

Hz wasn’t standardized until 1939 and previous to being standardized varied 

from place to place and over time.11

There are also pseudo facts. Pseudo facts are things widely assumed to be 

facts when they are not. One example of a pseudo fact is the attribution of 

the catchphrase “Just the facts, ma’am” to Sgt. Joe Friday (referred to ear-

lier). In the entirety of Dragnet’s run on radio and television, Friday never 

uttered the exact words, “Just the facts, ma’am.” That particular wording 

was actually popularized by a parody recording entitled “St. George and the 

Dragonet.”12 Yet another example of a pseudo fact: There was a time when 

schoolchildren in the United States were routinely taught that the crew of 

Christopher Columbus’s expedition of 1492 were the first Europeans to 

visit the New World. Some may still believe this to be true. However, ar-

chaeological evidence has conclusively proven that Vikings were sailing to, 

and establishing settlements in, the New World hundreds of years before 

Columbus set out from Spain.13 A more factual statement would be, “The 

expeditions of Christopher Columbus ultimately led to the establishment of 

the first permanent European settlements in the New World.” (While some 

of the Viking New World settlements lasted for decades, all were eventually 

abandoned.)

Of course, falsehoods are sometimes presented as facts without being based 

on any reasonably credible evidence. Example: A small minority of people 

might assert as fact that Earth is flat; however, based on all reasonable evi-

dence, they might as well assert as fact that 1 meter equals 10,000 milliliters 

or that the boiling point of water at sea level is –10° Celsius.

Information, Interpretation, and Opinion

The information people are most likely to encounter in their daily lives 

is typically an interpretation of facts (of varying degrees of certainty) as well 

as other forms of evidence that, while credible, might not reach the standard 

of facts. For example, consider the statistics in table 1.1 about baseball greats 

Willie Mays and Babe Ruth, each of whom happened to have enjoyed a Major 

League Baseball career that lasted exactly twenty-two seasons.

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19

F A C T S   A R E   S T U B B O R N   T H I N G S

One of the most famous quotations about facts comes from John 

Adams, the second president of the United States:

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our 

inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the 

state of facts and evidence.

Yes, facts are stubborn—if and when they are truly incontrovert-

ible facts. Too often, things presented as facts turn out to be a 

more slippery than solid, as in the example of the boiling point 

of water. So what about the Adams quotation? Is it really a fact 

that John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things”? Yes, it is a 

fact—at least as far as it is reasonably possible to prove. A con-

temporary court document reports Adams using the previously 

quoted sentence during his successful defense of a group of Brit-

ish soldiers standing trial for murder in the wake of the Boston 

Massacre.14 The existence of that court document constitutes 

strongly convincing evidence.

Is the evidence convincing enough for us to conclude that Ad-

ams’s use of “Facts are stubborn things” is an incontrovertible 

fact? While the evidence comes close to that standard, it does not 

quite reach the level of absolute certainty. Because the court doc-

ument is the only known source for Adams’s use of the phrase, 

this leaves open the remote possibility that the words appearing 

in the court document were incorrectly recorded or intentionally 

falsified or in one way or another jumbled somewhere between 

the time of the trial itself and the actual meeting of inked type and 

paper. But even if we cannot conclude it is an incontrovertible 

fact that Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things,” the available 

evidence ranks so high on the credibility scale that the most rea-

sonable conclusion is that Adams said those words as shown in 

the court document.

20 

C H A P T E R   1

Digging a bit deeper, if you type “Facts are stubborn things” into 

a web search engine, you will retrieve a large number of sources 

citing Adams’s use of the phrase. As a result, it may seem rea-

sonable to conclude that the phrase originated with Adams. But 

is it really a fact that Adams was the first person to say, “Facts 

are stubborn things”? Absolutely not. There are many printed 

examples of the use of the phrase “Facts are stubborn things” 

that predate the Boston Massacre trial, with the earliest known 

example dating back to 1713—twenty-two years before Adams 

was born.15 Given the preponderance of evidence, it is an incon-

trovertible fact that John Adams was not the first person to use 

the phrase “Facts are stubborn things.” For it to be otherwise 

would require an unbelievably complex and improbable set of 

circumstances, quite possibly involving time travel and multiple 

conspiracies.

Finally, in a web search of “Facts are stubborn things” you may 

also come across references to President Ronald Reagan’s use 

of the phrase “Facts are stupid things” during his address to the 

1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans. Is this a 

fact? Did Ronald Reagan, as president of the United States, really 

say in a public address “Facts are stupid things?” Yes, he said it. 

It is a thoroughly documented fact. However, it is also a fact that 

Reagan immediately corrected his misstatement to say, “Facts 

are stubborn things.” In addition, he correctly used the phrase 

“Facts are stubborn things” a total of six times in the course of 

his speech.16 So while it is factual for critics of Reagan to claim 

that he publicly said “Facts are stupid things,” it would be dis-

honest of them to point to this fact, in and of itself, as conclusive 

evidence that Reagan believed facts are stupid.

Facts are facts, but they don’t necessarily add up to the truth, 

especially when used selectively or with the intent to deceive.

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21

Table 1.1.    Career Statistics of Willie Mays and Babe Ruth

Career Statistics

Willie Mays

Babe Ruth

Batting average

.302

.342

Hits

3,283

2,873

Home runs

660

714

Runs batted in

1,903

2,213

Stolen bases

338

123

The numbers in table 1.1 are, beyond any reasonable doubt, facts. How-

ever, those facts cannot definitively answer a basic question: “Who was the 

better baseball player, Willie Mays or Babe Ruth?” Any attempt to answer that 

question requires some interpretation of the facts.

Supporters of Ruth will point out that he had more career home runs and 

RBIs than Mays as well as a higher career batting average. Fan of Mays will 

counter with the fact that Mays had more career hits and nearly three times 

as many stolen bases as Ruth in spite of sacrificing—during the prime of his 

playing days—the opportunity to play in 266 Major League Baseball games 

due to his service in the US Army. That may be, the Ruthians will respond, 

but Ruth was not only a homerun-slugging outfielder, he was also a skilled 

pitcher who amassed a very respectable 94–46 win-loss record along with a 

career earned run average of 2.28.

As with many debates, the argument shifts from points that can be proven 

with facts to points supported by evidence that, while credible, requires some 

interpretation. For example, those who favor Mays will point to his amazing 

skills as a defensive outfielder. Though, almost without exception, baseball 

historians and experts agree that Mays was one of the all-time-best defensive 

outfielders while Ruth was merely average to good in the outfield, this is not 

a point that can be proven by hard numbers in the way that “Who hit more 

home runs?” or “Who accumulated the most hits?” can be proven by num-

bers. The complex components of what makes someone a great defensive 

outfielder—knowledge of opposing hitters, ability to read balls off the bat, 

speed, ability to catch and throw the ball—cannot be fully conveyed through 

historical baseball statistics.

The Ruth versus Mays argument can go on forever and is, ultimately, 

unwinnable.17 There are countless examples of similar arguments that, while 

fueled by facts and other credible evidence, can never be definitively won. An 

22 

C H A P T E R   1

example from military history is the “lions led by donkeys” theory of World 

War I. According to this theory, the soldiers of the British Army fought like 

lions while their generals behaved like donkeys, indiscriminately wasting the 

lives of their troops by refusing to abandon outdated tactics when confronted 

with the terrible realities of the twentieth century’s industrial-scale warfare. 

While similarly cynical views of British military leadership and strategy had 

been circulating since the time of World War I itself, the lions led by donkeys 

theory came dominate mainstream thinking among historians in the early 

1960s. As time when on, however, some historians began countering the 

then-dominant lions/donkeys theory by arguing that British military leader-

ship was not incompetent; that British commanders, far from being blindly 

devoted to outdated tactics, changed their tactics as the war progressed and 

learned to improvise in response to dynamic battlefield situations. It is likely 

that historians of World War I will continue to argue their conflicting points 

for decades, if not centuries, and in doing so will use numerical facts (casu-

alty rates, number of shells fired, number of machine guns per battalion, etc.) 

along with other forms of credible evidence (diaries, contemporary military 

records, historical photographs, archaeological evidence, etc.) to bolster their 

arguments.

Unwinnable arguments inevitably end up invoking opinions. While it is 

common to dismiss opinion-supported arguments as “just an opinion” (es-

pecially when those opinions contradict our own), well-informed opinions do 

carry weight and need to be considered. In the Mays versus Ruth argument, 

the opinion of, say, a hypothetical baseball professional who has played and 

coached the game, studied its history, and evaluated thousands of players at 

every level of professional baseball should carry more weight than the opin-

ion of a casual fan. This is not to say that the opinion of one baseball profes-

sional—including our hypothetical expert—is the authoritative, case-closed 

opinion on Mays versus Ruth, merely that his opinion should be taken seri-

ously and given due consideration along with the opinions of other experts 

and in light of all the other facts and evidence.

The Expertise Factor

Especially when dealing with topics outside of our immediate areas of 

knowledge and expertise, we often look to experts for guidance. Perhaps the 

most frustrating thing about turning to experts for guidance is when the opin-

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23

ions of experts conflict. How are ordinary people supposed to make sense of 

information when highly educated and experienced experts cannot agree on 

what it means? A classic example of this occurs when expert witnesses testify 

in court cases. Say that, during the course of a patent infringement lawsuit, 

the plaintiff’s attorneys swear in a computer scientist who testifies that a key 

bit of computer code is the property of company M and also asserts that 

company A clearly purloined the code for use in its new software. It is a safe 

bet that the defense attorneys will then call to the witness stand an equally 

well-qualified computer scientist whose testimony contradicts that of the 

plaintiff’s expert. How can this be? There are, in fact, a number of possible 

explanations:

■

Offers of money can cause people, even experts, to bend, if not break, the 

truth.

■

Experts are fallible human beings who sometimes make mistakes or are 

swayed by their own biases. If experts were infallible, they would always be 

in agreement.

■

An expert may offer an opinion without having access to all the pertinent 

information. In the court testimony example, the plaintiff’s attorneys could 

have withheld from their hired expert witness information about the alleg-

edly purloined computer code that, if not withheld, might have caused that 

expert to offer a different opinion in court.

■

Finally, some questions are so complex that even experts with vast amounts 

of training and experience in a specific field of study can disagree on what 

all the facts and evidence actually mean.

Another point to consider about expertise is to remember that nobody 

can be an expert in everything. In the 1984 comedy film The Adventures of 

Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, the eponymous protagonist is 

a neurosurgeon, particle physicist, rock star, and inventor all rolled into a 

cowboy-themed action hero. Of course, such an outrageous Renaissance man 

character makes sense only in the goofy context of a film like Buckaroo Ban-

zai. In the real world, any one person’s area of in-depth expertise tends to be 

limited to a narrow, highly specialized field. There are exceptions, but these 

exceptions stand out because they are so rare.

24 

C H A P T E R   1

What is not so rare is someone with expertise in one field claiming to 

have expertise in different field, sometimes for less than honorable purposes. 

And while claims to multispecialty expertise can sometimes be valid, it is 

not a given that someone with a PhD in mathematics is also an expert in 

space exploration or nutrition. Nor is a retired navy admiral whose entire 

career specialization focused on submarine warfare necessarily any more of 

an expert on infantry tactics than a retired bus driver. Expertise in any field 

must be earned and demonstrated, not automatically granted as a privilege of 

education, occupation, or office.

Finally, there are those who have no real training or experience yet some-

how pass themselves off experts. Frank Abagnale (whose story was fictional-

ized in the film Catch Me If You Can) successfully passed himself off as a 

lawyer, physician, pilot, and federal agent. All too often, fake experts end up 

quoted in news stories or appearing as guests on news programs. For one ex-

ample, in 2017 a US news network interviewed a man identified as “Sweden’s 

Defense and National Security Adviser” who turned out to have “a criminal 

record in the United States and no ties to Sweden’s security establishment.”18

“You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”

—Will Rogers19

Evaluating the credibility of any given expert is a challenging but necessary 

part of evaluating information. Later chapters in this book will go into more 

detail on techniques for evaluating individual experts as well as seeking out 

the consensus opinion of multiple experts.

WHEN IS ENOUGH EVALUATION ENOUGH?

When you encounter information that seems like it will meet your informa-

tion need, you then must evaluate its credibility. The remaining chapters of 

this book deal with techniques for how to evaluate information, but for now 

the question is “How much evaluation do I need to do before deciding if a 

piece of information is credible?” Because evaluating information requires 

time and effort, thoroughly evaluating every bit of information you encounter 

is unrealistic. Instead, the amount of effort you put into evaluating informa-

tion should be based on your information need and, specifically, on what is at 

stake in any decisions the information leads you to make.

C R E D I B L E   I N F O R M A T I O N  

25

For example, if you found a wild mushroom and needed to know if it was 

safe to eat or poisonous, you would be dealing with an extremely high-stakes 

information need. Under those circumstances, it would make sense to thor-

oughly evaluate any information telling you that the mushroom was edible 

instead of simply trusting that information at face value and serving up a 

potentially deadly fungus for dinner. On the other hand, say you were stand-

ing in front of a candy machine and you impulsively decided to purchase an 

Idaho Spud candy bar. Though you have never tried an Idaho Spud before, 

you had once seen a random Instagram post declaring it to be “the greatest 

candy bar in the history of the world.” While it is true your purchasing deci-

sion would be based on not-very-credible information, the stakes involved are 

extremely low. The worst outcome is that the Idaho Spud bar turns out to be 

not to your liking and you have wasted the small amount of money you put 

into the candy machine.20 Hardly the end of the world.

Of course, most situations that call for evaluating information fall some-

where between a life-or-death decision and the price of a candy bar. A student 

who is planning to incorporate information into a paper or presentation 

will need to decide how much effort to put into evaluating that information 

based on the importance of the assignment. Logic dictates more thoroughly 

evaluating information for a major term paper as opposed to information 

for a nightly homework assignment. A Facebook user who is thinking about 

sharing a link to an article about the latest political outrage on the part of 

“those idiots” would do well to make sure the link points to a credible article. 

If the plan is to share the link with a couple of like-minded friends via direct 

messaging, the thoroughness of the evaluation process can be less rigorous 

than when forwarding it to 347 various and sundry Facebook friends. If there 

is one sure way to quickly find yourself unfriended, it is sharing controversial 

articles without checking to make sure they are at least minimally credible.

It may help to think of evaluating information in terms of return on invest-

ment. If you were diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition and 

you invested twenty hours of your time into carefully evaluating the credibil-

ity of information concerning potentially lifesaving medical treatments, your 

return on your investment of those hours could be huge—many additional 

years of healthy living. In contrast, investing twenty hours into researching 

the credibility of a post recommending one particular brand of dish soap over 

another is unlikely to provide any return on your investment. 

26 

C H A P T E R   1

FIGURE 1.4

Balancing credibility with what is at stake if the information proves to be 

misleading. Donald A. Barclay

As there are no formulas for deciding when the credibility of any given 

piece of information is good enough for any given information need, it is up 

to the individual to make the call on a case-by-case basis (see figure 1.4). That 

said, it is hard to imagine why anyone would make even a low-stakes decision 

on information known to be 100 percent false (or close to it). At the same 

time, making a high-stakes decision on information that is less than highly 

credible would be foolhardy. In the end it is about using the highly subjec-

tive standard of due diligence when evaluating information, of adjusting the 

thoroughness of the evaluation to what is at stake in the decision that must 

be, ultimately, made.

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27

E V A L U A T I N G   I N F O R M A T I O N   A N D 

B A L A N C E

As with most things in life, evaluating information works best 

when you achieve proper balance. On the one extreme, you do 

not want to become someone who automatically rejects all infor-

mation that fails to rise to some idealized level of perfection. The 

effect of such hypervigilant evaluation of information would be 

to cut yourself off from much of what you stand to learn from the 

knowledge and experience of others. On the other extreme, there 

is no benefit to being so gullible as to accept at face value every 

bit of information that crosses your path. Uncritically accepting 

information without any evaluation is how people end up falling 

for online scams or dismaying friends and family by forwarding 

patently fake Internet rumors. Sometimes, this is how people end 

up in the back of a Washington, DC, police car facing a host of 

very serious federal charges.

RECAP

For practical purposes, we can think of information as a crucial element of the 

decision-making process. In the current Digital Age, the ability to evaluate 

information is an essential skill.

It is important to understand certain limiting realities of information:

■

The credibility of information is rarely a binary true/false proposition. For 

most information, credibility falls somewhere in between completely false 

and completely true.

■

Making productive use of information requires knowledge and skill. Simply 

possessing information is not enough if you do not understand the infor-

mation or know how to make use of it.

28 

C H A P T E R   1

■

Facts, though a crucial component of credible information, are sometimes 

tricky things to nail down and do not always tell the whole story.

■

Making use of even very credible information often requires interpretation 

and the incorporation of opinion.

■

Expert interpretation and opinion are valuable tools for making sense of 

information, but the qualifications of experts must be evaluated.

The amount of evaluation any piece of information requires depends on what 

is at stake. Information that informs important decisions demands more 

evaluation than information that informs less important decisions. Users of 

information must practice due diligence in evaluating information.

As important as credible information is to the decisions we make, it is 

worth remembering that information is a tool, not a magic wand. No matter 

how credible, timely, or exhaustive any given body or piece of information 

may be, information by itself cannot cure a disease, improve the economy, or 

plant a crop. Like all tools, the ultimate value of information depends on both 

the ability of people to use it and the purposes for which they choose to use it.

In an ideal world, only the most credible information informs public deci-

sions about such important matters as the economy, the environment, justice, 

education, and national defense. The same holds true for personal decisions 

about such matters as finance, career choices, health, and child rearing. For 

students, information drives decisions about how to answer test and home-

work questions, what to write in essays, and how to develop presentations. 

Regardless of who is using the information or what they are using it for, de-

mocracies, families, and individuals cannot thrive if their important decisions 

are based on information that is not credible.

2

Fake News as Phenomenon

(Almost) Nothing New  

Under the Sun

As previously mentioned, stories about the fake news phenomenon made 

headlines and blew up on social media during the latter part of 2016. It may 

be that the furor over fake news is the reason you are reading this book and 

why you are interested in becoming more skilled at evaluating information. 

Fake news, though, is one of those troublesome phrases that gets casually 

tossed around by different people in different ways. In light of this, it is worth 

taking some time to define our terms.

FAKE NEWS

What is fake news? A seemingly simple question that is not so simple to an-

swer (see figure 2.1).

If you follow the lead of some politicians and their most devoted follow-

ers, fake news is defined as “anything that reports something I don’t want to 

believe.” This is not an accurate or useful definition of fake news, as it permits 

the label fake news to be applied to information that is highly credible and not 

at all fake. Employing so subjective and narrow a definition, the government 

of North Korea could brand as fake news any reports that the people of South 

Korea lead lives that are more prosperous and freer than those led by the 

people of North Korea—in spite of the fact that those reports are highly cred-

ible and, as far as questions of prosperity and individual freedom go, easily 

verified. Similarly, an individual who refuses to believe that racism exists in 

29

30 

C H A P T E R   2

FIGURE 2.1

The many faces of fake news. istock/ jax10289

the United States could label as fake news any reports to the contrary, regard-

less of whether those reports are credible.

Tossing aside the “anything I don’t want to hear” definition, it is fair to ask 

if fake news is the same thing as propaganda (a topic discussed in detail later). 

This is a tricky question. Instead of setting off propaganda as something 

distinct from fake news, it is more accurate to see propaganda as a subset of 

fake news. As a subset, propaganda is distinguished from other types of fake 

news in that propaganda is intentionally created to advance a specific politi-

cal, organizational, or commercial agenda—something that is not true of all 

fake news.

In the broadest definition, then, fake news is any information that is inten-

tionally created under the pretense that it is credible when, in reality, it is not.

Forms of Fake News

To define fake news, it helps to consider the various forms in which it 

comes. Of course, there is not universal agreement on what those forms are. 

Journalist Claire Wardle identifies seven types of “mis and disinformation”: 

1.  Satire or parody

2.  Misleading content

3.  Imposter content

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31

4.  Fabricated content

5.  False connection

6.  False context

7.  Manipulated content1

Academics Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, who define fake news as 

“news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead 

readers,” identify fewer types of fake news than does Wardle:

■

Intentionally fabricated news articles

■

Satirical articles that can be misinterpreted as nonsatirical

They also exclude several “close cousins of fake news” from their definition:

■

Unintentional reporting mistakes

■

Rumors that are not the product of a specific fake news article

■

Conspiracy theories

■

Satirical articles that are unlikely to be seen as nonsatirical

■

Lies told by politicians

■

Information that is slanted or misleading but not completely false2

Of course, other scholars and commentators will have their own takes on 

the various types of fake news. For the purpose of this book, I choose to divide 

fake news into three broad categories.

Mercenary Fake News

As the name implies, mercenary fake news is created for the purpose 

of making money with no intent on the part of its creators to further any 

particular political, organizational, or commercial agenda. In the digital mar-

ketplace, the owners of a website that includes paid advertisements stand to 

receive a small sum every time someone clicks to one of their pages. Neither 

the reason why a visitor lands on a web page nor the content of a web page 

matters to the advertiser who is making the payment—the entire financial 

transaction is entirely based on the number of visitors. Although each pay-

ment is small, total payments can add up to large sums. This is where fake 

news enters the financial picture.

32 

C H A P T E R   2

In August 2016 the Guardian reported that teenagers in the small town 

of Veles, Macedonia, were running over 150 websites featuring mostly pro–

Donald Trump fake new articles. Rather than having any politically moti-

vated interest in the US elections, the owners of these websites were creating 

fake news stories as a way to earn money. The websites featured pro-Trump 

articles simply because these generated more income than pro-Clinton arti-

cles.3 Similarly, in March 2017, 60 Minutes reported on a American purveyor 

of fake news who claimed to have no political motivations yet was earning 

$10,000 a month from advertising revenues generated by such fabricated 

stories as a report that the US Army had quarantined an entire Texas town 

due to an Ebola outbreak and another claiming that anyone who signs up for 

Obamacare would be implanted with a RFID tracking chip.4 Claims of non-

partisan intent by the creators of mercenary fake news aside, the effect of their 

fake news articles can be identical to that of propaganda pieces.

Clickbait articles, which use alluring, often sensationalistic headlines to 

attract readers, can be considered a form a mercenary fake news, especially 

when the connection between the headlines and the actual content of the 

article is tenuous.

Fake News with an Agenda

When fake news is intentionally created to promote a specific agenda, 

it becomes part of the subset of the fake news called propaganda. There 

are any number of websites and online commentators who deal entirely or 

largely in propagandistic fake news, though few would openly admit to be-

ing a propagandist.

Satirical Fake News

An entirely different genre of fake news consists of satirical stories created 

for purposes of humor as well as, in many cases, political or social commen-

tary. Jonathan Swift’s famous satirical essay “A Modest Proposal” is darkly 

humorous due to the preposterous nature of the barbaric “solution” (i.e., eat-

ing infants) it offers for reducing poverty in Ireland, yet, at the same time, the 

essay serves as a critical commentary on both the political situation in Ireland 

and the then-common practice of pamphleteers offering up impractical, half-

baked solutions to complex problems. The long-running web publication The 

Onion is perhaps the leading US source of satirical fake news stories, though 

F A K E   N E W S   A S   P H E N O M E N O N  

33

it is certainly not the only such source. Taken out of context, satirical stories 

can be mistaken for serious news and opinion. For just one of many recent ex-

amples, in March 2017 several Chinese publications reported as serious news 

a satirical story about President Donald Trump that was originally published 

as humor in the New Yorker.5

PROPAGANDA AS A SUBSET OF FAKE NEWS

Propaganda is a subset of fake news that is typically used to further a political 

agenda, though it also may be used to further nonpolitical agendas. The word 

propaganda is so loaded with negative connotations that labeling any informa-

tion as propaganda is to characterize it as both a lie and inherently malevolent. 

Few creators of information ever want to hear their handiwork labeled as propa-

ganda. However, propaganda does not necessarily serve an ill purpose. During 

World War II, the Allies constantly churned out propaganda as part of the effort 

to defeat the Axis Powers, something most people would consider to be at least 

a legitimate (if not a straight-up virtuous) use of propaganda. Similarly, while 

public service announcements against social ills like drunk driving or bullying 

may be quite propagandistic, their intention is to further a worthwhile cause.

Propaganda is not a new phenomenon, having been around for a couple of 

millennia now. The oldest example of written propaganda is a description of 

the conquests of Darius the Great dating from circa 515 BCE. Since that time, 

the world has endured an almost constant stream of propaganda generated by 

societies as diverse as Ancient Rome, the Qing Dynasty, and (perhaps most 

notoriously) Nazi Germany. In the present day, any number of countries 

employ propaganda on a regular basis, with North Korea standing out as a 

leading contemporary example of a propaganda state. That said, propaganda 

is not the exclusive property of any one nation, creed, or political party—the 

backers of just about every cause have employed propaganda at one time or 

another to exaggerate the greatness of their cause, denigrate the other side, 

or, most commonly, do both. Propaganda is often divided into three types:

1.  White propaganda: the propagandist openly acknowledges authorship of 

the propaganda.

2.  Gray propaganda: the authorship of the propaganda is left ambiguous.

3.  Black propaganda: the author of the propaganda falsely attributes author-

ship to an opponent.

34 

C H A P T E R   2

Propaganda does not necessarily have to originate from a government or 

other organization. Private individuals with no official connection to any gov-

ernment or organization can serve as propagandists. For a notorious example 

of the latter, in 1933 Walter Duranty, then the Moscow correspondent for the 

New York Times, filed stories from the Soviet Union downplaying the sever-

ity of a devastating famine that was at the time raging with particular sever-

ity in the Ukraine, where millions would perish from starvation and related 

diseases by the time the famine had run its course. Though Duranty’s stories 

proved to be effective propaganda for dictator Josef Stalin and the Soviet 

government, Duranty was neither part of that government nor on their pay-

roll. In a 1990 New York Times opinion piece which labels Duranty’s reports 

on the famine as “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper,” 

Duranty himself is characterized as

neither Communist nor swayed by Moscow gold. Instead, his failings reflected 

a more mundane affliction: he succumbed to a thesis. Having bet his reputation 

on Stalin, he strove to preserve it by ignoring or excusing Stalin’s crimes. He 

saw what he wanted to see.6

Whether you consider Duranty to be an arch villain or a supreme fool, his 

fixation on seeing only what he wanted to see—in spite of the very strong evi-

dence to the contrary—is an all-too-common human failing. At one time or 

another, most of us fall into the same trap into which Duranty fell: our filters 

prevent us from taking in information that contradicts our biases. The differ-

ence is that the average person’s brushes with shortsightedness and wishful 

thinking do not, typically, contribute to the deaths of millions or end up in 

the history books.

Whatever its source of origin, most propaganda mixes a small amount of 

fact with a large dose of fiction. One notorious piece of propaganda which 

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party was particularly fond of promoting centered on 

the so-called stab-in-the-back myth. According to the stab-in-the-back 

myth, the German Army of World War I was never defeated in the field but 

was, instead, betrayed—stabbed in the back—by the traitorous “November 

criminals” who signed the armistice on November 11, 1918. In the eyes of the 

Nazis, the November criminals were part and parcel of the Nazi Party’s tradi-

tional scapegoats: Bolsheviks, the various supporters of the interwar Weimar 

F A K E   N E W S   A S   P H E N O M E N O N  

35

Republic, and, especially, Jews. There was a tiny bit of truth to the Nazis’ stab-

in-the-back myth in that, by 1918, large segments of the German population 

were no longer supportive of the war effort and just wanted the fighting to 

end. As the privations caused by the war worsened, Germany experienced an-

tiwar strikes by industrial workers as well as a major antiwar mutiny among 

German Navy personnel that began in early November 1918. However, the 

bulk of the stab-in-the-back myth was a complete, self-serving fabrication—

especially the contention that the German Army was never defeated in the 

field. After overextending itself in the spring of 1918, the German Army was 

collapsing under the weight of the combined armies of France, Britain, and 

the United States and had no chance of winning the war by the time the ar-

mistice was signed. It was also a lie that the Nazis’ scapegoats were to blame 

for Germany’s defeat. The truth is that one hundred thousand Jewish soldiers 

fought for Germany in World War I, with twelve thousand of that number 

dying on the battlefield.7

Because what deserves to be labeled as propaganda is highly subjective, it 

is no surprise that one person’s propaganda may be another person’s truth. A 

typical supporter of Adolf Hitler would have no more considered the poster 

shown in figure 2.2 to be propaganda than a typical American of 1944 would 

have considered comic books featuring Captain America to be propaganda.

Propaganda, Public Relations, and Advertising

Although propaganda is most closely associated with political aims, its 

definition can be expanded to include such nonpolitical activities as public 

relations and advertising.

Public Relations

Such organizations as private-sector businesses, government agencies, and 

schools pay public relations specialists to enhance their image in the eyes of 

the public. When things go especially wrong—a company is accused of selling 

a dangerous product or an agency is called out for mismanagement—public 

relations staff can turn to propaganda in order to fight back against the resul-

tant negative publicity. In the wake of a shocking sex-abuse scandal that broke 

in November 2011, Penn State University contracted with the world’s larg-

est public relations firm in the hopes of rebuilding the university’s severely 

tarnished image. One week after the contract was signed, a media consultant 

FIGURE 2.2

A typical example of Nazi propaganda, this poster glorifies militarism, nationalism, 

and sacrifice. The text translates as “We will create the new Germany. Think of the 

sacrifices—elect National Socialists.” Library of Congress

F A K E   N E W S   A S   P H E N O M E N O N  

37

with connections to the head of Penn State’s new public relations firm pub-

lished an opinion piece in USA Today entitled “Penn State Deserves Great 

Praise.” As the title suggests, the author effusively cheers Penn State’s efforts 

to recover from the scandal.8 It does not require a great deal of skepticism 

to conclude that this ostensibly impartial opinion piece crosses the border 

between public relations and propaganda.

Advertising

Commercial advertising is another form of information that might be con-

sidered propaganda. There is no arguing that one hallmark of propaganda—

mixing a little truth with a lot of fabrication—is also a hallmark of commercial 

advertising. Brand X may be offering up a bit of truth when it claims nine out 

of ten doctors recommend it over brand Y, but what brand X’s advertisement 

fails to point out is that a total of only ten handpicked, well-compensated doc-

tors were surveyed while thousands of doctors brand X did not contact would 

never in a million years recommend its product.

The tobacco industry is especially notorious for its relentless, decades-long 

campaign to promote cigarette smoking through advertising. Cigarettes have 

been advertised through every conceivable medium, including billboards, 

newspapers, magazines, radio, film, television, sports sponsorships, and the 

Internet. Throughout the twentieth century, cigarette advertisements were 

such an important source of income for US magazines that only a handful—

including Reader’s Digest, the New Yorker, National Geographic, Good House-

keeping, and Washington Monthly—refused to run cigarette advertisements. 

The fascinating online exhibit “Not a Cough in a Carload” documents how 

magazine advertisements for cigarettes employed images of doctors, sports 

figures, celebrities, athletes, and even babies to promote cigarette smoking 

as glamorous, socially acceptable, and safe.9 Until television commercials for 

cigarettes were banned (starting in 1971 in the United States), they played 

a significant role in popular culture. In the 1960s even small children were 

familiar with the theme music and catchphrases of cigarette television ad-

vertisements. Lark cigarettes used as its theme music “The William Tell 

Overture,” which any self-respecting child of midcentury America would 

have identified as “the Lone Ranger song.” Marlboro television ads used the 

rousing theme from the popular western film The Magnificent Seven. Familiar 

38 

C H A P T E R   2

cigarette catchphrases heard in countless television commercials included the 

following:

“Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.”

“I’d walk a mile for a Camel.”

“Tareyton. I’d rather fight than switch.”

Cigarettes were openly advertised on television programs that appealed to the 

young, including The Beverly Hillbillies and The Flintstones, both of which 

featured “cast ads” promoting cigarettes.10

After being banned from advertising on US television, cigarette companies 

responded by expanding their sponsorship of sporting events. From 1972 to 

2003, NASCAR’s premier racing series was sponsored by the R.J. Reynolds 

tobacco company and promoted as the Winston Cup. Cigarette companies 

also resorted to product placement in films to promote smoking in general 

and their brands in particular. A study of the top twenty-five US films re-

leased from 1988 to 1997 (250 films in all) found that tobacco appeared in 80 

percent of these films and identifiable tobacco brands appeared in 28 percent 

of them.11

Did all that advertising of cigarettes work? The consensus among scholars 

who study the relationship between cigarette smoking and advertising is that 

there is a causal relationship between the two.12 Does the tobacco industry’s 

collective efforts to promote cigarette smoking equate to a propaganda cam-

paign? While there may be strong feelings about what the answer to this ques-

tion should be, the answer is subjective and it is ultimately up to the individual 

to decide when advertising becomes propaganda.

Of course, cigarettes are not the only products that use advertising. Even 

though we like to think we are above its influence, advertising has the po-

tential to shape many of our decisions: the food we eat, the cars we drive, 

the teams we root for, and the politicians who get our votes. In the end, the 

power of advertising to shape our decision making is unaffected by whether 

we choose to label it as propaganda.

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39

W H A T   C A N   H A R R Y   P O T T E R   T E A C H   U S 

A B O U T   F A K E   N E W S   A N D   T H E   M E D I A ?

The books that make up the Harry Potter series are deeply rooted 

in fantasy, yet, like most fantasies, the series uses imaginary 

worlds and characters to hold up a mirror to the real world inhab-

ited by real people. One of the real-world phenomena reflected 

in the mirror of the Harry Potter series is the disruption digital 

technology was bringing to traditional media at the time J. K. 

Rowling was writing the books that would make her one of the 

world’s most well-known and wealthy media celebrities.

For a work of fantasy, the Harry Potter series is unusual in that 

it is set in a clearly identified, real-world location (the United 

Kingdom) and adheres to a contemporary, real-world time line 

so specific that it is possible to pinpoint the dates of many events 

within the series. Harry Potter was born on July 31, 1980, and 

started his first year at Hogwarts School in early September 1991. 

Harry, Ron, and Hermione set out on their final quest to find and 

destroy the evil Voldemort’s horcruxes in August 1997, within 

a few weeks, as it happens, of the real-world death of Diana, 

Princess of Wales. While this synchronicity may be just a coinci-

dence, it turns out that aspects of the popular reaction to Diana’s 

death resonate in the Harry Potter series.

Traditional media were widely vilified at the time of Diana’s 

death, with the public at large blaming paparazzi as the proxi-

mate cause of the princess’s fatal accident and accusing maga-

zines, newspapers, and television of indulging in a ratings-fueled, 

post-tragedy feeding frenzy. The Harry Potter series shares a 

similarly critical view of traditional media, with the harshness of 

the criticism increasing in the novels written after Diana’s death. 

In the wizard society to which young Harry Potter is introduced 

in the first book of the series, the leading newspaper is the Daily 

Prophet. (The pun on prophet/profit is clearly intended.) Early on 

40 

C H A P T E R   2

the Daily Prophet is portrayed as a rather benign news outlet, 

but by the middle books of the series it has evolved to become a 

hurtful scandal sheet as well as a major source of disinformation. 

Among its sins, the Daily Prophet is the employer of Rita Skeeter, 

an unscrupulous practitioner of yellow journalism whose decep-

tive articles expose Harry to public ridicule and whose innuendo-

filled biography heaps dirt on Headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

By the final volume of the series, the Daily Prophet has completely 

transformed into a dangerous outlet for government propaganda, 

churning out a constant stream of fake news in order to keep the 

population in the dark about Voldemort’s evil plans to take over 

the wizarding world and purge it of all who are not pure-blood 

wizards. Whether or not one believes what is printed in the Daily 

Prophet becomes a litmus test within the wizarding community, 

inflaming passions and polarizing wizards into antagonistic camps 

in much the same way that highly partisan digital information has 

been accused of polarizing people in the real world.

Besides vilifying the Daily Prophet, Rowling also takes a few 

shots at the Quibbler, a low-circulation magazine that, when first 

introduced, specializes in printing unsubstantiated articles sup-

porting crackpot conspiracy theories or proving (unconvincingly) 

the existence of imaginary creatures (such as the crumpled-horn 

snorkack) too unbelievable even for a fictional universe in which 

dragons and hippogriffs are common. However, as the Daily 

Prophet  becomes increasingly propagandistic, the Quibbler’s 

publication of articles in support of Harry cast it in a better light.

In addition to generating widespread anger toward traditional 

media, the international shock over Diana’s death spurred people 

to turn en masse to the web, both as a source of information and 

as an outlet for expressing opinions and venting emotions. A sig-

nal event in the history of the web, Diana’s death demonstrated 

to millions that the old gatekeepers of information—newspapers 

and television networks—no longer held an absolute monopoly on 

what could be reported and the ways in which information could 

be shared. The unprecedented outpouring of user-generated 

F A K E   N E W S   A S   P H E N O M E N O N  

41

web content relating to the recently deceased Diana was a wake-

up call to traditional media. Whereas prior to Diana’s death many 

major print and broadcast media outlets had either ignored the 

web or merely dabbled in it, after her death both print and broad-

cast media scrambled to get on the web in a big way. Notably, in 

September 1997 the BBC hastily launched a temporary website 

devoted to the events surrounding Diana’s death, soon following 

this up with the establishment of a permanent, full-service BBC 

web presence in November 1997.13

As the web matured and attracted ever more users, it increas-

ingly became the go-to place for nontraditional, alternative 

media, inspiring in many a hope (which may have been naive) 

that the web would eventually give rise to a truly free, grassroots 

media uninfluenced by market forces on one hand and govern-

ment control on the other. In The Deathly Hallows, the final novel 

in the Harry Potter series, Rowling introduces such a true grass-

roots media in the form of Potterwatch. With Voldemort’s puppet 

government in complete control of not only the Daily Prophet, 

but also all other mainstream forms of magical communication, 

a group of rebellious wizards launches Potterwatch as a platform 

for sharing uncensored, factual news. While the radio-based 

Potterwatch may be seen as a throwback to the resistance move-

ments that sprang up in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War 

II, the irreverent, amateurish tone of Potterwatch certainly owes 

something to the popular image of the late 1990s/early 2000s 

web as an innovative, upstart, self-governing alternative to the 

kind traditional media represented by the mainstream Daily 

Prophet and the off-kilter, but still solidly old-school, Quibbler. 

What does not explicitly appear in the Harry Potter series is the 

emergence of any sort of grassroots (or even pseudo-grassroots) 

pro-Voldemort counterpoint to Potterwatch. The existence today 

of thousands of highly partisan information sources on the web 

suggests that the proliferation of pro-Voldemort echo chambers 

to counter, and possibly drown out, Potterwatch would have 

been inevitable.

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42 

C H A P T E R   2

THE HISTORY OF FAKE NEWS

One thing that can be said with certainty about fake news is that it is hardly 

a new phenomenon. If we accept that propaganda is a subset of fake news, 

then we already know that fake news in the form of propaganda dates back 

more than two thousand years. Even if we don’t bring propaganda into the 

fake news fold, non-propagandistic fake news has been around since long 

before the start of the Digital Age. One example of fake news from the nine-

teenth century is the series of non-propagandistic fake news stories published 

in 1835 by the New York Sun. Now known as the Moon Hoax, this series 

of articles reported in depth on the discovery of life and civilization on the 

Moon.14 Besides reporting totally fake news, the author of the Moon Hoax 

series falsely cites Sir John Herschel, one of the most credible astronomers of 

the day, as his source of information. 

Similarly, on April 13, 1844, the self-same New York Sun ran a major 

story under the following multipart headline rendered in typically ornate 

nineteenth-century display typeface:

ASTOUNDING  

NEWS!

BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK!

———————

THE

ATLANTIC CROSSED

IN

THREE DAYS!

———————

SIGNAL TRIUMPH

OF

MR. MONCK MASON’S

FLYING

MACHINE!!!

———————

Arrival at Sullivan’s Island, near Charlestown, S. C., of Mr. Mason, Mr. 

Robert Holland, Mr. Henson, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and four others, in 

the

STEERING BALLOON

“VICTORIA,”

F A K E   N E W S   A S   P H E N O M E N O N  

43

AFTER A PASSAGE OF

SEVENTY-FIVE HOURS

FROM LAND TO LAND.

———————

FULL PARTICULARS

OF THE

VOYAGE!!!

Now known as the Balloon Hoax, the story was nothing more than fake 

news invented out of whole cloth to sell newspapers to gullible readers. Nei-

ther hoax—moon or balloon—was all that unusual for newspapers of the 

day. In fact, fake news stories were common enough that the most notable 

thing about the Balloon Hoax is the identity of its author, American literary 

giant Edgar Allan Poe. Because Poe wrote the Balloon Hoax article strictly for 

money—he certainly did not write it to further the agendas of Big Balloon 

or the Aeronaut Party—it can be considered an example of mercenary fake 

news.

Fake news about moons and balloons did little harm and likely provided 

enough amusement to be worth the price of a newspaper. Other fake news 

stories were less benign. Fake news stories helped inflame the political pas-

sions that led to the US Civil War and served to keep those passions boiling 

during the years of conflict. Following the war, the United States entered into 

a heyday for fake news that was capped by the yellow journalism of the nine-

teenth century’s final decade. Unburdened by any journalistic standards or 

interest in the truth, yellow journalism was all about creating sensationalistic 

stories that sold newspapers and brought in advertising dollars (see, for ex-

ample, figure 2.3). Yellow journalism was responsible (if not entirely, then at 

least in part) for starting the Spanish-American War through the publication 

of sensationalistic fake news stories blaming fictional atrocities on Spanish 

authorities and generally whipping up war fever.

The steady professionalization of journalism over the course of the twen-

tieth century helped to drive fake news out of mainstream media. With, of 

course, some exceptions. One remarkable example of a fake news story that 

did make it into mainstream media is “Jimmy’s World,” an article that ap-

peared on the front page of the Washington Post on September 28, 1980. 

Purporting to tell the story of an eight-year-old heroin addict, “Jimmy’s 

44 

C H A P T E R   2

FIGURE 2.3

In this 1894 illustration by Frederick Burr Opper entitled “The Fin De Siècle Newspaper 

Proprietor: He Combines High-Sounding Professions and High-Spiced Sensations, 

and Reaps a Golden Profit Thereby,” the figure outlined in a box in the upper-left cor-

ner carries a sheet of paper that reads, “Fake News.” Library of Congress

World” earned a Pulitzer Prize for its author. When the story was proven 

to be fictional, the author resigned from the Washington Post and returned 

the Pulitzer Prize.15 Outside of occasional fake news stories that slipped into 

mainstream publications, supermarket tabloids became a major source of 

fake news beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the present day. One 

such tabloid, the now-defunct Weekly World News, was best known for its 

sensationalistic black-and-white covers and patently fake news stories on 

such unlikely phenomena as cryptids, aliens, and dead celebrities (especially 

Elvis Presley) spotted alive and well.

Of course, it was the advent of digital technology—particularly the spread 

of the web from a playground for computer buffs into something approach-

ing a household necessity—that really allowed fake news to take off. With no 

standards for accuracy, no way of vetting the qualifications of information 

creators or the truthfulness of what they created, and almost no way for the 

F A K E   N E W S   A S   P H E N O M E N O N  

45

libeled to take legal action against their libelers, the web made it possible for 

anyone to assert just about anything, no facts or credible evidence required. 

More importantly, the technology of the web made possible the potential for 

any given piece of information—no matter how false or potentially harmful—

to reach millions at virtually no cost. Adding fuel to the fire, the technology 

of mobile devices eventually made it possible to create, receive, and forward 

information—credible or not—without even the need to sit down at a com-

puter. Fake news never had it so good.

IS THE FUROR OVER FAKE NEWS YET ANOTHER MORAL PANIC?

With all the attention paid to the fake news phenomenon—especially the 

gloomy predictions that the world may be heading into some kind of post-

truth dark ages in which science, reason, and facts no longer matter—it is 

worth asking if all the hand-wringing is no more than another moral panic 

that will soon burn out and be remembered, if at all, with embarrassment and, 

possibly, shame?

As pointed out several times in this chapter, neither fake news nor propa-

ganda are new phenomena. And even though the harm caused by propaganda 

has at times in history been devastating (as happened in Nazi Germany), free 

and democratic societies generally right themselves before allowing propa-

ganda to take them completely over the edge. The existence of propaganda, 

though a risk, does not necessarily spell doom for society.

Similarly, while people can, and often do, debate the role of fake news in 

increasing the polarization of society, the existence of a polarized society itself 

is nothing new. Looking at the history of the United States, events like the 

Revolutionary War and the Civil War were more than polarizing disagree-

ments—they were bloody conflicts that divided society into armed camps. 

Literally. Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States was quite polar-

ized when it came to whether the country should get involved in World War 

II. In the 1960s the Vietnam War sharply divided the country into pro- and 

antiwar camps that clashed violently on a number of occasions. It is possible 

that fake news has made societal splits worse, but that thesis is yet to be con-

clusively proven. It may be that fake news, along with other forms of digital 

information, has done nothing more than make it harder to ignore how di-

vided people have almost always been. “Harder to ignore” is not, of course, 

the same thing as “caused.”

46 

C H A P T E R   2

Another angle to the furor over fake news is that new forms of media, or 

even just new twists on old media, tend to generate a great deal of anxiety. 

The world has seen moral panics over (mostly imaginary) dangers posed by 

theater, radio, movies, music, and television. In the 1950s the United States 

went into such a moral panic over comic books that comic book publishers 

voluntarily established the Comics Code Authority, an act of draconian self-

regulation publishers took out of the fear that, without the code, the United 

States government would step in to censor and regulate comic books.16 When 

the web was still a novelty, it was quite common for traditional media, espe-

cially movies and television, to cast the web as a villain—if for no other reason 

than the web was drawing viewers away from the very media that was, con-

veniently, villainizing the web. For one of many possible examples from the 

early years of the web, in October 1995 the television series Homicide: Life on 

the Street featured an episode entitled “Fire: Part 1.” In the episode homicide 

detectives are investigating the death of a homeless man killed in a building 

fire. The arson investigator who is assisting the detectives informs them that 

the fire was an arson and goes on to describe in exact detail the method used 

to commit the crime. When the detectives ask where anyone would learn the 

particular method of committing arson just described, the arson investigator 

replies, with sharp anger and contempt, “the Internet.” The detectives shake 

their heads. Of course, the writers of that episode managed to pull off a neat 

trick. On one hand, they sanctimoniously blamed the Internet for spreading 

potentially deadly instructions on how to commit arson; on the other hand, 

they, through the character of the arson investigator, shared with a television 

audience numbering in the millions potentially deadly instructions on how 

to commit arson. (Instructions I won’t repeat here because I’m not irrespon-

sible. Also, before I was a librarian I worked as a firefighter.)

Perhaps the most important question to ask about fake news and other 

forms of noncredible information in digital formats is, “Are people actually 

falling for this nonsense?” Maybe not as much as we might think. Researchers 

who studied the impact of fake news and social media on voting in the 2016 

US presidential election concluded (with multiple caveats and conditions) 

that fake news “would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of 

hundredths of a percentage point. This is much smaller than Trump’s margin 

of victory in the pivotal states on which the outcome depended.”17 At least in 

the eyes of these researchers, fake news did not change the outcome of the 

F A K E   N E W S   A S   P H E N O M E N O N  

47

H O W   F A K E   N E W S   S E T   O F F   T H E   S I L L I E S T 

M O R A L   P A N I C   O F   T H E   T W E N T I E T H 

C E N T U R Y

Not all moral panics produce dire outcomes. Sometimes they are 

the result of mostly harmless hoaxes intentionally created to take 

in the gullible.

The 1960s were a time of great social upheaval, and one of the 

biggest concerns of the decade was the increasing use of rec-

reational drugs by young people. Playing on mainstream fears 

about drug use—at least some of which were overhyped and 

overheated—the counterculture newspaper the Berkeley Barb 

published in 1967 a bit of fake news in the form of a made-up 

recipe for extracting from banana peels a psychoactive substance 

the writers dubbed “bananadine.”18

Of course, there is no such substance as bananadine nor is it pos-

sible to get high from banana peels. Even so, the story spread, 

with members of the hippie counterculture playing along by 

claiming to get high from banana peels and sometimes display-

ing banana peels in public to disturb and provoke the establish-

ment squares. The banana peel story was taken seriously enough 

that major newspapers began reporting on this new form of drug 

use that, unlike marijuana and LSD, would be virtually impossible 

to criminalize. Even the normally staid Wall Street Journal ran an 

article with the headline “Light Up a Banana: Students Bake Peels 

to Kick Up Their Heels: Exhilarating Effect Is Gained by Legal Puff-

ing, Some Say.”19

The great bananadine panic of 1967 soon blew over and is mostly 

forgotten today. As moral panics go, this one was not so bad. 

Nobody got hurt or sent to prison, and sales of bananas enjoyed 

a temporary surge.

48 

C H A P T E R   2

2016 election, like it or not. Along similar lines, a researcher of media literacy 

who studied Internet users from multiple countries found that most used 

search engines to find news rather than going to partisan websites or hiding 

out in bias-confirming echo chambers. In the words of this researcher, the 

“panic over fake news, echo chambers and filter bubbles is exaggerated, and 

not supported by the evidence from users across seven countries.”20 Because 

the research into fake news is still in its infancy, future researchers are likely 

to report different, possibly contradictory, findings on just how readily people 

swallow the bait of fake news.

Whether the furor over the fake news phenomenon is a moral panic has 

yet to be determined. It took a good decade for the late-1980s and early-1990s 

fears about ritual Satanic abuse to be exposed as an unfounded moral panic.21 

Sadly, that exposure came too late for the many innocent people who had to 

endure costly and embarrassing court trials and, in some cases, spend years 

in jail for made-up crimes they never committed. What is undeniable is that 

fake news, propaganda, and other misleading forms of information really ex-

ist and that their existence demands we carefully evaluate the credibility of the 

information we encounter.

WHAT IS NEW ABOUT THE FAKE NEWS PHENOMENON

Given that both fake news and propaganda have existed for years, is there 

anything new about fake news in the Digital Age? Yes, a few things are new. 

And the thread connecting these new things is digital technology itself.

Information Overload

By the middle of 2017 the total number of web pages numbered around 

4.48 billion, a bit more than half a web page for every person on the planet.22 

The number of Twitter accounts had reached 328 million.23 And the number 

of monthly Facebook users stood at 1.9 billion.24 While there are many more 

numbers that could be added to this roll call of mind-boggling statistics, the 

point is clear: by any measure—number of web pages, tweets, books, journal 

articles, images, videos, emails, bytes—the amount of information available in 

the Digital Age is beyond human comprehension.

Just consider how much less access to information people had in the not-

so-distant past. Even after the development of printing from moveable type in 

the middle of the fifteenth century, books remained expensive and relatively 

F A K E   N E W S   A S   P H E N O M E N O N  

49

rare. For most of history libraries were tiny compared to what is available 

from even a modest modern public or academic library (not to mention what 

is available via the web). It is sobering to consider that many of the greatest 

thinkers of the printed-book era never set foot in a library—or any other 

building—that contained more than a few thousand books. In the time of 

Isaac Newton, the library of his Cambridge University college (Trinity) held 

from 3,000 to 4,000 volumes; at the time of Newton’s death, his personal 

library, which was large for the time, consisted of some 2,100 volumes.25 

Jumping forward in time, in the mid-nineteenth-century United States a total 

of 126 college libraries held, in aggregate, just under 600,000 volumes, nearly 

120,000 of which were the property of three libraries: Princeton, Yale, and 

Harvard.26 It was not until the twentieth century that the book collections of 

any save the largest academic libraries began approaching sizes that would be 

considered even midlevel by the standards of today. The University of Illinois, 

for one example, grew from 66,639 volumes in 1904 to 440,372 volumes in 

1920, at which point it had bragging rights as the ninth largest (measured by 

number of volumes) academic library in the United States.27 By way of com-

parison, in 2017 the combined libraries of the ten University of California 

campuses held some 39 million print volumes along with vast amounts of 

content in digital formats.28

Because no previous generation has had to contend with so much infor-

mation or had such easy access to information, no previous generation has 

suffered so much from information overload—the inability to grasp a concept 

or make a decision because there is simply too much information to process. 

A number of causes contribute to information overload:

■

The amount of information and the speed at which it is created

■

The number of channels through which information can be communicated 

(Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, television, newspapers, etc.)

■

The ease with which information can be duplicated and forwarded

■

Contradictory information (as when economic statistics contradict each 

other)

■

Information lacking credibility (fake news, propaganda, partisan spin)

■

Information lacking context (as when bits of information are cherry-picked 

and the identity of the original source is absent)

■

The challenges of determining what information is credible and what is not

50 

C H A P T E R   2

With so much information and so much uncertainty over what informa-

tion to trust and what to dismiss, individuals may respond by resorting to 

coping mechanisms. One way of coping with information overload is to tune 

out, to simply stop paying attention to information: “Instead of trying to 

understand climate change, I’m going to watch cat videos.” Another coping 

mechanism is to limit information intake to a few trusted sources and, in the 

worst case, to trust those sources without question. This leads to the informa-

tion-bubble phenomenon in which individuals take in only information that 

reaffirms their existing social and political biases. Whatever the causes and 

whatever the coping mechanisms, information overload is an aspect of the 

fake news phenomenon that is much newer than fake news itself.

Reaching a Large Audience at a Low Cost

Imagine the following scenario. The year is 1989 and you are a member of 

a small but dedicated group of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy buffs try-

ing to publicize a theory about the assassination that is considered too weird, 

fringe, extreme, or flat-out crazy to get any traction in mainstream media. 

Since this is the pre-web era, you employ a typewriter or a word processor to 

create a five-page manifesto promoting your group’s agenda. You take a copy 

of your manifesto to a photocopy center and pay to have one thousand copies 

made (5 pages x .03 per page x 1,000 copies = $150). You then distribute cop-

ies of your manifesto either by hand or through the mail. Let’s say you really 

luck out and, on average, every single copy is read by three different readers. 

Congratulations! An audience of three thousand is now aware of your theory 

that the assassination of President Kennedy was masterminded by textbook 

publishers. (The evidence is all there. Oswald worked in the Texas School 

Book Depository. Wake up, sheeple!) And all it cost you to reach three thou-

sand readers was $150 dollars, plus your time, plus whatever you spent on 

delivery and/or postage. (That cost is in 1989 dollars, when the US federal 

minimum wage was $3.35 per hour.)

In the Digital Age, tallying up three thousand likes on a Facebook post, 

while decent, is hardly considered blowing up the Net. Not when an item that 

goes full-on viral will rack up views numbering in the millions. Millions of 

views, yet it costs almost nothing to create and distribute that piece of digital 

information via the Internet. Unlike the situation in 1989, when the cost of 

copying and distribution would serve as a check on the number of times any 

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51

individual or group could afford to make and distribute multiple copies of 

paper documents, in the online world anyone can create and distribute digital 

content at almost no marginal cost. Not every piece of digital content is going 

to go viral, of course, but it only takes one success to get a message in front 

of millions of people. A dedicated individual or group can, at very low cost, 

crank out tweets, Facebook posts, and fake news stories again and again and 

again in the hopes that one of those items will connect with a large audience. 

The potential to reach a very large audience at a very low cost is something 

that simply was not possible prior to the Digital Age.

Ease of Alteration

A third difference between information in the Digital Age and informa-

tion in earlier times is the ease with which digital information can be altered. 

While fakes and forgeries existed prior to digital technology, altering a physi-

cal object such as a paper document or a photographic print was not par-

ticularly easy or common. In 1920, a series of five photographs purporting to 

prove the existence of fairies generated a great deal of interest in the United 

Kingdom and abroad (see figure 2.4).

While the photograph in figure 2.4 leaps out as a crude fake by the image 

standards of the twenty-first century, altered photographs were enough of a 

rarity in the early twentieth century that some, including Sir Arthur Conan 

Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, believed the Cottingley fairies photo-

graphs to be genuine.

Today the technology for altering documents, images, sounds, and video 

is not only much better than what was available just a few years ago, it is also 

more prevalent and much easier to use. Altered photographs show up on the 

Internet all the time. Sometimes the purpose of such photographs is benign, 

perhaps to entertain or amuse, but altered photographs can also be used to 

mislead. In 2004, opponents of presidential candidate John Kerry distributed 

a convincing photograph showing him at a 1971 antiwar rally seated next to 

controversial actress Jane Fonda. The photograph showing Kerry and Fonda 

together turned out to be a faked compilation of two photographs taken at 

different times and locations.29 Like a lot of propaganda, the altered photo 

mixed truth with fiction. That both Kerry (a decorated Vietnam veteran) and 

Fonda had attended antiwar rallies in the early 1970s was true. That they had 

attended the same rally and sat together was false.

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C H A P T E R   2

FIGURE 2.4

Altered photograph depicting a 

young woman with one of the 

Cottingley fairies. Elsie Wright 

and Frances Griffiths

Digital technology facilitates the altering of not just still images but of au-

dio and video as well. The 2016 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story famously 

used CGI (computer-generated imagery) to make it seem that actress Carrie 

Fisher appeared in the film as a youthful Princess Leia when, at the time Rogue 

One was shot, Fisher was sixty years old and would, to the dismay of fans, 

pass away shortly after the film’s premiere. In the same year that Rogue One 

premiered, Adobe Systems introduced VoCo, a new technology that has been 

described as “Photoshop for audio.” With VoCO technology and twenty min-

utes of any individual’s recorded voice, editing speech becomes as simple as 

editing text in a word processing document.30 It is easy to imagine many ways 

this technology could be used to create deceptive information. For example, 

how easy would it be for someone equipped with VoCo and access to historic 

audio recordings to create, say, a convincing recording of Lyndon Baines 

Johnson admitting in his own voice that he (in collusion, of course, with text-

book publishers) was personally responsible for the assassination of John F.  

F A K E   N E W S   A S   P H E N O M E N O N  

53

Kennedy? More realistically, how easy would it be for a political operative to 

create an audio file of a political opponent saying something so offensive that 

it could change the outcome of an election? For police to create an audio file 

of a suspect “confessing” to a crime in his or her own voice?

Other Tricky Technologies

Besides making it easier to create misleading information, digital technol-

ogy has other tricks it can play on anyone attempting to evaluate the cred-

ibility of information.

Political Bots

Political bots are automated computer programs that use algorithms to 

generate political messages. While some political bots acknowledge up front 

that their messages are machine generated, some deceptively present their 

messages as human generated. According to a trio of computer scientists af-

filiated with Oxford University’s Project on Computation Propaganda,

Political actors and governments worldwide have begun using bots to manipu-

late public opinion, choke off debate, and muddy political issues. Political bots 

tend to be developed and deployed in sensitive political moments when public 

opinion is polarized.31

These same computer scientists estimated that at certain key times during 

the 2016 US presidential elections up to a one-third of all political tweets pro-

moting Donald Trump were machine generated.32 That said, it is important 

to note that the Hillary Clinton campaign also used political bots. But rather 

than focusing on which candidate is the bigger cheater, the focus should be 

on the fact that everyone needs to be aware that messages appearing to be 

from other human beings may be machine generated. There are a couple of 

tricks for detecting messages from bots. Political bots send messages around 

the clock, while humans take time away from posting messages for things like 

jobs and sleep. Political bots tend to be fixated on a single topic and to repeat 

the same words, slogans, and catchphrases over and over, while humans tend 

to send messages about a variety of topics and to vary their use of language. If 

you are not sure if a tweet is from a human or a bot, the Indiana University–

based Botometer can help you decide.33

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C H A P T E R   2

Machine-Written Articles

In much the same vein as political bots that create tweets, software now 

exists that is capable of writing news articles with a minimum of human 

input. Both the Associated Press and Fox News make limited use of machine-

written articles, and software for generating machine-written articles is now 

freely available to the public.34 While machine-written articles are, thus far, a 

rarity, they are yet another factor to consider when evaluating information.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines like Google and Bing use algorithms to produce naturally 

ranked (i.e., not influenced by payment or human biases) search results. 

Search engine algorithms consider a number of factors when ranking results, 

such as the frequency with which the search term appears on a site, the num-

ber of links made to a site, a site’s overall popularity, and so on. If you ever 

wonder why, for example, Wikipedia often appears at the top of many search 

engine results, it is not because Wikipedia pays for the privilege; it is because 

Wikipedia pages have earned their high rankings based on the search engine’s 

algorithm.

In a perfect world, search engine rankings would always be impartial and 

uninfluenced by those who wish to game the system. In the real world, people 

try to game the system all the time through a process known as search engine 

optimization (SEO). In its defense, SEO can be used as legitimate marketing 

practice to boost a website’s visibility and drive more visitors to a target web-

site. Businesses and organizations routinely seek to boost their online pres-

ence by paying computer experts to provide SEO services. However, so-called 

black-hat SEO can be used to damage the reputation of individuals, busi-

nesses, and organizations; to unnaturally inflate the prominence of selected 

websites; or to promote specific political or social agendas. Practitioners of 

black-hat SEO can employ a number of tactics, including “keyword spam-

ming, generating massive numbers of low-quality pages, creating artificial 

link networks, and creating deceptive web pages that appear differently to 

users and search engines.”35 Whatever the techniques may be, the takeaway 

for anyone who uses search engines is to be aware that the search results you 

see may have been manipulated to produce biased, unnatural, and unearned 

rankings.

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55

Identifying when search results have been manipulated through SEO is 

not easy, but it is most likely to occur when searching for information on a 

politically controversial topic or information about a candidate during a hotly 

contested election. Here are three signs that search results may have been 

intentionally manipulated through search engine optimization:

1.  The top results all repeat the same partisan message in essentially the same 

way.

2.  The top results consist of a mix of well-known partisan websites along 

with obscure partisan websites that normally do not rank highly.

3.  Less partisan, better known websites do not appear among the top rank-

ings.

Technology being the relentless beast that it is, there is no doubt additional 

tricky technologies are already out there or will soon emerge, each one ca-

pable of deceiving even the most cautious users of information. Nobody said 

that evaluating information in the Digital Age was going to be easy or that 

keeping current on the latest tricks and technology for promoting misinfor-

mation would not be an ongoing task. Stay alert. Keep your guard up.

RECAP

Fake news is a complex concept with multiple definitions. It is important to 

understand how the term fake news is being used in any given context.

Propaganda is a form of misinformation that is intentionally created to 

further a specific agenda (political, organizational, or commercial). Propa-

ganda, which has been around for thousands of years, is a subset of fake news.

Fake news includes propaganda, but may also include misinformation cre-

ated for proposes other than furthering a specific agenda. Fake news has been 

around for many years, though it exploded into a worldwide media sensation 

at the end of 2016. For the purposes of this book, fake news can be classified 

into three main types:

1.  Mercenary fake news: created for profit with no concern about the content 

of the message

2.  Fake news with an agenda: propaganda

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C H A P T E R   2

3.  Satirical fake news: created for humorous purposes but may also function 

as political or social commentary and criticism

For all the attention paid to fake news and hand-wringing over its dangers 

to democracy, it is fair to ask if all this concern constitutes a moral panic. 

Whether fake news, as it exists in the Digital Age, is truly as dangerous as 

some believe it to be remains to be seen.

While fake news, including propaganda, is not new, there are a few new 

twists to fake news in the Digital Age:

■

Information overload makes evaluating information harder than it has ever 

been in the past.

■

Digital technology makes it easy to distribute fake news to a potentially 

huge audience at a very low cost.

■

Digital technology makes it easy to alter information—including photo-

graphs, audio recordings, and video—for the purposes of misleading the 

recipients of that information.

A number of relatively new technologies give purveyors of misinformation 

sophisticated tools for carrying out deceptions:

■

Political bots produce machine-generated content, such as tweets, that may 

falsely appear to be human-generated content.

■

Software makes it possible to create machine-written articles that require 

minimal human input. As with tweets produced by political bots, these 

articles may falsely appear to be generated by humans.

■

Search engine optimization can mislead by re-ranking search engine results 

to drive less credible information to the top of a results list while driving 

more credible information to the bottom.

It is inevitable that new deceptive technologies will continue to emerge and 

that masters of deception will deploy them. Anyone who uses information 

faces the lifelong challenge of staying aware of these technologies and learn-

ing how to detect and defeat them.

3

Tricks of the Trade

Techniques That Lower 

Your Information Guard

The world is full of information that is not credible. Some of this misinforma-

tion is easy to spot. Quite a lot of it is not. If you care about the credibility of 

the information you use as part of your decision-making processes, it is up to 

you to perform due diligence before accepting any information as credible. I 

like to think of this process as keeping up my information guard in the face 

of a flood of information capable of misleading, deceiving, and quite possibly 

controlling my decisions. The focus of this chapter is all about defense, about 

learning to recognize the tools and tricks of deception so that you do not get 

taken in by misinformation.

ALL OF THE PEOPLE SOME OF THE TIME

This is a true story. In November 2007, when my daughter was still in elemen-

tary school, I came upon a video demonstrating a really cool phenomenon. 

The makers of the video mixed hydrogen peroxide and baking soda into a 

plastic bottle of a certain brand of soft drink.1 (I won’t name the brand, but 

let’s just say it is noted for its high caffeine content, is popular among those 

who devote serious amounts of time to video games, and goes well with crispy 

cheese-flavored snacks). When the creators of the video shook up the solu-

tion, it produced a powerful, almost magical, green glow. On the way home 

from work that evening I stopped by the grocery store and bought a bottle 

of the soft drink used in the video. That night my daughter and I carefully 

57

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C H A P T E R   3

N O   P A T E N T   O N   D E C E P T I O N

This chapter will go into detail on common techniques used to 

pass off deceptive information as credible. As you learn about 

these techniques, it is important to remember that nobody has 

the patent on deception. Just as those you disagree with or, quite 

possibly, despise will practice deceptive techniques to advance 

their cause, so too will those you agree with and greatly admire. 

Because people are human beings and not AI robots, it is much 

harder to spot deception when members of “my team” are prac-

ticing it as opposed to when those rotten jerks on the other side 

are up to their usual sneaky tricks. This means that your informa-

tion guard should actually be higher when you are evaluating 

information that speaks to your happy place than when you are 

evaluating information that makes you want to punch a brick 

wall. This is not an easy thing to do.

On the flip side, there is nothing inherently wrong with infor-

mation that expresses an opinion, supports a point of view, or 

puts forward an argument for or against something. Almost all 

information, and certainly the most interesting sort of informa-

tion, has a point to make rather than being blandly neutral. What 

to watch out for, then, is when the information creators’ desire 

to make a point becomes so powerful that they resort to using 

deceptive techniques.

combined the ingredients as instructed and shook the bottle like our lives 

depended on it. Nothing. We adjusted the quantities. More frantic shaking. 

More disappointment. What were we doing wrong?

After a good thirty minutes of fussing, shaking, and growing disappoint-

ment, it hit me. No. It couldn’t be. I went online and did the fact-checking I 

should have done from the start. It took me about one minute to determine 

T R I C K S   O F   T H E   T R A D E  

59

the video was a big, fat hoax. There was no chemical reaction. The magical 

light effect came from a glow stick the perpetrators had surreptitiously in-

serted into the bottle. Ugh! How could I be so gullible?

I mean that literally. How could I? A good part of my professional life has 

been devoted to preaching the gospel of evaluating information, of not ac-

cepting facts or evidence without first checking them out, and yet I was taken 

in by an obvious hoax that some rube who just fell off the turnip truck from 

Hokeyville should have seen right through.

The point of my confession is that anyone can be deceived by misinfor-

mation, even someone who has a high (in one particular case, far too high) 

opinion of his ability to smell an informational rat. I was fortunate that the 

deception cost me nothing more than a bottle of soda pop, a few pennies’ 

worth of household chemicals, and a little bit of pride. People have lost thou-

sands of dollars, even their entire life savings, to Internet scams not much 

more sophisticated than the glowing-soda-pop video hoax.

So why do people fall for misleading information? I know why I fell for 

it. I fell because the message of the video—mix together a few ordinary 

household items to produce something spectacular—appealed to my bias for 

do-it-yourself homemade fun over prepackaged fun that someone else makes 

for you. I fell because the video had me anticipating the delight my daughter 

would express on seeing the solution light up like a potion from Harry Potter. 

(Even more, it had me anticipating how good I—wonderful father that I am—

would feel for being the one to show my daughter this bit of real-world magic 

in a bottle.) I fell because the prideful part of my brain had me imagining 

my genius daughter, upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Advanced Science- 

olo-graphy, mentioning in her speech how it all started the day her dear old 

dad brought home a bottle of high-octane soda and mixed in a few items from 

the kitchen cupboard. That fake video hit a grand slam by simultaneously 

appealing to my existing biases, my ego, my vanity, and my wishful thinking. 

Which is to say the video so thoroughly appealed to my emotions that I let 

down my information guard and ended up getting good and snookered. Sad 

to say, this can happen to anyone at any time.

EMOTIONS AND YOUR INFORMATION GUARD

Having your emotions appealed to in order to manipulate you, for good or 

bad, is a universal experience. Children and parents, husbands and wives, 

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C H A P T E R   3

brothers and sisters—all manipulate each other’s emotions to get what they 

want from each other. Pets can manipulate your emotions. So can friends and 

classmates and work colleagues and bosses. Politicians and advertisers do it 

to gain power and money. It happens in the physical world and it happens 

online. There is nothing wrong with having emotions, of course. Emotions 

pretty much go with having a detectable heartbeat. And there need not be 

anything wrong with doing something because someone played on your 

emotions. It is OK if I go outside to throw the ball for my dog because she 

made me feel guilty for ignoring her—though it is important that I be aware 

of why I am doing it. What you have to watch out for is when your emotions 

are played on so subtly that you do not realize you are being manipulated.

If you were trying to put together a list of emotions that can be played on 

to get you to drop your information guard, you could do a lot worse than 

starting with the following:

Anger: Many fake news stories do a land-office business in anger, in get-

ting your blood boiling so hard that you forget to ask yourself if the outrage 

being reported is genuine, highly exaggerated, or completely made up (see, 

for example, figure 3.1). It is especially easy to get angry enough to drop your 

information guard when it is those idiots on the other side who are, as usual, 

up to no good. The problem with anger, even when it is justified, is that it can 

cause you to accept as true information that you might question if you were 

in a calmer state of mind. Also, anger is not a particularly helpful tool for 

making the best decisions. As the example of road rage proves, anger can be 

a good alarm, but it is a lousy compass.

Greed: This is the emotion that con artists, digital or otherwise, depend 

on for separating people (some would say “fools”) from their money. The 

allure of increasing the size of your bankroll is hard for anyone to resist, 

whether that increase comes from a “surefire system for generating wealth” 

or “locked-in betting tips for beating the football point spread this very week-

end.” Of course, if someone has a surefire system or locked-in tips, it is a fair 

question to ask why they are going through all the time and expense of selling 

their information to strangers when they could instead use their knowledge 

to make money without any middleman. And why do the makers of these of-

fers so often urge you to “Act now!” rather than suggesting you take the time 

to evaluate just what it is they are selling? These questions are mysteries of 

the information world, like why online advertisers who urge you to buy gold 

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61

FIGURE 3.1

This famous illustration of the Boston Massacre, which was engraved by 

Boston silversmith and patriot Paul Revere, is today regarded as a highly 

sensationalized, biased, and mostly inaccurate depiction of the event. The 

creators of this illustration twisted the facts in order to provoke feelings of 

anger among their fellow colonists and, by so doing, win support for the 

American cause. Library of Congress

because “paper money will soon be worthless” are willing to sell you their 

gold for your (soon-to-be-worthless) paper money. Greed can cause you to 

overlook the need to evaluate the credibility of any information holding out 

the tempting promise of a golden opportunity.

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C H A P T E R   3

Envy: A close cousin of anger, envy is triggered by tales of those who 

have too much, have it too easy, or simply have more than you do. There 

is an entire genre of memes called “Rich Kids of the Internet” consisting of 

photographs allegedly depicting spoiled, hyper-wealthy young people either 

being shamelessly wasteful or ostentatiously flaunting their wealth. The sight 

of overprivileged twits pouring expensive champagne over the sides of giant 

yachts or whining that the Ferrari daddy bought them is the wrong color 

tends to peg the envy meter at the top of the scale. On the other side of the 

income divide is information focusing on lazy moochers living quite well off 

the government dime without doing a day’s work. Either way, envy can make 

you forget to ask whether the information you see before your eyes is credible 

and actually representative of, respectively, the very rich or the very poor.

Pride: Puffing up someone with flattery is the surest way to trigger this 

emotion. Who, after all, could be smarter, more right-thinking, or straight-

up better than you? Why should you, as decent and right thinking as you 

are, doubt for one minute any information reconfirming that your biases, 

hunches, gut feelings, and most cherished beliefs are justified and correct? 

Why should you—you, of all people—question any information that asserts 

your team, profession, political party, religion, or nationality is more deserv-

ing than all the others? Why? Because pats on the back make it difficult to see 

that you are being flattered into accepting misinformation.

Sloth: What’s better than getting something for nothing? Simply reply to a 

Nigerian prince and wait for all that sweet, sweet oil money to come gushing 

in. Or pay a small handling fee to receive some great freebie. But bothering 

to check if the opportunity is genuine or just another scam? That’s way too 

much work.

Lust: As the expression “the world’s oldest profession” implies, humans 

long ago discovered that there is money in lust. The online world is filled with 

phony—yet apparently profitable—schemes based on false promises to fulfill 

this most basic of human emotions. If you want examples, you can find them 

for yourself online. You won’t have to look very hard.

Gluttony: Gluttony, in the sense of overconsumption of anything, has been 

a staple of misleading advertisements for decades. Most would agree that an 

advertisement normalizing the consumption of a 2,500-calorie meal is, at 

best, misleading. Really any information that promotes conspicuous con-

sumption—live in a giant, energy-gobbling mansion; own a sports car (heck, 

T R I C K S   O F   T H E   T R A D E  

63

make it two or three) that costs more than the average family home; travel 

the world in a state of luxury that would make Louis XIV blush—counts on 

human gluttony to stop people from asking if what they are being sold has 

even the slightest acquaintance with everyday reality.

Some readers may recognize the preceding emotions as corresponding to 

the seven deadly sins. And so they do. Sin or not, just about any human emo-

tion can be played on to manipulate people into letting down their informa-

tion guard. While listing every single emotion and how misinformation plays 

on each would belabor the point beyond endurance, two additional emo-

tions—fear and joy—deserve more discussion because they are so prominent 

among the emotions played upon by purveyors of misinformation

Fear

One of the most primal emotions to which manipulators can appeal, fear 

can lead people to do and tolerate things they would never do or tolerate if 

they were not afraid. Dictators use fear—both fear of the threat posed by the 

other and fear of the dictator’s own ruthless methods of control—to subjugate 

entire nations, to convince people to commit terrible acts and put up with 

intolerable tyranny and deprivations. Like anger, fear is not the best tool for 

informing sound decisions, and, again like anger, fear can cause people to 

readily believe information without taking the steps to make sure it is cred-

ible.History is filled with examples of terrible wrongs committed when false 

fears are stirred up by deceptive information. The witch hunts of medieval 

Europe, which resulted in the executions of tens of thousands of innocent 

people, were set off by propaganda that played on fear. The unlawful in-

ternment of people of Japanese descent—many of whom were American 

citizens—during World War II was brought about by misinformation that 

played on unfounded fears. As for contemporary instances of fearmongering, 

it only takes a quick scan of news headlines to identify more examples than 

anyone would like to acknowledge.

Which is not to say that information that causes you to feel fear is always 

misinformation. If you are driving along a winding, isolated mountain road 

and see a makeshift sign that reads, “Danger! Bridge Out! 50 Feet,” the 

information on that sign likely makes you feel fear. And your natural fear 

reaction—bringing your car to a stop without worrying about whether that 

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C H A P T E R   3

information is credible—is the correct and rational thing to do. Assuming 

the bridge really is out, the fact that the information on the sign caused you 

to feel fear is negated by the fact that the information very likely saved your 

life. The problem is when the information playing on fear proves to be false. 

A prankster repeatedly yelling, “There’s a bomb in the stadium!” is danger-

ous because doing so could set off an unnecessary, possibly deadly panic as 

people quite logically react to the information without wasting a lot of time 

to determine if it is true or not.

Barring an emergency situation in which seconds matter, however, it is 

important to evaluate the credibility of any information that makes you feel 

afraid, important to remember that the fear you are feeling has lowered your 

information guard and left you vulnerable to misinformation.

Joy

Even though joy is about as far as you can get from so negative an emotion  

as fear, it too can be used to lower your information guard. In a world in 

which bad news seems to be the only constant, who does not want to believe 

joyful, uplifting stories reporting on good people and good things? But just as 

people have a propensity to unquestioningly believe information that makes 

them angry or fearful, they have a propensity to believe information that 

makes them feel joy, regardless of whether that information is credible.

Who wouldn’t feel like a bit of a Grinch for questioning the credibility 

of a heartwarming story about a brave and adorable child’s successful fight 

against cancer? What kind of killjoy casts doubt on a story about a generous 

good Samaritan (who, surprise, turns out to be a celebrity admired by mil-

lions of fans)? Or dares to question the truth of a satisfying tale in which a 

likable, unassuming hero quietly, yet publicly, delivers a bit of karmic justice 

to some stuck-up, entitled, self-important jerk? Who really wants to pooh-

pooh a breathless report on some exciting new technology that is going to fix 

a seemingly insoluble worldwide problem or a miracle cure that promises to 

eliminate a devastating malady? Even when you are aware that all good news 

is not credible news, the right piece of fake good news told in the right way 

can worm its way through your defenses and into your heart.

The online world has spawned a neologism, glurge, to describe misinfor-

mation that plays on the desire to unquestioningly accept that which makes 

you happy. Glurge, while superficially being all about goodness and rightness, 

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65

not only is fake but also carries with it undertones of insincerity, hypocrisy, 

and moral superiority. (The TV Tropes website provides a lengthy discussion 

of glurge that includes many excellent examples of the genre.2) Glurge or not, 

if information makes you feel especially joyful or righteous in your thinking, 

your information guard is probably lower than you realize. This is not to say 

that information that brings you joy and reaffirms your faith in humanity is 

L E A D   A N D   V I O L E N C E

I have another true confession to share. Many years ago, I heard 

someone on a radio interview program state that the long-term 

drop in violent crime in the United States can be attributed to the 

elimination of leaded gasoline. Lead from gas fumes, the theory 

goes, damages the brain in ways that contribute to violent behav-

ior. Simply removing the lead from gasoline (and other products, 

such as paint) reduces violent behavior.

My instantaneous, emotion-driven reaction was to unquestion-

ably accept this theory as true. Why? Because it punched all my 

happy buttons to think that steps taken to improve the environ-

ment had paid off with a profound and unexpected benefit.

Was I wrong to accept that information as true? Not entirely. 

While the long-term drop in violent crime in the United States 

is most likely attributable to multiple causes, it turns out there 

is some credible evidence that reducing lead in the environment 

numbers among those causes.3

Should I have checked out that information before accepting it? 

Absolutely. That the information may have some truth to it is a 

mere coincidence that I only discovered after the fact. The les-

son to me is that I need to evaluate information that makes me 

happy as carefully as I evaluate information that makes me angry 

or fearful.

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C H A P T E R   3

always false. Good news can be as credible, or not, as bad news. Just remem-

ber when that warm glow of joy kicks in to be sure to check out the facts 

before breaking into your happy dance.

DECEPTIVE TECHNIQUES AND HOW TO SPOT THEM

The most basic tool of deception is good, old-fashioned lying. People will say 

and write things that are not true, grossly exaggerated, or only partly true. 

People will fake documents, photographs, audio, and video to make some-

thing that is false appear to be true. And, as described earlier, people will play 

on your emotions to manipulate you into falling for misinformation. There 

is no one-size-fits-all means of detecting whether information is credible, but 

becoming aware of the most common tools of deception can go a long way 

toward helping you spot misinformation.

Confounding Correlation with Causation

Confounding correlation with causation is a very familiar technique for 

assigning either credit or blame for a particular outcome. A current example 

of correlation confounded with causation is the argument that autism is re-

lated to childhood immunizations. The correlation is based on the fact that 

the number of autism diagnoses began to rise as childhood immunizations 

became more frequent. What is missing, at least as far as medical science is 

concerned, is a causation—a scientifically verifiable explanation for how im-

munization increases the occurrence of autism.

Of course, it is theoretically possible that medical science will someday 

discover a causation that proves correct those who claim immunizations con-

tribute to autism. Until that day, which may never come, the immunization-

autism connection is merely a time-based correlation that lacks any causation.

The lack of causation does not stop people from using correlation to sup-

port their positions. All it really takes to make a correlation is an understand-

ing of how calendars work:

The American League introduced the Designated Hitter Rule in April 1973. In 

October of that same year, the OPEC oil embargo caused the price of oil to rise 

by 400 percent. The Designated Hitter rule caused the oil crisis.

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Or, much more likely, the Designated Hitter Rule had nothing at all to do 

with the oil crisis. For even more, and more entertaining, examples of the 

misuse of correlations, check out the Spurious Correlations website (www 

.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations).

Covering Up with Cleverness

This trick is easy to overlook because things that strike you as funny or 

clever tend to disarm you. A sharp bit of satire, a clever bumper sticker, a 

memorable slogan, a meme that makes you laugh out loud—any of these can 

be used to make a point while making you forget to ask if the information 

conveyed is credible. Even worse, a spoonful of cleverness can be used to make 

truly hateful medicine seem palatable. Just look at the thousands of clever and 

funny (at least to sympathizers) memes inhabiting the online world, some of 

which advocate truly repellent ideas (see, for example, figure 3.24).

Denouncing Hypocrisy

Denouncing the hypocrisy of those with whom they disagree is practically 

the go-to strategy for anyone commenting on controversial topics.

She says that nobody has the right to tell her what she can or cannot do with her 

body, yet she wants to limit my right to smoke cigarettes and ride my motorbike 

without a helmet.

He says he’s pro-life, but he is all in favor of the military bombing civilian 

targets.

The reason it is easy to point out an opponent’s hypocrisy is that almost 

everyone is a hypocrite to one extent or another. In fact, there is a word for 

people who are so consistent in their beliefs that they cannot be accused of 

hypocrisy. That word is fanatic. Even so, the fact that hypocrisy is nearly 

universal does not stop people from disliking hypocrites and calling out hy-

pocrisy when they see it.

For example, suppose candidate X vocally supports Libertarian economic 

principles but is also in favor of government agriculture subsidies. Some vot-

ers might decide not to vote for candidate X because they think holding both 

views is hypocritical and makes candidate X unworthy of their trust. But even 

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FIGURE 3.2

Originally published in 1894 as a work of humor, Bill Nye’s History of the United States 

includes this illustration by comic artist Frederick Burr Opper. Although the intent of 

the drawing is comic, it features a racist depiction of a Native American as a dishev-

eled, welfare-dependent drunk while positing the idea that genocide is something 

worthy of a good chuckle. Library of Congress

if candidate X is a hypocrite, this has no bearing on the validity/invalidity of 

either Libertarian economic principles or government agriculture subsidies. 

The validity/invalidity of both concepts exists outside of, and separate from, 

any one person’s hypocrisies. Although pointing out someone’s hypocrisy is 

used as a way to discredit their ideas or views, it is actually a criticism of the 

person’s inconsistency and is a form of ad hominem attack (see chapter 4).

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Deceptive Images

The old adage holds that “seeing is believing.” Of course, anyone who is 

familiar with digital technology knows that you cannot believe everything you 

see. As pointed out in chapter 2, digital technology has made it easier than 

ever to manipulate photographs and video to mislead. But other types images 

can mislead as well.

Charts can easily mislead when they are based on bad data or are simply 

used in ways that are not well suited for their intended purpose. For example, 

even though pie charts frequently show up in popular media, they are avoided 

by statisticians because they are a poor choice for comparing sizes, especially 

when a pie chart contains a number of small slices (see figure 3.3).

Another type of image that can deceive is the map. Because maps are 

representations of reality, rather than reality itself, the ways in which they 

are drawn can mislead, either by intention or inadvertently. For example, 

consider the familiar Mercator projection map. Mercator projection maps 

are useful for navigation because they render latitude and longitude as a 

square grid, thereby allowing navigators to follow a straight compass heading 

from point A to point B without being thrown off course by the curvature of 

the earth. The problem with the Mercator projection, however, is that land 

masses closer to the equator appear smaller (and therefore less geopolitically 

significant) than they actually are (see figure 3.4).

A more recent example of potentially deceptive maps are the red state/blue 

state maps used to depict US election results. One problem with such maps 

is that showing an entire state as either 100 percent red or 100 percent blue 

ignores the fact that even the reddest of red states have significant numbers of 

blue voters and vice versa. For example, in the 2016 US presidential election, 

the solidly blue state of California voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton by a 

comfortable margin of 61.6 percent versus 32.8 percent for Republican Don-

ald Trump. Even so, the fact remains that around 4.5 million Californians 

voted for Donald Trump. Meanwhile, in the solidly red state of Texas, 3.8 mil-

lion Texans voted for Clinton. Coloring California all blue and Texas all red 

visually erases the votes of over eight million Americans. Another example 

of a deceptive election map occurs when votes are taken down to the county 

level with each county shown as either red or blue. Not only do such maps 

replicate the 100 percent fallacy of the red state/blue state maps, but such 

maps also fail to acknowledge the vastly different populations of US counties. 

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C H A P T E R   3

FIGURE 3.3

In the this example, visually comparing popular vote per-

centages among several candidates is much easier with the 

bar chart than with the pie chart. Donald A. Barclay

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FIGURE 3.4

Because this map uses the Mercator projection, it is impossible to tell that Af-

rica is, in fact, fourteen times the size of Greenland. Donald A. Barclay

Because the most populous US counties have millions of residents while the 

smallest number less than one hundred inhabitants, showing every county as 

equal creates a wildly distorted picture of how the nation actually voted.

Emphasizing Outliers

Emphasizing an outlier is a neat trick because it can be used with infor-

mation that is actually credible. One way this trick works is by presenting an 

extreme case—an outlier—so as to discredit a large segment of the popula-

tion. Example:

A college newspaper editor wrote an opinion piece that says college tuition 

should be free for everyone.

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C H A P T E R   3

That editor is a Millennial.

Those spoiled Millennials think the world owes them a free college educa-

tion.

Assume the first and second statements are true. Does that make the third 

statement true? Only if the opinion of the college newspaper editor is repre-

sentative of all, or at least most, Millennials. The only way to determine that 

would be by conducting a scientifically valid opinion survey of Millennials. If 

the newspaper editor is an outlier whose opinion represents only a few Mil-

lennials, then the third statement is misleading.

Even though people should be able to see through the trick of propping 

up outliers as representative of larger groups, this technique is nonetheless 

widely used for smearing entire populations ranging from gun owners to col-

lege professors to suburban soccer moms. No conclusion about any group of 

people should be based on the views or actions of an outlier (or two or three), 

whose views and actions may be not at all representative of the larger group.

Beyond smearing groups, the outlier trick can be used to mislead people 

about an issue or a cause. People who oppose seat belt laws are quick to point 

to the very rare instances in which someone survived a car crash because they 

were not wearing a seat belt. While such cases occur from time to time, they 

are such outliers that focusing on them while ignoring the tens of thousands 

of verified cases in which seat belts save lives and prevent injuries is as dishon-

est as it is misleading.

Faking Expertise

This trick involves falsely claiming—or falsely crediting someone else 

with—expertise and then using that fake expertise to support an argument. 

How can you tell if someone is actually an expert on the topic in question?

It is a bad sign if an expert is not named and is instead described in a 

generic way, such as “a leading forensic examiner” or “an expert on inter-

national trade” or “an industry analyst.” Even when a name is given, watch 

out when the alleged expert’s qualifications are of the sort that anyone could 

claim with impunity. For example, just about anyone could claim to be “a 

commentator on the topic of natural foods and health,” while not just anyone 

could rightfully claim to be “a registered dietician with a PhD in human nutri-

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73

tion from Johns Hopkins University.” A superficially meaningful credential 

that frequently gets misused is “journalist.” While the word journalist could 

be applied to someone with an MBA, two decades of actual business experi-

ence, and a paid position writing a weekly personal finance column for the 

Wall Street Journal, it could also describe someone whose entire journalistic 

experience consists of a personal blog and a few posts to unmoderated com-

ments sections. There is no more a law against calling yourself a journalist 

than there is against calling yourself a poet or a mime.

I N S T A N T   E X P E R T I S E :   J U S T   M I X   A N D 

M A T C H   T H E S E   P U F F E D - U P   A D J E C T I V E S 

W I T H   C O R R E S P O N D I N G   M E A N I N G L E S S 

C R E D E N T I A L S

Adjective Credential

noted blogger

recognized expert

celebrated authority

acknowledged consultant

well-known speaker

experienced professional

As mentioned in chapter 2, expertise in one area does not automatically 

bestow expertise in another. When anyone is presented as, or claims to be, an 

expert, it is worth asking is whether they are an expert on the topic in ques-

tion. Someone who has flown crop dusters for twenty years is not necessarily 

an expert on airline transportation. A distinguished scientist who studies an-

tibiotic-resistant bacteria is not necessarily an expert on preschool education.

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Experience and education are both factors in determining expertise, but 

phony experts can make false claims regarding either or both.

To check up on an expert’s professional experience, visit the website of the 

university, agency, or business for which the expert claims to work to see if 

there is any mention of her name, position, responsibilities, or qualifications. 

You can also try entering the expert’s name—along with her place of employ-

ment and/or line of work—into a web search engine to see if you can find 

independent (i.e., not created by the person you are checking out) verifica-

tion of the individual’s professional experience. If you have access (possibly 

through your public or school library) to periodical databases, then newspa-

per and magazine articles provide another way to check out someone’s claims 

to expertise. In the twenty-first century, just about anyone prominent enough 

in any line of work to be considered an expert is likely to be mentioned (by 

impartial sources) in magazines, in newspapers, or on the web. If an expert 

claims to be an academic—a professor or an academic researcher—then a 

search of Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) should turn up at least a few 

scholarly articles or books written by that expert on the topic in question.

Here’s an academic pro tip: not everyone who teaches at a college or 

university is a professor. The title of “professor” is generally reserved for full-

time, permanent faculty members of a college or university. Non-professors 

who teach at a college or university have titles like “lecturer” or “adjunct” or 

“non-tenure-track faculty.” Just because a college or university teacher is not 

a professor does not mean he cannot be an expert, but if someone who is not 

actually a professor claims that title, he or she is not being fully honest.

Educational qualifications can be tricky to check out. People can straight-

up lie about their education and get away with it for years. If an expert claims 

to have a degree from a specific college or university, verifying the truth of 

that statement can be difficult. However, if someone claims to have a doctor-

ate-level degree (PhD, DPhil., EdD., etc.), it almost certainly means the per-

son wrote a dissertation, which is something you can check out fairly easily. 

First, search the expert’s name (and the school that awarded the doctorate, if 

known) in the free OCLC WorldCat database (www.worldcat.org). WorldCat 

allows you to limit search results to only dissertations, greatly reducing the 

number of hits retrieved. If the dissertation does not turn up in WorldCat 

and you know the name of the college or university that awarded the degree, 

go to the online library catalog of that college or university and search for the 

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dissertation there. If the dissertation does not turn up in either source, you 

may be looking at someone who is claiming a doctoral degree that was never 

earned.

Medical doctors (MD or DO) do not write dissertations unless they also 

hold a PhD, so searching for a dissertation is not helpful for determining if 

someone claiming to be a medical doctor actually is. However, you can turn 

to the American Medical Association’s online Doctor Finder database (apps 

.ama-assn.org/doctorfinder/home.jsp), which contains information on “vir-

tually every licensed physician in the United States.” Other countries may or 

may not have similar online directories of physicians.

Another trick of the fake expert is to hold worthless diploma-mill degrees 

from unaccredited colleges or universities. The US Department of Education 

maintains a searchable database of accredited US colleges and universities 

(www.ed.gov/accreditation) that you can search to see if a US institution is 

accredited or not. If the institution from which the degree was earned is based 

outside of the United States, it is possible the country in question maintains 

online lists of accredited institutions located within its borders.

Finally, even when an expert is well qualified to comment on the topic in 

question, it is crucial to remember that experts do not always agree with each 

other. The word of a single expert, no matter how well qualified, is never the 

final word on any topic.

Falsifying Attribution

One sign of credible information is that it is accurately attributed to a 

real and credible source. When such attribution is lacking, the information 

may not be credible. The act of attributing a piece of information to a source 

(such as a book, a website, an article, a person, etc.) is called citing and the 

information that identifies the source is call a citation. Citations can be infor-

mal: “President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear 

itself.’” Or citations can follow strict formatting guidelines like those found in 

the notes section at the end of this book.

Unattributed information lacks any citations identifying its sources. 

Things like eyewitness accounts and personal reflections may not require 

sources, but when someone presents information that goes beyond personal 

experience or common knowledge (see chapter 2), then sources are required 

if the information is credible.

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It is always a red flag when information is attributed to ambiguous sources 

described with such inexact terms as they, top scientists, an official, local po-

lice, many people, government documents, published reports, groundbreaking 

studies, archival footage, and the like. Credible information cites named indi-

viduals or specific information sources:

Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole confirmed in a July 7, 2016, press confer-

ence . . . 

On June 19, 2017, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein reported in a televised 

interview that . . . 

The 2016 United States Supreme Court case of Welch v. United States holds 

that . . . 

As depicted in the 1965 documentary film Tokyo Olympiad, midcentury Japa-

nese society was . . . 

There are cases in which the use of anonymous sources can be legitimate, 

as when the identity of a whistleblower needs to be protected; even so, an 

anonymous source is still a red flag as far as the credibility of the information 

goes. At the very least, when an anonymous source is being used in a legiti-

mate way, the creator of the information should acknowledge that the source 

is anonymous and provide a reasonable explanation as to why the source 

cannot be disclosed.

Another way to deceive is by falsely attributing information to a source 

that is, in fact, not the actual source of that information. One form this can 

take is that of attributing information to a completely made-up source. Us-

ers of this trick can give unsupported information the appearance of cred-

ibility by inventing individuals, organizations, or documents; citing them as 

sources; and hoping that nobody bothers to check up on their validity:

According to Mr. Ben Dover, director of the Federal Bureau of Keeping It Real, 

each year over 1,500 American public-school children between the ages of six 

and eleven fall victim to unprovoked noogie attacks.

Yet another form of false attribution is to credit as a source someone or 

something that has no connection to the information in question, as was the 

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case when the author of the Moon Hoax articles of 1835 (discussed in chapter 

2 of this book) claimed that the astronomer Sir John Herschel was the source 

of information for the articles.5 The digital world has given rise to a rash of 

celebrity memes in which quotations, often inspirational, are attributed to 

famous people who never said any such thing. The actress Marilyn Monroe 

has become, for reasons unknown, a magnet for being credited with things 

she never said.6

While researching this book, I came across a perfect quotation about infor-

mation that I was dying to use:

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and 

conflicting information.

This quotation appears on tens of thousands of websites, in newspaper 

and magazine articles, and even in scholarly books and journal articles. Ev-

ery source that uses the quotation—and I checked out dozens and dozens of 

them—attributes the quotation to former British prime minister Winston 

Churchill; however, none of these users of the quotation provides a citation 

to its source. If the words are Churchill’s, they have to be from something that 

can be cited: an identifiable speech, a conversation, or something Churchill 

put down in writing. If the words are Churchill’s, there has to be a date associ-

ated with when he said or wrote them. A quotation cannot exist in a vacuum. 

I spent hours trying to determine if the quotation could truly be attributed to 

Churchill without finding any solid proof that he was the source. While prov-

ing a negative is difficult, unless new information to the contrary surfaces I 

have to believe that Churchill never said the words so widely and frequently 

attributed to him. This appears to be yet another case of a misattributed quo-

tation that spreads from one source to another without anyone bothering to 

check the facts of the matter.

Alternatively, it is possible to cite a source in support of an argument 

when, in fact, the source does no such thing. For example, someone might 

cite Albert Einstein’s seminal article, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving 

Bodies,”7 which focuses on the concept of special relativity, to support their 

argument that the sun actually circles Earth. Of course, the problem with such 

a citation is that “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” in no way sup-

ports such an argument.

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Finally, it is important to remember that citing one or more (even many 

more) noncredible sources of information does not somehow make the in-

formation that cites them credible. Sadly, the chore of thoroughly evaluating 

a piece of information may involve going down the rabbit hole of evaluating 

the sources it cites.

(Mis)Playing with Words

Suppose you received an unsolicited email with the following subject line:

An Important Message from Concerned Citizens for Freedom and Justice

Because phrases like concerned citizens, and words like freedom and justice, 

are so general that they can mean very different things to different people, it 

is impossible to tell from the name of this group if the position of its mem-

bership sits on the left, center, or right. Or, quite possibly, if their position is 

located more in the vicinity of Rigel 12. Using words that invoke positive or 

negative values while remaining on a high level of generality—words like pa-

triotism, liberty, terrorism, tyranny, or love—is a way to slip a highly partisan 

message in front of those who might otherwise not give the message a second 

look if its bias was clear from the outset.

Another misuse of words is to throw around dismissive labels as a way of 

discrediting someone’s point without having to go to the trouble of actually 

addressing that point. In contemporary political discourse, it is common to 

see labels such fascist, libtard, Nazi, social justice warrior, and much worse 

tossed around with abandon. Of course, such behavior is nothing new. A 

quick flip back through the pages of history reveals an almost endless list 

of dismissive labels, including racial and ethnic slurs, political insults, and 

nationalistic taunts. If someone makes a compelling argument or presents 

credible facts, dropping an insulting label on that person does not negate their 

argument or invalidate their facts.

There is also the linguistic trick of misleading through equivocation, hair-

splitting, or resorting to legalisms, none of which are necessarily easy to spot 

without access to all the relevant information. Take the example of a public 

official vigorously denying accusations of accepting a $100,000 bribe (because 

the bribe was only $50,000). While the objection is technically correct, it is an 

equivocation because the point is not the size of the bribe; it is the fact that 

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a bribe was accepted at all. It’s a bit like a child telling his mother that he ate 

a serving of fruit when the serving of fruit was actually a bag of strawberry-

flavored candy. Another example of this type of hairsplitting would be the 

backers of a ballot initiative promising that its passage will not impact the 

state’s budget while failing to mention that this will only result if their wildly 

optimistic revenue projections hold true for the next thirty years. For those 

who employ equivocation, hairsplitting, and legalisms, there is always the 

slightest shred of truth to their words, but for all practical purposes their 

words are lies.

Misusing History

It is quite common to point to events or people from history to validate 

arguments about modern-day issues. As with any persuasive technique, ap-

pealing to history can be used to mislead.

The most basic abuse of history is simply getting the facts wrong, either 

through ignorance or intentionally. For example, someone might argue,

Women did not fly military aircraft in World War II. Therefore, they should 

not be allowed to fly military aircraft today.

Besides tacitly implying that people in the past were somehow inherently 

wiser and better than people living today, the statement is historically inac-

curate. Russian women flew combat missions during the war, while in the 

United States the more than one thousand WASPs (Women Airforce Service 

Pilots) ferried military aircraft all across the country. Whenever information 

presents something as a historical fact, it is worth making sure that the alleged 

fact is accurate.

A second abuse of history occurs when someone cherry-picks a historical 

fact or quotation—often taking it out of context—to support an argument. 

Take for example the following fact and conclusion:

Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) served in the Confederate military dur-

ing the Civil War.

This proves that Twain was a racist who supported slavery.

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While the question of the extent to which Mark Twain did or did not hold 

racist views is a valid topic of scholarly debate, the preceding conclusion takes 

its supporting fact completely out of context:

■

Twain served in a ragtag volunteer Confederate unit for less than two weeks 

before he headed off to Nevada.

■

As far as is known, Twain never fired a shot in anger.

■

Twain spent most of his long life writing works critical of slavery, racism, 

American imperialism, and the slave-owning culture that he saw as the root 

cause of the Civil War.

In context, Twain’s brief military service is an anomaly that stands in contrast 

to every belief he espoused through his writing and the way he lived his life. 

Focusing on a few historical facts—or a few selected words of a historical fig-

ure—without considering the broader historical context is a dishonest use of 

history. If you selectively consider the historical examples of RMS Titanic and 

RMS Lusitania, you might conclude that crossing the Atlantic by steamship 

was an extremely perilous undertaking in the early decades of the twentieth 

century. However, if you consider all the thousands of ships that steamed 

back and forth across the Atlantic with no loss of life, your conclusion would 

be that crossing the Atlantic by steamship involved minimal risk.

Mixing Fact and Fiction

Misinformation often mixes in some amount of fact with greater or lesser 

amounts of fiction. This is especially true of propaganda, but less extreme 

forms of misinformation employ this trick as well. Suppose that a blog post 

contains the following statements:

Stanley Kubrick was a twentieth-century film director whose work won three 

BAFTA awards, one Academy Award, and one Golden Globe.

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey included scenes of space travel that were far 

more realistic than anything audiences had seen prior to that time.

Danny Torrance, the child character in Kubrick’s The Shining, wears a sweater 

depicting a rocket ship and displaying the words Apollo 11 and USA.

Stanley Kubrick filmed the faked Apollo moon landings.

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The first three statements are verifiably credible; the fourth is not. Present-

ing one or more highly credible facts can be an effective technique for getting 

people to accept any noncredible information along for the ride.

Omitting Selected Facts

Did you see the New York Times story about two hundred people in the 

town of Patchogue, New York, celebrating the birthday of Adolf Hitler? Ter-

rible, right? Society is clearly falling apart when Nazis can run wild in a town 

not even sixty miles from the heart of Manhattan.

Hang on. The story is missing a few key facts:

■

The celebration took place on April 20, 1944.

■

The theme of the celebration was “Hitler’s Last Birthday,” and the refresh-

ments served included deviled eggs, deviled ham, and devil’s food cake.

■

The party was put on by the local USO for the entertainment of US service-

men, with dance music provided by a band from a nearby US Army camp.8

This example shows how telling only part of a story can completely alter 

its meaning. Leaving out key facts about when, where, or why something hap-

pened is an all-too-common tool of deception. (By the way, the celebration 

was premature. Hitler lived just long enough to see one additional birthday.)

Documentary films stand out as a type of information often criticized for 

telling only part of a story (i.e., telling only the part the filmmakers want their 

audience to know). For example, the 2015 Netflix documentary Making a 

Murderer, which convinced thousands of viewers that an innocent man had 

been framed for murder, remains controversial because of claims by the local 

prosecutor and county sheriff (among others) that the documentary omitted 

details justifying the guilty verdict handed down by the jury.9 While leaving 

out critical information can be a valid criticism of documentary films (as well 

as other types of information), it is also true that including every fact and 

point of view is at least difficult, if not impossible, especially in a medium like 

film in which there is a limited amount of time to tell a story and a limited 

production budget with which to tell it. The really important question when 

evaluating information is to ask whether the creator of the information has 

omitted credible facts and evidence that, if included, could substantially 

change how the recipients of the information understand and respond to it.

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Pitting Us against Them

Whether the information is about us and our greatness or them and their 

evil ways, presenting information in ways that play into group loyalties 

and exaggerate group difference is an excellent means of catching people 

with their information guards down. The us-versus-them strategy is often 

on display in schoolyard and workplace rumors, in propaganda, and in the 

social-media echo chamber phenomenon that is part of the larger fake news 

phenomenon.

Privileging Eyewitness Accounts

Eyewitness accounts are often presented as slam-dunk proofs of credibility. 

Who can argue with, “I was there. I saw it with my own eyes.”? Actually, there 

are excellent arguments against assuming eyewitness accounts are inevitably 

accurate, and a growing body of social science research casts serious doubt 

on the reliability of eyewitness testimony.10 Human beings are not perfect, 

unbiased recording machines, so what they report having seen is shaped by 

their biases, preconceived ideas, and the influence of others, including fellow 

witnesses and investigators. There is no better evidence of the imperfection of 

eyewitness testimony than the fact that the accounts presented by legitimate 

eyewitnesses to the same event can differ from, or even contradict, each other. 

For an example of this, look no further than a baseball coach arguing with an 

umpire over a play that just unfolded right in front of their wide-open eyes.

Besides being mistaken about, or differently interpreting, what they saw, 

eyewitnesses can straight-up lie. Witnesses can be bribed or intimidated or 

feel that lying is justified “in this case.” There are also many examples of 

people providing “eyewitness” accounts—often in writing—of events they 

never actually witnessed. For example, the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks 

saw cases of individuals providing detailed eyewitness accounts of the attacks 

when they were, in fact, nowhere near either the World Trade Center or the 

Pentagon.11

Of course, eyewitness accounts are not always wrong and constitute an 

important source of evidence for both historical and current events. However, 

such accounts need to be considered in light of all the facts and evidence and 

not given top priority just because someone claims to have been there and 

seen the whole thing. If one person claims, “I was outside the World Trade 

Center on 9/11, and I didn’t see any planes hit the buildings,” this claim has 

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83

to be taken in context with the thousands who did report seeing airplanes, 

the video footage of airplanes hitting the buildings, and other corroborating 

evidence.

G R O W I N G   U P   W I T H   A N   E Y E W I T N E S S   T O 

H I S T O R Y

During World War II, my father served as a sergeant in the US 

Army Infantry and was involved in ground combat in the Pacific 

Theater. He talked openly about his wartime experiences and 

shared many of his eyewitness accounts of the war with me. 

Do I believe every war story my father told me? To quote Mark 

Twain’s  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “There was things 

which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”

So, yes, I believe my father was a mostly reliable eyewitness, 

though I cannot swear that every word he said was the 

unvarnished truth. For example, a few years before he died my 

father told me a story about a wartime incident so extraordinary 

that I had a hard time believing him. For one thing, it was an 

entirely new war story that he had never before told, something 

quite unusual for him at that point in his life. The second thing 

was that the incident my father described seemed more like 

some incredible exploit pulled from a Captain America comic 

book than a true story. Of course, I did not tell my father that I 

doubted his story, but, in fact, I did.

Fast-forward a year. I was flipping through a library copy of 

historian Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of United States Naval 

Operations in World War II when I came upon a description of 

an incident—an attempt by Japanese airborne troops to launch 

a surprise attack behind the American lines—that completely 

matched my father’s hard-to-believe story. The location, the date, 

and the details as related by Morison comprised strong evidence 

that the incident my father described actually took place. Of 

course, the history book could not tell me if my father played 

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C H A P T E R   3

the part he claimed to have played in this remarkable incident. 

Maybe he did. Or maybe he inserted himself into someone 

else’s true story. Though my father’s actual role in the incident is 

something that most likely can never be verified, I am inclined to 

believe his story is true while accepting that some part of it might 

be an invention.

The point of my story is that other people in our lives—family, 

friends, work colleagues, and schoolmates—regularly share 

information in the form of eyewitness accounts of events. Some 

of these events are trivial, “You should have seen the line at the 

grocery store this afternoon.” Others are more dramatic, “Some 

maniac ran a stop sign and nearly T-boned me on the way to 

work.” The natural human tendency is to accept as credible the 

eyewitness accounts of people you know. And, in most cases, 

that is the right thing to do. However, it is important to remember 

that the eyewitness accounts of people you respect, trust, like, 

and quite possibly love can be shaped by their biases, lapses of 

memory, and misinterpretations of what they have (or merely 

claim to have) seen. In the final analysis, the eyewitness account 

of someone you know is no more or no less credible than the 

eyewitness account of a complete stranger.

When I say that I do not believe everything my father told me 

about the things he witnessed in the war, I mean no disrespect 

to him. I am simply recognizing that he was a human being 

and not a perfectly impartial and infallible history-recording 

machine. Holding anyone to so high a standard of credibility is 

unreasonable and unfair. I also recognize that my own eyewitness 

accounts are as fallible as anyone else’s and do my best to keep 

this in mind, especially when sharing my stories with those who 

I know are inclined to trust me.

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Rankings and Reviews

Ranking and reviews can be useful sources of information, but they can 

also be used to mislead.

Rankings are most credible when they are based on clearly defined objec-

tive criteria. Ranking countries from smallest to largest based on their size in 

square kilometers constitutes credible ranking because the physical size of 

countries is not subject to much, if any, interpretation. On the other hand, 

ranking countries from worst to best based on their quality of life is quite 

subjective, though less so when the criteria used to calculate quality of life 

(income, cost of living, health, safety, political freedoms, etc.) are explicitly 

stated. One type of ranking that draws a great deal of attention is the rank-

ing of colleges and universities, with students and their parents often making 

important, life-changing decisions based on such rankings. However, among 

those who study higher education, there is considerable dismay over the 

power of college and university rankings, in part because the data and meth-

odologies used for the some of the rankings is not very good, in part because 

quantifying something as nuanced as what college or university is the best 

choice for any given student is a disservice to both students and colleges and 

universities.12

Reviews—whether of restaurants, films, hotels, or college professors—can 

be helpful for decision making, though it is important to recognize how 

subjective reviews can be. Almost everyone has experience the dismay of 

reading a review that is the dead opposite of their own experience: “Did the 

idiot who wrote this review even see the same movie I saw?” One question 

to ask of any review is, “What does this reviewer know about the thing be-

ing reviewed?” Even if I do not agree with its assessment, a review of a new 

automobile written by an automotive professional who has been behind the 

wheel of hundreds of different vehicles carries more weight than a review by 

someone whose knowledge of automobiles comes mostly from playing video 

games and watching action films. Another question to ask of any review is, 

“Is this reviewer too biased to be credible?” For example, it is possible for the 

owners of a local restaurant to use fake names to post either overly negative 

reviews of a competitor’s restaurant or overly positive reviews of their own 

establishment. When evaluating reviews found in online sites to which any-

one can contribute, it is generally a good idea to consider all the reviews as a 

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C H A P T E R   3

whole rather than focusing on a few extremely positive or extremely negative 

reviews.

Repeating until It Is the Truth

For several decades now, social scientists have acknowledged the validity 

of a phenomenon known as the truth effect. In essence, the truth effect holds 

that the more something is repeated, the more likely people are to believe that 

it is true.13 Because of the ease with which digital information can be copied 

and distributed, the online environment makes it easier than ever before for a 

piece of information to gain credibility through repetition. Many conspiracy 

theories, for example, gain credibility through sheer repetition.

As information is repeated, it is possible for a kind of circular attribution 

to take place. Pat cites Chris as a source of information. Chris cites Jesse. Jesse 

cites Pat and Chris. And on and on. Given time, circular attribution can give 

the appearance that information that started out with no credible source is 

supported by multiple sources and has become, somehow, credible.

Sharing Secrets

Almost everyone enjoys being in on a secret, enjoys the thrill of knowing 

some fact to which others are not privy. The pleasure of knowing, and reveal-

ing, secrets is why rumors, including false rumors, spread so quickly. The ap-

peal of conspiracy theories, too, is partly about being in on a secret, of having 

access to the “straight dope” to which others are oblivious.

Want in on a secret they don’t want us to know?

Here is some information to which all those dumb sheep out there are 

oblivious. Just us sly foxes are in on this.

Not everyone can handle the real truth, but we can.

Because being in on a secret that turns out to be untrue is not as much fun 

as being in on a secret that is true, people are inclined to believe secrets rather 

than to question their credibility. As for secrets shared in the online envi-

ronment, how secret can they be when they are posted and reposted where 

(potentially) millions of people can access them?

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Torturing Analogies

Analogies work by listing several properties shared by thing A and thing B, 

pointing out an additional property of thing B, and then arguing that thing A 

does—or could—have this further property. For example:

Shared properties:

■

London and Manhattan are subject to unacceptably heavy traffic congestion.

■

London and Manhattan do not have space to build additional roads.

■

London and Manhattan offer extensive public-transportation options that 

people could use instead of driving their cars.

Further property:

■

London has successfully reduced traffic by charging congestion pricing.

Conclusion:

■

Manhattan could reduce traffic by charging congestion pricing.

Now whether or not this conclusion is valid depends on several factors.

■

The degree of relevant similarity between the things being compared:

□  In the example, the more London and Manhattan are similar in ways that 

are relevant to the conclusion, the more likely the analogy holds. This is 

why an analogy comparing London, United Kingdom, to Manhattan, 

New York, is more likely to hold than one comparing London, United 

Kingdom, to Manhattan, Kansas.

■

The number of shared properties between the things compared as well as 

the variety of those properties:

□  The more properties London and Manhattan share, the more likely it 

is the analogy will hold. However, the number of properties are less 

significant if all the properties are similar. For example, if all the shared 

properties concerned only the capacity of the roads in each location while 

ignoring factors like public-transportation options, lifestyles, cultural 

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C H A P T E R   3

norms, and impact on surrounding communities, the less likely it is that 

the analogy will hold.

■

The relevance of the shared properties to the conclusion:

□ If the similarities between London and Manhattan focus on things that 

are not relevant to traffic and transportation, the analogy is less likely to 

hold. The fact that world-class theater, restaurants, and art galleries are 

properties of both London and Manhattan is not all that relevant to each 

location’s traffic problems.

Analogies, when used properly, can be powerful tools of persuasion. How-

ever, they can be misused to draw invalid conclusions. Keeping in mind how 

valid analogies work—and why invalid analogies fail—is the best defense 

against falling for tortured analogies that (1) compare things that are not re-

ally all that similar; (2) rely on lists of irrelevant, superficial shared properties; 

and (3) reach strained conclusions that do not hold up to careful examination.

Trolling

A creature of the Digital Age, the Internet troll is a person who stirs up 

trouble online by being aggressively argumentative and inflammatory for the 

purpose of upsetting others. Trolls may actually care about whatever argu-

ments they put forward, or they may engage in trolling just for the fun they 

get from working strangers into a frenzy. Trolling happens in comment sec-

tions, on social media sites, and in just about any other public online forum. 

Not surprisingly, trolls do not have any qualms about simply making up 

information, so nothing trolls say should be accepted as credible information 

without first evaluating it. The anonymity of the digital world encourages 

trolling, as it is very unlikely that a troll will ever have to confront in the 

physical world someone they have tormented in the online world.

An early, and notorious, example of trolling unfolded in 1993 when the 

Usenet group alt.tasteless pranked the group rec.pet.cats by posting pseudo-

innocent, yet tasteless, questions about caring for cats; eventually, the mem-

bers of alt.tasteless escalated to such trollish outrages as exchanging recipes 

in which cat is the main ingredient.14 Although the concept of trolling (in the 

online sense) was not widely known in 1993, the behavior of the members of 

alt.tasteless in front of the truly horrified, cat-loving members of rec.pet.cats 

stands as an early example of what would become the all-too-familiar practice 

of trolling.

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T H E   D U N N I N G - K R U G E R   E F F E C T

In the opening paragraphs of their seminal article “Unskilled and 

Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incom-

petence Lead to Self-Inflated Assessments,” Cornell University 

psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning spell out what 

they acknowledge to be a harsh conclusion:

We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they 

adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual bur-

den: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make un-

fortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability 

to realize it. Instead . . . they are left with the mistaken impression 

that they are doing just fine.15

Does this phenomenon extend to evaluating information? The 

evidence suggests it does. One review article analyzing “53 Eng-

lish language studies that assessed and compared peoples’ self-

reported and demonstrated information literacy (IL) skills” found 

that the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to information literacy.16 

In other words, the research shows that many people are not as 

good at finding and evaluating information as they think they 

are, and their exaggerated self-confidence blinds them to their 

shortcomings.

The conclusion reached by this research confirms my own, non-

scientific observations that students and others who are novices 

at working with information tend to view finding credible infor-

mation as nothing more than typing a few words into Google 

and, all too often, do not think much about evaluating the infor-

mation they find (assuming they evaluate that information at all). 

Maybe you are not one of those overly confident types and have 

a good understanding of your actual abilities. But then again, 

according to the findings of Dunning and Kruger it is unlikely 

that you would recognize that you are overly confident of your 

abilities. For anyone, it does not hurt to ask yourself if you “reach 

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C H A P T E R   3

erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices” when it 

comes to evaluating and using information. Further, assuming 

you are able to recognize that you are not “doing just fine,” are 

you willing to make the effort required to become more a com-

petent evaluator and user of information?

RECAP

Creators of information have many deceptive tricks they can employ in the 

hope that you drop your information guard and fall for information that is 

not credible. Being aware of, and alert for, these tricks will help you avoid fall-

ing for them. That said, anyone can fall for misinformation, especially when 

encountering information that confirms existing biases or plays on emotions. 

Powerful emotions like anger, fear, and joy can be manipulated in ways 

that cause you to drop your information guard, so it is important to remain 

vigilant when you feel information evoking strong emotions. Similarly, being 

aware of your own limitations as an evaluator of information—and working 

to overcome those limitations—is key to avoid being tricked into accepting 

misleading information.

4

Logical Fallacies

More Tools of Deception

Logical fallacies are rhetorical devices misused for the purpose of persuasion. 

Some of the tricks described in the previous chapter could, and maybe should, 

be classified as logical fallacies. For example, the trick labeled “Denouncing 

Hypocrisy” is a form of the ad hominem logical fallacy described in this chap-

ter. Even though there is some overlap among logical fallacies and the tricks 

described in chapter 3, the importance of learning to spot deceptive practices 

in their various guises justifies a bit of repetition.

However you classify them, logical fallacies are problematic in that they 

are built on errant reasoning that undermines the argument being made. 

Though logical fallacies cannot undermine an argument when you are aware 

that they are being used, they work all too well when they fly under your radar 

undetected. This is why learning to spot logical fallacies and understand their 

weaknesses is an important skill for evaluating information.

Logical fallacies have been used, and denounced, for centuries, as reflected 

by the fact that some are still best known by their Latin names. As old as they 

may be, logical fallacies continue to appear in both the print and the digital 

world. There are dozens of logical fallacies, but the focus here will be on those 

that surface most frequently. For anyone who is interested in learning more 

about logical fallacies, there are a number of sources that cover them in depth. 

The free Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a substantial scholarly article 

on fallacies (plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies). The Purdue OWL (Online 

91

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C H A P T E R   4

Writing Lab) is one of many university-affiliated websites offering lists of 

logical fallacies along with definitions and examples (owl.english.purdue.edu/

owl/resource/659/03).

AD HOMINEM

A very common logical fallacy, the ad hominem attack focuses on some flaw 

in an individual rather than on that person’s opinions or arguments. Example:

Our principal is a bald old man who drives a boring car. Why should he be al-

lowed to ban soda from the school?

Regardless of whether the principal should or should not ban soda from 

the school, attacks on his hair, age, and choice of transportation have no rel-

evance to the wisdom of banning soda or whether the principal is qualified to 

make such a decision. 

Figure 4.1 shows an ad hominem attack on President George W. Bush.

AD POPULUM

The ad populum fallacy appeals either to positive ideals (such as patriotism, 

liberty, or religion) or to their counterpoint negative fears (such as xenopho-

bia, tyranny, sinfulness) in order to distract from the question actually being 

discussed. Example:

If the school bans soda, the terrorists of ISIS win.

Of course, ISIS has no direct connection to soda being banned from schools 

(at least in schools outside of any territory ISIS controls), so bringing up ISIS 

in this context is simply a misdirection that plays on fear and patriotism.

APPEAL TO AUTHORITY

Also known by the Latin name ad verecundiam, this fallacy is based on defer-

ring to a leader or an expert (qualified or not) because of who that person is 

or the position they hold. Example:

If the chair of the National Soft Drink Council says that soda does not impact 

the health of schoolkids, then we should listen. Honestly, who knows more 

about soda?

L O G I C A L   F A L L A C I E S  

93

FIGURE 4.1

This photo shows an example of ad hominem attack in which President George W. 

Bush is depicted as a prison inmate. In addition, his facial features (especially his ears) 

have been exaggerated to make him look unintelligent. Attacking the person, rather 

than what the person stands for, has been a staple of politics for centuries. istock/ 

ScottKrycia

The problem with appealing to authority is that simply being an author-

ity does not make anyone the final word on any topic. Often, deferring to 

the opinion of one expert means ignoring the opinion of some other equally 

qualified expert.

BANDWAGON FALLACY

This fallacy argues that because an idea is popular, it is the right thing to do.

A survey of the student body shows that over 60 percent want to have soda on 

campus. The will of the people must be obeyed.

One need look no further than examples of mob rule to realize the major-

ity is not always right. In many democratic countries, including the United 

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C H A P T E R   4

States, constitutions limit the power of the majority so that basic human 

rights are not subject to the tyranny of the majority.

CONFIRMATION BIAS

Confirmation bias describes the (very human) tendency to focus only on in-

formation that supports what you already believe while ignoring information 

that contradicts your beliefs. Example:

My research on the subject turned up twenty-five articles proving that school 

soda bans do nothing to improve the health of students.

Yes, but what about all the articles showing that school soda bans have a 

positive impact on student health? Also, it is not the number of sources sup-

porting or discrediting an argument that matters. It is the credibility of the 

information contained in those sources. A thousand online rants claiming 

that a popular recreational drug is harmless do not invalidate three rigorous 

scientific studies finding that the drug can have serious adverse effects.

DISMISSIVE FALLACY

This fallacy operates on the idea of dismissing something simply because it 

seems absurd or does not conform to some ill-defined concept of common 

sense. Example:

Banning soda from the school is just weird and ridiculous.

Common sense is a highly subjective concept, so the fact that something 

strikes an individual, or even a group of individuals, as weird, absurd, or un-

usual does not make it false. Not owning a car may seem absurd to someone 

who lives in a small town or a midsized city, but it may not seem at all odd to 

someone who lives in a crowded urban center such as Tokyo or Paris.

DIVINE FALLACY

This fallacy involves attributing anything that cannot be readily explained to 

some supernatural power. Example:

The reason for the soda ban is that an evil spirit has taken control of the prin-

cipal’s soul. There is no other explanation.

L O G I C A L   F A L L A C I E S  

95

While supernatural intervention is not necessarily ruled out as the cause, 

neither is it proven by the claim there is no other explanation. Even though 

they may not be known, there could be many other explanations for the prin-

cipal’s behavior. A similar example occurs when strange, unexplainable lights 

appear in the sky and people automatically assume the source must be alien 

spacecraft. Alien spacecraft may be the source of the lights, but this is not 

proven by the lack of some other explanation.

EITHER/OR

Reducing options to an either/or choice oversimplifies complicated questions 

for which there may be multiple solutions. Example:

Either we stop this soda ban or we will all die of thirst.

Or the students could drink water at school. Or drink enough liquid at 

breakfast to get through the end of the school day without perishing. Reduc-

ing a problem to two stark choices may be an effective way to rabble-rouse, 

but most problems do not boil down to simple either/or choices. Couching 

choices in such reductionist terms only serves to inhibit creative problem 

solving.

Figure 4.2 shows an either/or scenario that ultimately proved false.

GENETIC FALLACY

This fallacy condemns by implying that the origin of a person, idea, theory, 

and so on determines its worth or credibility. Example:

There’s a weird religious cult in Southern California that doesn’t allow its mem-

bers to drink soda. The plan to ban soda is cult based and must be stopped.

Whether or not a cult allows soda has no bearing on health-related argu-

ments put forward as the reason for removing soda from the school. The 

genetic fallacy is often invoked to criticize such phenomena as antismoking 

campaigns and vegetarianism on the grounds that both were embraced by 

some leaders of Nazi Germany. Or course neither antismoking campaigns 

nor vegetarianism have any direct connection to the horrors perpetrated dur-

ing the Third Reich. One could as easily argue that, because the first modern 

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C H A P T E R   4

FIGURE 4.2

This image from the US Civil War proposes an either/or scenario that proved false. In 

fact, several of the states depicted on the snake—Missouri, Delaware, Maryland, and 

Kentucky—never joined the Confederacy and, of course, still exist to this day. Library 

of Congress

freeway system, the autobahn, was built under Nazi rule, freeways are there-

fore morally objectionable and should be banned.

HASTY GENERALIZATION

This occurs when someone jumps to a conclusion based on biased or insuf-

ficient evidence. Example:

The soda ban has been in place for a month, but the students are as unhealthy 

as ever. It’s not working.

Maybe the soda ban will result in healthier students. Maybe not. A month 

is not enough time to know. Similar examples include such hasty generaliza-

tions as jumping to conclusions about a sports team’s championship potential 

based on the outcome of the first game of the season or predicting the long-

term success of a new restaurant based on its first few weeks in business.

L O G I C A L   F A L L A C I E S  

97

MORAL EQUIVALENCE

One of the Internet’s oldest “laws” is Godwin’s law, which can be paraphrased 

as “Any online argument that goes on long enough will eventually invoke 

Hitler.” The point of Godwin’s law is similar to the point of the moral equiva-

lence fallacy: it is logically flawed to trivialize something terrible, such as the 

Holocaust, by comparing it to something much less serious. Example:

Banning soda from the school is the greatest injustice since the Tiananmen 

Square massacre!

No, it is not. Not even close. Making a faulty analogy—equating things that 

are not really comparable—regularly rears its head in heated debates. Athletes 

not being paid for participating in college sports may or may not be unfair, 

but it is not the equivalent of slavery. Living in a cramped studio apartment 

is not ideal, but it is not the equivalent of being locked up in solitary confine-

ment.

PACKAGE DEAL FALLACY

Commonly used in political arguments, this fallacy assumes that beliefs that 

traditionally go together always go together. Example:

Jane is a vegan and runs on the track team. You better believe she is all for the 

soda ban.

Not necessarily. Jane might believe that the soda ban is an affront to indi-

vidual liberty and disagree with it in spite of her personal dietary and health 

choices. Similarly, someone who would not dream of owning a gun might 

support the Second Amendment. Or a married couple who have chosen not 

to have children of their own might support both extended parental leave and 

free child care for working parents. There is nothing that prevents a person 

from holding views that others see as contradictory, though anyone who does 

so runs the risk of being attacked as a hypocrite.

POST HOC

Formally known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, this logical fallacy underpins 

the “Confounding Correlation with Causation” trick described in chapter 3. 

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C H A P T E R   4

The (faulty) reasoning of this fallacy is simple: thing A came before thing B. 

Therefore, thing A caused thing B. Example:

First they put a salad bar in the school lunchroom. A month later they decided 

to ban soda. The salad bar is the reason they banned soda.

While installing a salad bar and banning soda may both have been moti-

vated by concerns about student health and nutrition, without evidence of 

causation there is no reason to conclude that the earlier occurrence caused 

the latter.

RED HERRING

The red herring is a misdirection technique that distracts from the relevant 

issue. Example:

If you think the soda ban is a good thing, then how do you explain the increase 

in students getting detentions?

The relevant issue here is the soda ban, not student behavior. Without an 

established connection between the two, the rate of student detentions is not 

relevant. A version of the red herring fallacy is the “what about” tactic, in 

which someone tries to change the topic by bringing up some unrelated topic:

Your honor, we have obtained video evidence of you accepting a bribe from an 

attorney who is currently pleading a case in your court.

Yeah, but what about all those so-called homeless people aggressively panhan-

dling on our streets and sleeping in doorways?

SLIPPERY SLOPE

The slippery slope fallacy argues that if you allow W to happen, then X, Y, and 

Z are the inevitable consequences. Example:

If this soda ban is put in place, the next thing you know they will ban chips, 

gum, and cell phones. And from there it is only a short step to mandatory 

school uniforms.

L O G I C A L   F A L L A C I E S  

99

FIGURE 4.3

This anti–women’s suffrage cartoon paints a slippery slope scenario in which women 

winning the right to vote has inevitably led to a complete reversal of male and female 

roles. Library of Congress

While such an outcome is (remotely) possible, it is far from inevitable. 

The slippery slope fallacy is a type of a non sequitur (Latin for “it does not 

follow”). A non sequitur occurs when a conclusion does not necessary follow 

from what precedes it: “Since the state legislature passed that bill decriminal-

izing marijuana, there is no doubt they will raise college tuition” (see figure 

4.3 for another example).

STRAW MAN

This logical fallacy takes several forms, the most common of which involves 

attacking an argument that an opponent never raised.

The principal’s soda ban will not reduce littering on campus because 100 per-

cent of soda cans on campus are recycled.

This is a straw man attack because the principal has never argued that the 

soda ban was about reducing littering; instead, his point is that a soda ban will 

improve the health of students.

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C H A P T E R   4

RECAP

Logical fallacies often appear in information focusing on political and social 

controversies. While the existence of a logical fallacy does not necessarily 

mean that the information in which it is used is completely noncredible, logi-

cal fallacies undermine the specific arguments they are employed to support. 

Being familiar with logical fallacies and alert to their use will help you become 

a better evaluator of information and help you keep up your information 

guard in the face of deceptive arguments.

5

Evaluating an 

Information Source 

Nine Essential Questions 

Everyone Should Ask

The most basic question for anyone trying to evaluate information is “How 

credible is this information?” While there is no simple formula for evaluating 

any given piece of information, the following list of questions constitutes a 

reasonable line of inquiry for establishing the credibility of any information 

you may encounter.

When evaluating information, it is important to remember that most 

information falls on a continuum somewhere between completely noncred-

ible and incontrovertible fact, with relatively little information resting at one 

extreme or the other. It is similarly important to remember that when you are 

evaluating a piece of information no single factor is necessarily a deal maker 

or a deal breaker. Evaluation is more about looking at the whole package and 

making an informed judgment about the information’s credibility than it is 

about rooting out a single factor that makes the case one way or the other. For 

example, suppose a documentary filmmaker who has never before done any 

work on the topic of terrorism suddenly releases a one-hour documentary 

on that topic. Does that one fact—the filmmaker’s lack of experience with 

the topic of terrorism—discredit the film? Not necessarily. While it would 

be worth asking, “Is someone who has never before addressed the topic of 

terrorism qualified to make such a film?” other factors may add to the film’s 

credibility: Maybe the filmmaker took an entire year to study terrorism and 

consulted with a number of terrorism experts as preparation for shooting 

the film. Maybe the filmmaker has produced several documentaries about 

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C H A P T E R   5

violence and violent behavior and therefore shooting a film about terrorism is 

not that much of a stretch. Maybe the film has been well reviewed with many 

and varied reviewers commenting on the film’s credibility.

Reiterating the point: evaluating any given piece of information is about 

looking at the whole picture rather than focusing on a single factor that, 

somehow, proves or disproves credibility.

QUESTION 1: WHO CREATED THE INFORMATION?

When evaluating any piece of information, arguably the most important 

question you can ask is “What can I learn about the knowledge, experience, 

reputation, and outlook of the person or persons who wrote, drew, filmed, 

or otherwise created this information?” There are a number of steps you can 

take to answer questions about the author, or authors, of information. (For 

the sake of brevity, I will use the word author broadly to include any creator 

of information in any format, including videos, images, data sets, etc.)

Is the author anonymous or is the authorship wrongly attributed to someone 

who did not actually create the information?

■

If the answer to either question is yes, then the credibility of the informa-

tion itself must be seriously questioned.

■

There are cases where anonymous authorship is legitimate, as when the 

creators of the information might be harmed or possibly killed if their iden-

tities were revealed, but even in such cases anonymous information should 

be approached with a high degree of skepticism.

Is there objective biographical information addressing the author’s qualifications?

■

Have articles about the author been published in newspapers, magazines, 

reference works, news websites, or other sources that are not under the 

author’s control?

Is the author knowledgeable about the topic in question?

■

Is the author a genuine expert on the topic? (See “Faking Expertise” in 

chapter 3 for suggestions on how to determine whether or not someone is 

a qualified expert.)

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103

■

Has the author produced other credible works (books, articles, videos, etc.) 

on or related to the topic in question? Note: Having produced a large num-

ber of poorly researched, heavily biased, and generally noncredible works 

on a topic does not make someone an expert on that topic.

Is there a possible conflict of interest?

■

Does the author have a financial, personal, or political interest that could 

cause the author to be less than completely forthcoming?

■

Another way of framing the conflict-of-interest question is to simply ask, 

“Who benefits?” (You can even impress your friends by using the Latin ver-

sion of this question: Cui bono?)

For example, if the CEO of a company writes an article encouraging people 

to buy shares in her company, she clearly has a financial interest in present-

ing her company in the best possible light and will benefit if people read her 

article and invest in her company. While this does not necessarily mean the 

information is not credible—the CEO may run a great company that repre-

sents a sound investment opportunity—it does mean you have to question the 

author’s impartiality. The same caution would apply if, for example, you have 

a university president praising the quality of education at his campus during 

a television interview or a US senator publicly promoting support for a bill 

that she authored.

QUESTION 2: WHO PUBLISHED THE INFORMATION?

As with the word author, I will use the word publisher very broadly to include 

any entity—whether private, governmental, or nonprofit—that serves to put 

information in front of the public. (At the risk of pointing out the obvious, 

the words publisher and public come from the same Latin root.) Publishers’ 

outlets include newspapers, magazines, journals, books, films, broadcast me-

dia, websites, and social-media platforms.

Does the publisher have a known bias?

■

For example, the political magazine the Nation has a liberal bias while its 

rival publication, the National Review, has a conservative bias. Being pub-

lished by a source with a bias does not invalidate information. However, the 

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C H A P T E R   5

existence of a bias means that opposing points of view will likely be down-

played or completely missing. In the most extreme cases, the publisher’s 

bias can be so strong that the information sinks to the level of propaganda.

Does the publisher have a reputation for credibility?

■

Publishers who set high standards for editorial processes and fact-checking 

develop reputations for credibility. Those who cut corners or simply do not 

care about credibility, do not.

■

Getting a sense of any publisher’s reputation is not always easy. It cannot 

be based on any one person’s opinion. On one hand, anyone who has ever 

disagreed with or felt wronged by a publisher will very likely label the pub-

lisher as biased, unfair, or inaccurate—even in cases where the publisher 

was providing credible information. On the other hand, anyone who is in 

sympathy with the publisher’s aims will likely label the publisher a credible 

source. It typically requires looking at the opinions of a number of diverse 

commentators in order to get a sense of a publisher’s overall reputation.

■

Even a good reputation for credibility does not ensure that every piece of 

information appearing under a credible publisher’s banner is automati-

cally trustworthy. Two examples of discredited information mentioned in 

chapter 2—Walter Duranty’s reports on the famine in the Soviet Union 

and the “Jimmy’s World” hoax—were published in, respectively, the highly 

regarded New York Times and the equally esteemed Washington Post. Even 

though both of these publications have excellent reputations for accurate 

reporting and fact-checking, their good reputations do not render either 

one infallible.

■

Publishers’ reputations can change over time. Factors such as changes in 

ownership, declining revenues, competition from new media outlets (such 

as social media), and political pressure can impact a publisher’s ability and/

or willingness to maintain the highest standards of credibility.

Does the publisher have experience with the topic in question?

■

Publishers who focus on a particular topic are probably (though not neces-

sarily always) better sources of information on that topic than publishers 

who only dabble in it. For example, the health information website Med-

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105

linePlus (medlineplus.gov) has years of experience providing health infor-

mation to the public and is, therefore, more likely to be a reliable source of 

health information than, say, a website devoted to rebuilding classic cars.

Does the publisher have a conflict of interest?

■

As with authors, publishers can be influenced by conflicts of interest. For 

example, information published on the website of a trade association rep-

resenting motorcycle manufacturers is very likely to promote motorcycling 

as a safe and enjoyable form of transportation while downplaying the risks.

■

One of the most obvious and prevalent conflicts of interest is between 

publishers and advertisers, as publishers are loath to publish anything that 

might cause advertisers to pull their financial support. Indeed, some argue 

that accepting any advertising revenue at all fatally compromises a pub-

lisher’s ability to produce unbiased, fully credible information.

■

Government websites, which typically do not carry advertising, have built-

in conflicts of interest as well. The NASA website is likely to promote the 

interests of NASA while being unlikely to provide information advocating 

that the NASA budget should be cut. Similarly, a state legislator’s official web 

page is unlikely to provide information supporting bills he or she opposes.

Information provided by any publisher or author who operates under 

one or more conflicts of interest is not automatically invalid. Why? Because 

every person, business, and organization operates under multiple conflicts of 

interest. Avoiding them entirely is all but impossible. What is important is to 

understand what conflicts of interest might be in play and to consider how 

they might influence the credibility of the information.

QUESTION 3: WHAT COMES AFTER THE HEADLINE?

It is quite easy to read a headline, make a judgment about the content, and 

then move on. Evaluating a work’s credibility requires more effort.

■

Do the contents of the information match or confirm what is written in the 

headline?

■

It is a simple matter to stick a misleading headline on a document and 

hope that nobody bothers to read further. After all, the sensational headline 

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C H A P T E R   5

“Teen Romance Leaves Six Dead” could apply to either a breaking news 

story about youth violence run amok or a review of William Shakespeare’s 

Romeo and Juliet.

QUESTION 4: WHAT SOURCES ARE CITED?

Credible information clearly identifies its sources through either informal or 

(for academic writing) formal citations.

■

First, are any sources cited?

■

Second, are citations to sources specific and accurate?

■

Third, are the sources cited themselves credible and relevant? You can 

click on links to online sources to evaluate their credibility and relevance. 

Sources that are not available online require more work to track down and 

evaluate, but the effort is worth it if the credibility of the information is re-

ally important to you.

See “Falsifying Attribution” in chapter 3 for detailed information on the use 

and misuse of sources.

QUESTION 5: HOW OLD IS THE INFORMATION?

Presenting old information as new information is a familiar technique for 

misleading readers.

■

Is the information so old as to be out of date? In some scientific and tech-

nological fields, information that is more than a few years old may be too 

out of date to be useful. In any field, new findings may render previous 

findings obsolete.

■

Any accounts of specific events should indicate when those events took 

place. The lack of a date may indicate that the author is trying to pass off an 

old event as a recent occurrence. For example, while the headline “Muslim 

Forces Capture US Navy Warship. Hold Entire Crew Hostage.” is perfectly 

credible, it loses its shock value when you learn that the headline refers to 

the capture of the USS Philadelphia in October 1803.

■

Be aware, too, that the date information was created does not necessarily 

correspond to the date it was published (or republished).

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107

QUESTION 6: WHAT DO OTHERS THINK ABOUT THE INFORMATION?

Seeking out a second (or third or fourth or . . . ) opinion is a powerful tool for 

evaluating the credibility of information.

■

Books and documentary films are often reviewed by independent reviewers. 

Magazines, journals, and newspapers are good sources of reviews written by 

professional reviewers or individuals with expertise in the topic covered by 

the books and films. Amateur reviews can be found on social media sites as 

well as on commercial sites such as Amazon.com.

■

Similarly, books, films, and other information sources may have won 

awards that speak to their credibility. The value of any award greatly de-

pends on who bestows it and the rigor of the requirements for winning the 

award. Beware of impressive-sounding awards bestowed by organizations 

of dubious credibility and/or bestowed to such a large number of recipients 

as to be meaningless. On the other hand, a book or article that has won a 

highly competitive prize from a prestigious organization such as the Ameri-

can Historical Association, the American Academy for the Advancement 

of Science, or the American Library Association stands out for having been 

recognized as significant by knowledgeable experts.

■

Finding reviews of shorter works, such as articles in newspapers, maga-

zines, and journals, is unlikely. Finding online comments on shorter works 

is possible, but the credibility of any such comments depends entirely on 

the knowledge and objectivity of the people who make them. Online com-

ments sections, though common, are typically not reliable sources of com-

mentary and criticism.

■

Asking a trusted third party—a teacher, a librarian, or someone with a lot 

of knowledge on the subject—for their thoughts on whether a source of 

information is credible is a good practice. Asking more than one trusted 

third party for an opinion is an even better practice.

QUESTION 7: IS THE INFORMATION A PRIMARY OR  

SECONDARY SOURCE?

Whether a source is primary or secondary has no direct bearing on its cred-

ibility. Both primary and secondary sources can be credible or noncredible. 

But determining if a source is primary or secondary may help you decide how 

to evaluate it as well as how to best make use of it.

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C H A P T E R   5

Primary sources take a number of forms, depending on who is working 

with them. For historians, primary sources consist of documents, images, 

accounts, recordings, maps, or objects created during the time being studied 

(for example, figure 5.1 shows an actual memorandum from the US Navy 

Hydrographic Office). For a historian, a diary detailing a pioneer woman’s 

experience crossing the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon is a primary source. 

For a journalist, a primary source might be an interview with someone who 

just witnessed a newsworthy event. For a scientist, lab notes would be a pri-

mary source. For a theater director, an original cast recording of a Broadway 

play can be a primary source. Yale University maintains an excellent website 

that describes different forms that primary sources may take (primarysources 

.yale.edu/identify-types-formats). 

FIGURE 5.1

This daily memoran-

dum from the US 

Navy Hydrographic 

Office (dated April 

15, 1912) would be 

considered a primary 

source document for 

anyone studying the 

sinking of the RMS 

Titanic. Library of 

Congress

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109

Secondary sources consist of information that is created from and/or 

comments upon primary sources. A scholarly book about the history of the 

Oregon Trail might use (and cite) primary sources such as diaries, maps, 

government documents, and images as its source material.

In some cases, a single source of information may be both primary and 

secondary. For example, a newspaper article published on September 12, 

2001, which quotes eyewitnesses to, and is illustrated with photographs taken 

of, the 9/11 terror attacks would be a secondary source for someone who was 

studying the history of the 9/11 terror attacks. However, that same article 

would be a primary source for someone who was studying how the media 

responded in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Evaluating a primary source mostly consists of making sure the source is 

authentic. Is that diary of an Oregon Trail pioneer genuine or is it a fake? If 

genuine, did anyone alter the diary at any time after it was first written? Is that 

a genuine photograph of a Civil War battle or is it a photograph of a modern 

reenactment that has been altered to look old? Even if the photo was taken at 

the time of the Civil War, its credibility may still be questioned. For example, 

because Civil War photographers are known to have moved the bodies of 

fallen soldiers to enhance the artistic quality of their photographs, it is not 

unfair to ask if a Civil War period photograph was staged in ways that alter 

its meaning or impact.1

QUESTION 8: IS THE INFORMATION A JOKE?

Satire can be so subtle that the fact that something is being said in jest gets 

lost, especially when the joke is pulled out of context.

■

Entering the title or first few sentences of a piece of information into a web 

search engine may reveal that the information came from a satirical website 

like Cracked.com or College Humor. Or perhaps the search reveals com-

ments or reviews indicating that the information originated as a joke.

QUESTION 9: IS THE INFORMATION DIFFERENT FROM ANYTHING YOU 

HAVE EVER SEEN?

The story of a single iconoclastic genius making a discovery that flies in the 

face of all previous knowledge and sets conventional wisdom on its ear is 

invariably appealing. So, too, is the idea of a historian, anthropologist, or  

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C H A P T E R   5

investigator turning up a lost document, a rare object, or piece of smoking-

gun evidence that completely changes everything we thought we knew about 

a famous person or a landmark event. The problem is that such world- 

changing discoveries, while common in the realm of fiction, are extraordi-

narily rare in real life.

■

Any information that contradicts all previous knowledge on the topic in 

question must pass an extraordinarily high bar before being deemed credible.

■

Similarly, any information that presents some absolutely stunning, never-

before-known concept begs to be thoroughly evaluated before being 

deemed credible. For example, an article making the astounding claim that 

Queen Victoria was actually Jack the Ripper deserves much more skepti-

cal reception than an article reporting the widely acknowledged fact that 

Queen Victoria was grief stricken following the death of her husband, 

Prince Albert, in 1861.

B O N U S   Q U E S T I O N :   W H A T   A B O U T 

W I K I P E D I A ?

As a widely known and heavily used online encyclopedia, Wiki-

pedia (www.wikipedia.org; see figure 5.2) has both its adherents 

and its detractors. Students often ask, “Is it OK to use Wikipedia 

as a source?” Teachers and parents often answer this question 

with a resounding “No!” While there are some legitimate rea-

sons for answering no to this familiar Digital Age question, the 

best answer is actually more nuanced than either a straight-up 

yes or no.

What Is Good about Wikipedia?

■

Wikipedia contains millions of articles covering just about any 

topic, including articles on current events that will not be cov-

ered by traditional reference books for months or years to come.

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FIGURE 5.2

Close-up of Wikipedia’s main page on an LCD computer monitor. Wikipe-

dia is a collaborative, web-based encyclopedia. istock/ jentakespictures

■

Wikipedia articles provide, in general, good introductions to 

the topics they cover. Reading a Wikipedia article for back-

ground and then following up on the sources cited in the article 

has become a something of a go-to strategy for beginning a 

research project. And, as strategies go, it is not a bad one.

■

Longer  Wikipedia articles often go far beyond the level of 

mere introductions by providing in-depth coverage of a topic. 

For example, the Wikipedia article on “Wave-Particle Duality” 

is approximately seven thousand words long, cites fifty-two 

sources, and links to a number of Wikipedia articles on related 

topics.

■

Many  Wikipedia contributors are extremely knowledgeable 

about the topics on which they write and are motivated to con-

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C H A P T E R   5

tribute content to Wikipedia because of their passion for their 

areas of expertise.

■

Since Wikipedia accepts no advertising revenue and contribu-

tors and editors are unpaid volunteers, conflicts of interest are 

minimized.

■

Because  Wikipedia  may be edited by anyone, it employs the 

talents of a vast, worldwide readership to create new content 

while also leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to correct mis-

takes in, as well as make updates to, existing articles.

■

In spite of its Wild West reputation, Wikipedia does exert edito-

rial control. New articles are reviewed and graded by volunteer 

editors who may reject articles that do not meet standards for 

credibility. Additions to existing articles are subject to similar 

editorial control.

■

Wikipedia requires contributors to cite sources, and editors of-

ten point out where citations are needed in existing articles. Ed-

itors also point out articles or sections of articles that could be 

improved by additional information, additional cited sources, 

or more thorough copyediting.

■

Wikipedia enforces a “Protection Policy”2 that employs various 

levels of protection to prevent articles on controversial figures 

or topics from being vandalized or turned into the personal 

battlegrounds of warring contributors.

■

Wikipedia provides “Talk Pages” on which readers can discuss 

and debate the quality and credibility of articles with the ulti-

mate goal of improving Wikipedia content.

What Is Bad about Wikipedia?

■

Because anyone can contribute to or edit articles, the content 

of Wikipedia is vulnerable to bias, misinformation, vandalism, 

poor writing, and sloppy research.

■

Articles about living individuals such as celebrities, politicians, 

and public figures, as well as articles about current-day busi-

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113

nesses, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, may 

be entirely or largely authored by insiders who aim to show 

their favored individual or organization in the best possible light 

while downplaying or completely ignoring any criticism of the 

individual or organization. Conversely, the exact same types of 

articles can be hijacked by critics and turned into hatchet jobs.

■

For better or worse, the content of any Wikipedia article can 

change at any time, which makes citing a Wikipedia article as a 

source a risky proposition. A Wikipedia fact that you cite today 

could be gone tomorrow.

■

In general, Wikipedia articles are not subject to the level of edi-

torial review and fact-checking that is the standard for profes-

sionally edited and written information resources.

■

The relative anonymity of Wikipedia editors and contributors 

makes it difficult to evaluate the qualifications of those who 

contribute to and edit Wikipedia articles.

■

The fact that many Wikipedia articles are the work of multiple 

contributors who are not working in collaboration with each 

other means that the quality of any article can vary from sec-

tion to section or even from sentence to sentence. This means 

a single article may include contradictory facts or opinions or 

change tone without warning.

■

The quality of information found in Wikipedia can vary wildly 

from one article to another. For example, a Wikipedia article on 

a complex scientific concept may be an excellent source of in-

formation because it is the work of several PhDs with extensive 

knowledge of the subject. At the same time, an article on an 

obscure pop-culture topic may lack credibility because it was 

compiled by youthful fans with little writing and research expe-

rience and a no-more-than-superficial knowledge of the topic.

So, is it OK to use Wikipedia? If that question had a Facebook 

relationship status, it would be “It’s Complicated.” Wikipedia 

has strengths and weaknesses that users need to be aware of 

114 

C H A P T E R   5

(see figure 5.3). But that is true of any information source. Some 

critics of Wikipedia seem to operate on the premise that more 

traditional sources of information like, for example, Encyclope-

dia Britannica stand as the infallible counterparts to the highly 

flawed Wikipedia, though of course this is not true. No source of 

information is perfect, and holding Wikipedia to a gold standard 

of credibility that does not actually exist in the real world is unfair 

and unhelpful. In the end, readers of Wikipedia should approach 

its content with the same degree of critical judgment used with 

any source of information, employing all their skills for evaluat-

ing information to decide on the credibility, or lack thereof, of the 

information they encounter in Wikipedia. Or, for that matter, in 

any other communally written and edited information resource.

FIGURE 5.3

This Wikipedia article on 

political consultant Roger 

Stone was vandalized by 

a Wikipedia contributor. 

While the highly biased 

and noncredible content 

was quickly removed, it 

stands as an example of 

how the content of Wiki-

pedia—or of any commu-

nally written and edited 

source of information—is 

vulnerable to malicious 

alteration. Wikipedia

E V A L U A T I N G   A N   I N F O R M A T I O N   S O U R C E    

115

RECAP

When you need to evaluate the credibility of information, there are certain 

logical steps you can take, keeping in mind that evaluation is a holistic process 

rather than a treasure hunt for one piece of evidence that entirely credits or 

discredits the information in question. These steps can take the form of an-

swering the following series questions about an information source:

1.  Who created the information?

2.  Who published the information?

3.  What comes after the headline?

4.  What sources are cited?

5.  How old is the information?

6.  What do others think of the information?

7.  Is the information a primary or a secondary source?

8.  Is the information a joke?

9.  Is the information different from anything you have ever seen?

6

Power in Numbers

Negotiating the Statistics Minefield

In the opening pages of his entertaining and informative book Damned Lies 

and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists, 

statistician Joel Best tells the story of what he bluntly describes as “the worst 

social statistic ever.”1 The short version of Best’s story is that in 1995 a peer-

reviewed social science journal published an article that made the claim that 

the number of children killed by firearms in the United States had doubled 

every year since 1950. Assume, for the point of illustration, that only one child 

had been killed by a firearm in the United States in 1950 (though the actual 

number killed would have certainly been greater than one). Table 6.1 shows 

what the numbers would have looked like from 1950 to 1994.

Obviously, the figures shown in the table quickly grow impossibly large. 

The error that allowed so inaccurate a statistic to see the light of day was 

simple but significant. The source data indicated that the number of US chil-

dren killed by firearms had doubled from 1950 to 1994. What ended up in 

the article was that the number of US children killed by firearms had doubled 

every year. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 

the number of persons under the age of eighteen killed by firearms in 1994 

was 3,224 (1,921 homicides, 902 suicides, and 401 unintentional shootings),2 

a far cry from the impossibly high 17.5 billion figure reached had the number 

of dead children actually doubled every year. Though the fact that the number 

of persons under the age of eighteen killed by firearms doubled from 1950 to 

117

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C H A P T E R   6

Table 6.1.    Hypothetical Numbers If Deaths by Firearms Had Actually Doubled 1950–1994

1994 is nothing to celebrate, that amount of increase is not all that surpris-

ing when you consider that, over the same time span, the population of the 

United States increased by 73 percent. With a larger population, the expecta-

tion is that the number of deaths would also be greater.

P O W E R   I N   N U M B E R S  

119

Best’s point in telling the story of the “worst social statistic ever” is not 

to weigh in on the gun debate or mock anyone for having made a very large 

statistical error. The point of the story is that it is really easy to misunderstand 

statistics and be misled by them even when, as in the story Best relates, there 

was no intention to deceive. When you throw in the all-too-common cases of 

issue advocates misusing statistics to further their agendas (either intention-

ally or through their own statistical illiteracy), the chance of being misled by 

bogus statistics becomes even greater.

This chapter will cover some of the basics of understanding statistics and 

how they can be misused, but reading this chapter is not, all by itself, going 

to transform anyone from being statistically illiterate to master of statistical 

information. Anyone who wishes to become truly adept at understanding 

statistics and capable of evaluating information that contains statistics would 

do well to take instruction in statistics or, barring that, read a book or two 

covering basic statistical concepts. Joel Best’s Damned Lies and Statistics is 

not a bad place to start.

WHY STATISTICS MATTER

Statistics matter because statistical information is arguably the most useful 

tool humans have for making decisions as individuals and as societies. In a 

world with more problems than there are resources to fix those problems, sta-

tistics help people decide which problems are most critical and, by extension, 

where to put a society’s limited resources for solving problems. Statistics can 

also help both societies and individuals measure the effectiveness of any solu-

tions they choose to implement. For example, statistical data is the only way 

to truly know if a medication, surgical procedure, or other medical treatment 

is safe and effective; without statistical data, physicians and patients would be 

forced to rely on anecdotal evidence, which in many cases is less reliable than 

outright guessing.

See the box titled “The Pothole Problem” a hypothetical example of how 

statistics can drive decision making.

While the War on Potholes is a made-up and somewhat frivolous example, 

in the real world statistical data is used to inform decision making for just 

about everything that impacts society: public health, poverty, environmental 

issues, transportation, taxation, the economy, national defense, and so on.

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C H A P T E R   6

T H E   P O T H O L E   P R O B L E M

A coalition comprised of sports car enthusiasts, lowrider clubs, 

asphalt paving companies, and assorted sympathetic politicians 

holds a press conference to sound the alarm: potholes have 

become a national problem that must be addressed. Each year, 

so these advocates claim, potholes inflict millions of dollars of 

damage to vehicles and are responsible for thousands of injuries 

and hundreds of deaths. The advocates relate the shocking and 

tragic story of the Green Family, whose vehicle rolled over after 

hitting a pothole. Now is the time for the nation to invest, and 

invest heavily, in making our roadways pothole free! Now is the 

time for a War on Potholes!

Of course, nobody is in favor of potholes, but is the anti-pothole 

coalition constructing a problem where none truly exists? Is 

the problem serious enough that society should finance a war 

on potholes rather than, say, invest those dollars in repairing 

bridges or building high-speed rail or simply reducing taxes? 

Rather than guessing where the resources should go based on 

highly emotional appeals, politicians and the public should base 

their decisions on valid statistical information. Credible statistics 

could, for example, guide decision making by answering the fol-

lowing questions:

■

What are the actual annual costs of the damage potholes inflict 

on vehicles?

■

How many people are injured each year by potholes and how 

severe are those injuries?

■

How many people are killed each year due to potholes?

■

How many potholes are there on the nation’s roads?

■

What is the estimated cost of repairing all the existing pot-

holes?

■

What is the estimated annual cost of repairing future potholes?

P O W E R   I N   N U M B E R S  

121

Statistics provide an efficient way to answer each of these ques-

tions. For example, using valid statistical sampling methods to 

accurately estimate of the number of potholes in the nation’s 

roads eliminates the need to count every single pothole, a pro-

cess that would take years and cost millions before even the 

first pothole was repaired. Similarly, statistics could be used to 

estimate the annual costs of an all-out war on potholes, allowing 

people to decide if the cost makes economic sense.

As powerful as they are, statistics are not magic, and answering 

complex questions is rarely simple.

Before statistics can be used to accurately answer a question, 

there must be agreed-upon definitions of exactly what is being 

measured. For example, consider the seemingly simple question 

of how many potholes there are in the nation’s roads. The answer 

would depend on the definition of a pothole. Advocates for going 

to war against potholes might define a pothole as any roadway 

imperfection with volume of thirty cubic centimeters (about one-

eighth of a cup) or more. Those who think the roads are good 

enough as they are, on the other hand, might define a pothole as 

having a minimum volume of four thousand cubic centimeters 

(about a gallon). On one hand, the thirty-cubic-centimeter defini-

tion will result in a much larger number of potholes, making the 

pothole problem look big and solving the problem seem urgent. 

On the other hand, the four-thousand-cubic-centimeter definition 

will result in a much lower number of potholes, making the prob-

lem look smaller and seem less urgent. If the two sides cannot 

agree on the definition of what constitutes a pothole, any statics 

they present in the court of public opinion will be apples-and-

oranges comparisons that are useless for shaping decisions.

Besides the need for agreed-upon definitions, there is the chal-

lenge of collecting statistical data in the first place. For example, 

to answer the question of how many people are killed or injured 

by potholes each year, someone would have to collect that data. 

Do the police who investigate accidents keep track of which  

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C H A P T E R   6

accidents are caused by potholes? If not, then any claims about 

the dangers posed by potholes are merely guesswork. (Even 

though the Green family was involved in a terrible pothole-

related accident, without more data it is impossible to know if 

that accident was a one-in-a-million aberration or an example 

of something that happens several times a day on the nation’s 

roadways.) If police do keep pothole-related accident statistics, 

then how accurate are they? What if police investigators cannot 

always tell when an accident was caused by a pothole and, as a 

result, either undercount or overcount pothole-related accidents? 

What if different police departments have different rules for what 

is and is not considered a pothole-related accident? Should it 

count as a pothole-related accident when a drunk driver hits a 

pothole? Should it count as a pothole-related injury when pas-

sengers fail to wear seat belts?

If society does decide to wage a war on potholes, statistics can 

show whether going to war is actually solving the problem. As 

roads have been improved, have pothole-related injuries, deaths, 

and damage declined? What if the statistics show that smoother 

roads are encouraging people to drive faster and, as a result, the 

nation is suffering as many—or possibly more—accidents than 

before the potholes were repaired? (The law of unintended con-

sequences is ruthlessly unforgiving.)

Compiling credible statistics and interpreting them correctly is 

often challenging, but when the alternative is making decisions 

based on guesswork—guesswork that may well be influenced by 

powerful appeals to emotion—meeting that challenge is worth 

the effort.

Statistical information is also used to inform personal decisions. A family 

that is considering buying a house might gather statistics on sales of houses in 

their area to help them decide how much they should spend on a house, what 

neighborhoods to consider buying in, and what they might expect to gain 

P O W E R   I N   N U M B E R S  

123

(or lose) when the time comes to sell. In the area of personal health, medical 

statistics help individuals understand the likelihood of a specific drug or treat-

ment option being beneficial to them as well as the likelihood of unwanted 

side effects. Just as statistical information can inform a wide range of social 

issues, it can also inform a wide range of personal issues.

One way to think of statistics is as tools for measuring. Like a tape measure 

or a scale, statistics tell you the size of whatever it is you are studying:

■

Nationwide, how many people are chronically homeless?

■

How proficient are Connecticut high school sophomores in math?

■

What percentage of trees in the Payette National Forest are infested with 

pine bark beetles?

No form of measurement—whether you are talking about an intelligence 

test, a highly sensitive laboratory scale, or a laser-powered interferometer—

can ever be perfectly exact. The same is true of statistical measurements. 

There are simply too many variables for absolute statistical precision. How-

ever, when statistical data is gathered and analyzed in accordance with sound 

scientific principles, the accuracy of the measurements is more than adequate. 

Are statistical measurements ever perfect? No. Are they good enough to guide 

sound decision making? Yes—if they are collected and analyzed properly.

As useful as credible statistics are, there is a problem in that it is deceptively 

easy to be misled by statistics. The mechanisms through which this happens 

are as follows:

1.  The end user of the statistics is not statistically literate enough to fully 

understand what the statistics actually mean.

■

Concerned about side effects, a patient declines to take a drug even 

though the statistical evidence indicates that the chances of any side 

effects are very small while the chances that the drug will improve the 

patient’s health are high.

2.  The creators of the statistics make unintentional errors that render their 

statistics noncredible.

■

A company conducting a telephone poll of potential customers unin-

tentionally employs a sampling method that results in a biased sample.

3.  The creators of the statistics intentionally produce noncredible statistics.

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C H A P T E R   6

■

Instead of using neutral questions, political pollsters intentionally con-

struct a survey composed of biased questions with the goal of shaping 

the opinions of voters.

4.  Advocates unintentionally employ noncredible statistics to support their 

arguments.

■

Congressional lobbyists present statistics that incorporate basic math-

ematical errors because the lobbyists lack the statistical knowledge to 

recognize those errors have rendered their statistics meaningless.

5.  Advocates intentionally employ noncredible statistics to support their 

arguments.

■

Leaders of a political action committee (PAC) run television advertise-

ments employing statistics the PAC leaders know are based on incom-

plete data but do so anyway because the statistics will garner support for 

their favored candidates.

As an end user of statistics, you cannot control the behavior of either creators 

of statistics or advocates who use (or misuse) statistics to further their various 

agendas. What you can do is become more adept at spotting the common prob-

lems that undermine statistical credibility so that you can avoid being misled.

STATISTICS MAKE POWERFUL AMMUNITION

As already suggested in the hypothetical pothole example, advocates use 

statistics as ammunition in the seemingly endless wars to win the hearts and 

minds of a public that has only so much capacity—financial, intellectual, and 

emotional—to devote to social issues. If you are an advocate for any issue—

political, scientific, economic, and so on—statistics can help you win support 

by making your issue seem bigger, more important, and more urgent than all 

the other issues competing for attention and, in many cases, financial sup-

port. Consider the following statements:

■

I think librarians should be paid more because their jobs are entirely about 

helping people.

■

Librarians should be paid more because they consistently earn 57.8 percent 

less than other professionals with similar educational requirements and job 

duties.

P O W E R   I N   N U M B E R S  

125

Isn’t the second statement far more powerful, far more convincing that the 

first? After all, it cites hard numbers. The first statement comes off as whiney 

and opinionated, while the second resonates with the strength of numerical 

authority. There is just one problem. The second statement should be no 

more convincing than the first because the number it quotes is a complete 

fabrication. I made up “57.8 percent less” out of thin air. It has no more ba-

sis in fact than if I declared that last year the gross domestic product of the 

United States was $1.57 or that the weight of all the gray whales in the world 

is 17.34 times the weight of all the moose in Alberta.

Why do people use statistics—whether intentionally or unintentionally—

in ways that mislead? They do so because statistics are numbers and, for many 

people, numbers are assumed to be facts. (Even when they are not.) Some-

times those who misuse statistics are true believers so committed to their 

causes that they filter out any statistics that contradict their arguments while 

unquestionably accepting as valid as any statistics that support their cause. 

In the 1980s various advocates—social workers, police, religious leaders, 

journalists—trotted out statistics “proving” that satanic ritual abuse was real 

and pervasive. It is likely that many of those passionate advocates believed 

the statistics they cited were valid, but that does not change the fact that the 

numbers were fabrications.3 Conversely, some of those who misuse statistics 

are straight-up liars. The leadership of Enron Corporation and its auditors 

presented statistics showing that the company was profitable (and therefore a 

good investment) even though they knew their numbers were bogus and the 

company was deeply in the red.4

Recognizing that anyone—including those with whom you agree and 

sympathize—may use statistics as ammunition will go a long way toward 

keeping you from being misled. When you recognize that a statistic is being 

used as ammunition, the first step is to evaluate the credibility of the statistic, 

something you can do using the evaluation questions outlined in chapter 5. 

When evaluating a statistic, it is probably most important to ask yourself who 

is behind the statistic and what biases or conflicts of interest may be influenc-

ing either those who created that statistic or those who are using the statistic 

to further their agenda. Another good tactic is to see if you can find other 

statistics on the same topic. If three or four credible sources cite the number 

of children abducted by strangers each year in the United States as being be-

tween three hundred and four hundred, then you really need to question any 

statistic claiming that the number is over fifty thousand.

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C H A P T E R   6

Big, Round Numbers

Not every big, round number you see is a lie, but liars sure do like big, 

round numbers. Why stop at 600,023 when 1,000,000 is pretty close and has 

a much better ring to it? Why not round up that anemic 27 percent to 50 

percent? Why? Because doing so is dishonest. Big, round numbers and high 

percentages make whatever idea you are selling seem big and important, so 

be extra skeptical when you see them. Similarly, when you hear anyone cite 

the proverbial “99.9 percent,” you can be sure it is a lie.

Sampling

Statistics use sampling as a way of producing accurate numbers without 

the need to count every single thing being studied. And why not just count 

everything instead of sampling? Unless you are counting a small number of 

things that are easily accessible, counting everything is slow and expensive. 

In some cases, counting every single thing being studied is impossible. Just 

imagine the impossibility of trying to count every single mosquito in Dade 

County, Florida. It makes far more sense to count the number of mosquitos 

in several areas that are representative of the entire county and then estimate 

the total number of mosquitos based on those samples. Though it may seem 

counterintuitive, attempts to count everything are so prone to errors that 

in many cases sampling may actually be more accurate than counting. The 

United States Decennial Census provides a good example. Every ten years the 

United States conducts a census in which the goal is to count every person in 

the country. Conducting the census is a huge, complicated undertaking that 

costs millions of dollars and, some argue, produces numbers that are actu-

ally less accurate than would be produced by conducting a (much less costly) 

census based on valid sampling techniques; even so, the notion of conducting 

the census via sampling remains hotly controversial.5 The census sampling 

controversy is mostly political, but in part the controversy is based on mis-

trust and misunderstanding of sampling as a valid technique.

Two factors determine the credibility of any statistical sample: (1) the size 

of the sample and (2) the representativeness of the sample.

Sample Size

For a sample to produce credible statistics, it must be large enough to 

have what statisticians call sufficient statistical power. While the process for 

P O W E R   I N   N U M B E R S  

127

determining statistical power involves some sophisticated mathematics, the 

basic concept is fairly simple in that a sample of any population (people in a 

country, bacteria in a water supply, molecules in an atom, potholes in a road, 

etc.) must be large enough to ensure that the sample is representative of the 

entire population rather than only a part of that population. While surpris-

ingly small samples can have sufficient statistical power to produce credible 

results (if the samples are carefully chosen to be representative), it is pretty 

obvious that, say, sampling only ten people out of the entire world population 

(approximately 7.5 billion in 2017) is not a large enough sample to produce 

a meaningful result.

When scientific sampling methods are used, the letter n is used to indicate 

sample size, as in: “For the control group n = 28.” (That is, there were 28 

subjects in the control group.)

Representativeness of the Sample

For a sample to be valid it must be representative of the population be-

ing studied. Say a study of US attitudes toward gambling interviewed ten 

thousand people. A sample of that size might well be large enough to have 

sufficient statistical power. However, if all ten thousand people interviewed 

were patrons of Las Vegas casinos, the sample would hardly be representa-

tive of the entire country. The same would be true if all ten thousand people 

sampled were adherents of a religion that specifically forbids gambling. To 

be representative of the entire US population, a gambling study would have 

to include a random sample of people whose opinions about gambling were 

representative of the entire population rather than those of a narrow slice of 

the population. Even if the study included five thousand casino patrons and 

five thousand churchgoers, that sample would be representative only of the 

opinions of two extremes rather than of the entire population.

Representativeness applies to any study population, not just people. For 

example, a national study to determine the sizes of municipal transportation 

budgets that samples only the largest cities or only the smallest towns would 

not produce accurate statistics on municipal transportation budgets across 

the entire country.

Samples of convenience can also throw off the validity of statistics. What is 

a sample of convenience? Suppose that foresters studying the density of veg-

etation in a national forest only sample plots of land that are adjacent to roads 

128 

C H A P T E R   6

because sampling plots that are far from roads adds to the cost of the study. 

While plots of land near roads are convenient to sample, there is the risk that 

the density of plant life near roads is, for whatever reason, either lower or 

higher than plant life located farther from roads, thus invalidating the statis-

tics derived from the roadside sample of convenience. Another example of a 

sample of convenience is reflected in the tendency for academic psychologists 

to conduct behavioral research on college students because students comprise 

an easily accessible sample of convenience. While there is nothing wrong with 

studying the behavior of college students, their behaviors are not necessarily 

typical of a population at large; in fact, it is possible that researchers might ob-

serve very different behaviors in younger, older, or less educated populations.

T H E   L I T E R A R Y   D I G E S T   1 9 3 6 

P R E S I D E N T I A L   P O L L

An infamous historical example of the pitfalls of a sampling can 

be found in the Literary Digest 1936 presidential poll. Prior to 

the 1936 US presidential election, in which incumbent Demo-

crat Franklin D. Roosevelt ran against Republican Challenger Alf 

Landon, the Literary Digest mailed out 10 million sample ballots. 

An impressive 2.3 million ballots were returned—seemingly 

more than enough to provide a valid sample size.

Based on the responses to its poll, the Literary Digest predicted 

that Alf Landon would not only win the election, but would win 

by a large margin; the actual outcome of the election was, how-

ever, the opposite of what the Literary Digest predicted. After all 

the votes were counted, the Literary Digest poll turned out to be 

off by a whopping 19 percent. This polling error occurred in spite 

of the Literary Digest having correctly predicted the outcomes 

of every previous US presidential election since 1920. What is 

more, rival polls, such as the Gallup Poll, correctly predicted the 

outcome of the 1936 election using much smaller samples than 

the one available to the Literary Digest.

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129

Why did the Literary Digest poll of 1936 fail? Based on a follow-

up, postelection survey conducted in 1937, it turns out that most 

of the people who received sample ballots were Roosevelt sup-

porters; however, a majority of those who took the trouble to 

return the ballots were Landon supporters.6 The survey failed 

due to that fact that those who responded were self-selected 

rather than a truly random, truly representative sample of the 

population. Landon’s supporters may have been more enthu-

siastic about responding to the Literary Digest poll, but at the 

actual election polls they proved to be far fewer in number than 

Roosevelt’s supporters.

The type of self-selection bias that undermined the Literary Di-

gest poll of 1936 is the same problem faced by audience polls 

commonly seen on television programs and websites. Even if a 

large number of people respond to such a poll, the results are not 

representative because the respondents are self-selected and, in 

many cases, the audiences appealed to are not at all representa-

tive of the entire population. The opinions of the audience for 

website whose demographic is working women age twenty-five 

to forty-five are going to skew a lot differently from those of the 

audience for a television program whose demographic is male 

martial-arts fans age fifteen to thirty.

Definitions

Clear definitions are absolutely crucial if statistics are going to have any 

meaning. Say a statistic reports, “Twenty-five percent of high-school seniors 

enrolled in online education programs are not competent in math.” For this 

statistic to have meaning, a few definitions are required. First, how is “en-

rolled in online education programs” defined? Does the definition include

■

only high school seniors who take all of their courses online?

■

all high school seniors who take even one online course (but otherwise at-

tend in-person classes)?

■

only high school seniors who take math as an online course?

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Second, what is the definition of “competent in math?” Is competency in 

math defined as

■

attaining a specific minimum score on a standardized math test?

■

obtaining a passing grade in a math course?

■

being able to complete such basic mathematical tasks as making change or 

balancing a bank account?

Obviously, how the terms are defined can completely change the meaning of 

any statistic.

Without clear definitions, statistics not only lack meaning, but are also 

susceptible to manipulation. For example, according to the US Centers for 

Disease Control and Prevention, there were 36,252 firearms deaths in the 

United States in 2015. Consider the following statement:

In the United States, 36,252 people lost their lives to guns in 2015.

While this statement is true, phrased as it is and lacking a clear definition 

of what is meant by “lost their lives to,” the statistic could easily be misin-

terpreted as, “In the United States in 2015, 36,252 people were murdered by 

guns.” However, of the all the firearms deaths in 2015, homicides accounted 

for a total of 12,979 deaths. While nearly 13,000 firearm homicides are more 

than anyone wants to see, this figure accounts for only about one-third of 

the 2015 firearms deaths. Of the remaining 23,273 firearms deaths in 2015, 

approximately 500 were accidents, approximately 500 were legal interven-

tions (self-defense, justifiable homicides, etc.), and approximately 300 were 

classified as being of “undetermined intent.” The overwhelming majority of 

the 2015 firearms deaths were suicides—22,018 in total.7 The point here is not 

to enter into debates about Second Amendment rights or suicide prevention. 

The point is to illustrate that when definitions of what is being measured are 

lacking, statistics can be manipulated to mislead.

Comparisons

Statistics are often used to make comparisons between things for the 

simple reason that a statistic all by itself is merely a number that, lacking any 

context, conveys little or no meaning. Consider the following example:

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For small cell lung cancer, the five-year survival rate is less than 7 percent.8

By itself, this statistic is not very informative. A five-year survival rate of 

less than 7 percent does not sound encouraging, but how would you know 

without a comparison? How does small cell lung cancer’s five-year survival 

rate compare to other forms of lung cancer? How does it compare to the five-

year survival rate for all forms of cancer? Has the survival rate for small cell 

lung cancer improved over time or has it remained static? What therapies, if 

any, result in improved survival rates?

An important technique for making statistical comparison is the control 

group. Often (but not exclusively) used in medical and psychological studies, 

a control group consists of a set of subjects that does not receive the treat-

ment, therapy, or other intervention given to the test group. For example, 

say that a fifty-acre cornfield is being used to test the effectiveness of a new 

fertilizer. The corn plants in forty of the field’s acres are given the new fertil-

izer, while a ten-acre control group is not. At the end of the growing season, 

the difference between the control group and the rest of the crop becomes the 

measure of the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the new fertilizer.

Comparisons help people make sense of statistics, but they can be mislead-

ing when the things being compared are not truly comparable. Comparing 

the survival rate for an aggressive and difficult-to-treat disease like small cell 

lung cancer to the survival rate for the common cold would be an apples-to-

oranges comparison that has little significance.

Comparisons among Groups

Comparisons among groups run into problems when the groups are 

markedly different from each other. This is especially true when the groups 

compared are of very different sizes. For example, in 2013 the United States 

suffered 32,719 deaths due to motor vehicle crashes, whereas Spain suffered 

only 1,680.9 This is not a fair comparison because the United States has a 

much larger population than Spain. A better comparison between the two 

countries would be to look at percentages based on the size of each country’s 

population. Expressed as a percentage, the United States suffered 10.3 mo-

tor vehicle crash deaths per 100,000 people versus Spain’s 3.6 per 100,000 

people.10 While it is fair to argue that an even better comparison would be to 

consider deaths per miles traveled, according to the US Centers for Disease 

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Control and Prevention, “Even when considering population size, miles trav-

eled, and number of registered vehicles, the US consistently ranked poorly 

relative to other high-income countries [a group which includes Spain] for 

crash deaths.”11 It seems that any way you look at it, driving in Spain is safer 

than driving in the United States.

Another comparison sometimes used between dissimilar groups is percent 

change within each group. The tricky thing about percent change is that it is 

much easier for a small group to record a large percentage change than it is 

for a large group to do so. For example, a small cult consisting of five people 

could increase membership by 100 percent with a gain of only five additional 

converts. A mainstream religion, on the other hand, would need to add mil-

lions of converts to experience a 100 percent increase in membership. Go-

ing back to the example of motor vehicle crashes, from 2000 to 2013 Spain 

reduced its motor vehicle crash deaths by 75 percent while, over the same 

period, the United States reduced its motor vehicle crash deaths by 31 per-

cent. While Spain’s 75 percent reduction is both remarkable and admirable, 

the United States’ 31 percent reduction represents far more human lives saved 

because the United States has a much larger population.12

The important points to keep in mind when considering statistical com-

parisons among groups include

■

the relative sizes of the groups being compared

■

whether the numbers being compared represent total numbers or percent-

ages

■

what the percentages actually represent, such as

□ percentage of the total population

□ percentage of something other than population (e.g., accidents per mile 

traveled)

□ percentage change over time

Be especially alert when groups are being compared using numbers that 

are (intentionally or unintentionally) mixed up. It is meaningless to compare 

a total number from group A to a percentage from group B, or to compare a 

percentage based on the total population of group B to a percentage based on 

a change within group A. Another intergroup comparison that can mislead is 

when a comparison focuses on only one factor among the groups being com-

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pared. An example of this routinely occurs when differences between groups 

of people focus on only one factor, such as race or sex, when other factors, 

such as wealth, education, or age, may also play a role in group differences.

Comparisons among Different Geographic Locations

Yet another type of statistical comparison that may not hold up to close 

examination occurs when statistics are used to compare groups or phenom-

ena from different locations. Differences in culture, economies, language, and 

ways of collecting and compiling data can render statistical comparisons be-

tween geographic locations unreliable. For example, statistics comparing the 

academic abilities of US high school students to German gymnasium students 

would be an invalid comparison. Why? Because almost all US secondary 

school students attend high school while only the top third of German sec-

ondary school students attend gymnasium. A more useful analysis would be 

to compare the top third of US high school students to German gymnasium 

students. Even within a single country, regional differences can interfere with 

statistical comparisons. A US researcher trying to collect statistics on gang 

membership might, for example, find that different jurisdictions use varying 

definitions of gang membership or differently interpret a shared definition 

of gang membership, making it difficult to accurately compare the extent of 

gang activity among various cities or regions. If the police department in city 

X broadly defines gang membership as “being a validated gang member or af-

filiating to any extent with validated gang members” while the sheriff’s office 

in county Y narrowly defines gang membership as “having been convicted of 

a gang-related crime,” any statistics provided by the two agencies will not be 

comparable.

Before statistical comparisons between different regions can be considered 

valid, it is essential that the definitions of the things being compared are clear 

and truly comparable.

Comparisons over Time

Things widely separated in time also provide ample opportunity for statis-

tical comparisons to go wrong.

One time-based statistical challenge lies in the fact that the way things are 

named, defined, or counted can change over the years. For example, statisti-

cal increases in autism diagnoses over the last few decades may be explained 

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by the fact that, in the past, cases of autism either went undiagnosed or were 

diagnosed as other conditions. The word autism was not even used in its 

modern sense until 1943,13 while the American Psychiatric Association’s 

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual did not differentiate autism from child-

hood schizophrenia until 1980.14 Although autism has existed for centuries, 

diagnosing it as such before 1943 would have been impossible while, prior to 

1980, distinguishing autism from childhood schizophrenia would have been 

difficult. So while it is true, if possibly misleading, to say that diagnoses of au-

tism have been increasing over the last thirty to forty years, this statistic is not 

proof that occurrences of autism have increased. Occurrences of autism may 

have increased. They may have dropped. They may have remained stable for 

centuries. There is simply no way to know for certain because the historical 

statistical data is lacking.

Similarly, statistics that are routinely collected in current times may not 

have been collected in the past. Racial statistics provide a good example. Since 

the 1960s/1970s, US colleges and universities have routinely collected and 

reported statistics on the race and ethnicity of their student bodies; prior to 

that time, few colleges and universities collected such data. So even though re-

searchers may know (through anecdotes, historical photos, or other evidence) 

that there were African American, Hispanic, and Asian students attending a 

particular university during the first decades of the twentieth-century, there 

is no way to know exactly how many such students were attending at any one 

time or how those attendance numbers may have fluctuated across the years, 

making any historical statistical comparisons about the racial and ethnic 

makeup of the student body challenging if not impossible.

Another time-based statistical challenge is standard measures that do not 

change over time, the classic example of which is money. As a measure, five 

dollars is five dollars whether you are talking about the 1880s or the 2010s; 

however, the buying power of five dollars in the 1880s was many times greater 

than five dollars in the 2010s. This is why a family income of $1,000 per year 

in 1884 cannot be directly compared to a family income of $1,000 per year in 

2018. Even when you use inflation calculators to adjust for changes in value 

over time, the numbers can be misleading. In nineteenth-century America, 

human labor was relatively much cheaper than it is in the twenty-first cen-

tury, while commodities like books, clothing, food, and transportation were 

relatively costlier in the nineteenth century than in the twenty-first century. 

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Depending on location, in 1884 $5.00 could have paid the weekly salary of 

a house servant; in that same year, a nicely bound edition of Mark Twain’s 

new novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, cost nearly as much ($4.25, to be 

exact). In contrast, in the 2010s the cost of a new novel could not begin to 

match the cost of even a minimum-wage weekly salary.

All of which is to say that any statistics that set out to compare things from 

different time periods are candidates for extra scrutiny. And the further sepa-

rated in time the things being compared are, the more scrutiny is required.

Projections

If statistics that attempt to compare the present with the past can be 

misleading, so too can statistical projections that attempt to predict future 

outcomes.

Some types of statistical projections are less risky than others. Accurately 

projecting the number of US high school graduates over the next five years is 

fairly easy. Census data provides an accurate picture of how many students 

are in the pipeline to graduate over the next five years. Data on recent gradu-

ation rates provide a good estimate of how many of those students will actu-

ally graduate. On the other hand, accurately predicting something like the 

number of traffic accidents over the next five years is more difficult because 

of the number of variables and unknowns:

■

Several especially severe winters in a row could result in more accidents 

than anticipated.

■

A recession combined with rising gas prices could lead to less driving and 

fewer accidents.

■

An increase in texting while driving could cause the number of accidents 

to climb.

■

Increasing numbers of new cars equipped with advanced collision- 

avoidance technology could decrease accidents.

Whether you are dealing with something that is relatively easy or relatively 

difficult to predict, the further ahead the prediction, the less likely it is to be 

accurate. Accurately predicting the number of high school graduates over the 

next fifty years is far more difficult than predicting that number over the next 

five years.

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Be especially careful about straight-line projections based on the premise 

that a current trend will continue on unabated, a line of reasoning that un-

derpins many dire predictions that will never come true. For example, back in 

January 1973, someone using a straight-line projection might have declared, 

“Based on the number of manned moon landings from July 1969 to Decem-

ber 1972, by December 2015 there will have been approximately seventy-six 

additional manned moon landings.” Of course, no such thing happened. The 

rate of moon landings after December 1972 did not merely slow; it com-

pletely stopped. Whether the straight-line projection is about moon landings, 

crime, population growth, or winning streaks, if a straight-line projection 

lacks strong supporting evidence demonstrating why the trend will continue 

at current rates, there is a strong likelihood the projection will not hold true 

over time.

Inadequate Measures

In some cases, coming up with statistics regarding a given phenomenon 

is impossible because the underlying statistical data either has not been col-

lected or cannot be collected. Statistical data, after all, is a human creation, not 

a naturally occurring substance, and it is important to remember that every-

thing that happens does not get reported or recorded. For example, there are 

statistics showing the number of cases of the flu each year because health-care 

providers are required to record and report every case of the flu that they see. 

However, if someone gets the flu but never seeks out a health-care provider 

for treatment, that case of the flu is not recorded and does not become part of 

the flu statistics. For a slightly different example, say that a team of medical 

researchers wants to know the total number of cases of motion sickness over 

the last ten years. That number does not exist because cases of motion sick-

ness do not get reported the way a contagious illness like the flu is reported. 

The motion-sickness researchers might well have to conduct their own study 

using sampling techniques in order to come up with a reasonable estimate 

of the total number of cases. Put another way, statistics cannot answer ques-

tions when the underlying data does not exist. Either the question remains 

unanswered or, when possible, the researchers must find a way to collect and 

record the underlying data themselves.

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Surveys

One of the most powerful tools for research is the survey. Want to know 

how people feel about a given political issue? Conduct a survey. Want to 

know how many people have experienced racial or gender discrimination? 

Conduct a survey. While a well-constructed and properly administered sur-

vey can provide excellent statistical data, there are many ways a survey can 

go wrong.

First, the credibility of any survey depends on the sample size and the rep-

resentativeness of the sample. (See the earlier “Sampling” section.)

Second, the credibility of any survey depends on the wording of the ques-

tions asked. Credible surveys use neutral questions that do not lead survey 

respondents toward a preordained response. (Developing truly neutral ques-

tions requires both training and practice. It is not as easy is it may seem.) 

Less credible surveys, notably politically motivated “push polls,” use biased 

questions that are designed to change opinions rather than to collect them. 

Consider the following hypothetical survey questions:

A. Under Governor Cheryl Lee’s dynamic leadership, the state budget has 

turned around from a huge deficit to a multimillion-dollar surplus. Do 

you agree that Governor Lee is moving the state in the right direction?

B.  On a scale of 1 to 10, how dissatisfied are you with Cheryl Lee’s dismal 

record of failure as governor?

C. Which of the following best describes your assessment of Governor Lee’s 

performance over the last two years?

Very Dissatisfied | Somewhat Dissatisfied | Neutral |  

Somewhat Satisfied | Very Satisfied

Questions A and B are strongly biased questions, with A biased in favor of 

Governor Lee while B is biased against her. Question C is more neutral and 

would likely produce more accurate statistics on Governor Lee’s actual popu-

larity than either of the biased questions. The exact nature of the questions 

asked is key to the credibility of any survey.

Not surprisingly, clear definitions are another key to the credibility of a 

survey. If those being surveyed do not fully understand what they are being 

asked, the results of the survey will be flawed. For example, a survey that asks 

the question, “Have you ever been the victim of sexual harassment at work?” 

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without clearly defining what is meant by “sexual harassment” will fail to pro-

duce credible statistics because, lacking any clear definition of sexual harass-

ment, individuals will come up with their own definitions. As a result, some 

people who really should answer yes to the sexual harassment question will 

answer no, while some who should answer no will answer yes.

Another shortcoming of surveys is that the individuals surveyed may not 

be completely forthcoming. For example, when surveyed about behaviors that 

are illegal, highly taboo, or simply embarrassing, people may be reluctant to 

admit to behaviors that might land them in jail, lead to social ostracization, or 

simply make them feel bad about themselves. This reluctance can occur even 

after being assured that survey responses will remain anonymous. A rather 

mild example are survey questions about diet and exercise. While a typical 

respondent might not complete a diet-and-exercise survey with answers that 

would be true only for a vegan who does CrossFit seven days a week, there is 

a temptation to forget about those extra helpings of maple-bacon ice cream 

when responding to questions about daily caloric intake or to amplify your 

twice-a-month visit to the gym into three vigorous cardio workouts per week.

Conversely, the temptation to come off as depraved as possible can also 

throw off survey results. When I was in ninth grade, all the students in my 

class were asked to complete a survey about illegal drug use. I, along with 

several of my friends, checked off “Yes” to every drug-use question. Have you 

ever used heroin? Yes. Cocaine? Of course! Marijuana? Every day! In truth, 

none of us had ever laid eyes on any of the drugs mentioned on the survey, 

much less used them. We just thought it was a hoot to mess with the survey 

because teenagers can be idiots. On the other hand, I am certain that if, in-

stead of an anonymous paper survey form, my friends and I had been asked 

the same questions by a live interviewer, we would have been too intimidated 

to answer yes. In fact, I am pretty certain that, faced with a live interviewer, 

we would not have answered yes even if we had taken any of the drugs (which 

we had not).

All of which is not to say that survey results are worthless; rather, it is to 

point out that there are circumstances that can impinge on the credibility of 

surveys. In practice, surveys are especially useful for

1.  assessing opinions: “How do you feel about . . . ?”

2.  quantifying experiences: “Have you ever . . . ? How often have you . . . ?”

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One fact that is sometimes overlooked when survey results are presented 

is that public opinion cannot change reality. Whether or not the majority 

agrees that climate change is real or agrees that it is not real has no impact on 

the workings of the physical world. Climate change may be real or not real, 

but either way the world’s climate is completely unaffected by public opinion. 

Although certain advocates do not see it this way, truth is not something that 

can be determined by majority rule.

Primary Sources

One of the surest ways to evaluate any statistic is to examine the primary 

source—the original study, survey, experiment, and so on—that actually gave 

birth to the statistic.

First, it is a huge red flag when an anyone quotes a statistic without pro-

viding the specific source of that statistic. Specific as in: What persons or 

organization came up with the statistic? When did they come up with the sta-

tistic? Where was the statistic originally published and in what form (e.g., in a 

scholarly article, as part of an official report, in a book chapter, on a random 

website)? A vague attribution along the lines of “a leading study reported,” or 

“a survey found,” or “according to a government report” is no substitute for 

accurately citing the source of the statistic.

Equipped with a proper citation, you can examine for yourself the primary 

source that generated the statistic in the first place and go about evaluating its 

credibility—quite possibly by asking most or all of the evaluation questions 

outlined in chapter 5. Among these questions, those concerning the quali-

fications, biases, and conflicts of interests of the creators of the statistic are 

especially important. Any credible primary source that produces statistics will 

describe its methodology—will clearly describe how the data was collected 

and, in many cases, how the results were calculated. Articles in scholarly 

journals, conference proceedings, and other formal, primary-source descrip-

tions of studies or experiments will always include an entire section under the 

heading “Methodology.” In addition to explaining its methodology, a primary 

source for any statistic must also provide clear definitions of what exactly is 

being studied. Finally, the primary source for any credible survey should in-

clude a list of every question asked of survey participants (often provided in 

the form of an appendix).

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There is, however, a challenge the average person will face when evaluat-

ing the primary source of any statistic. Unlike the rather simple statistics used 

as examples in the chapter, trained researchers often employ complicated 

statistics in their analysis. When researchers start throwing around termi-

nology like “weighted estimation of population parameters” or “univariate 

continuous distributions,” the meaning of the numbers tends to become all 

but incomprehensible to those with little or no training in statistics. When 

confronted with complex statistics, the average person can do little more 

than seek out expert assistance, either in person on online. Along the same 

lines, it is important to understand how easy it is for an untrained person to 

completely misinterpret a complex statistic and spread that misinterpretation 

through advocacy. If, in looking at the primary source of a complex statistic, 

you cannot make heads or tails of the terminology and convoluted statistical 

formulas, what are the chances that an issue advocate with no training in 

statistics is going to understand and correctly interpret that primary source? 

In the hands of advocates, complex statistics can too often lead to wholesale 

misinterpretation.

Interpretation of Statistics

Over the last thirty or so years, the United States has seen crime rates drop. 

This phenomenon is so widely accepted as fact that it is safe to consider it 

common knowledge. What is left to interpretation, however, is why crime 

rates have declined. One person might look at the numbers and assert that 

crime dropped due to more police and tougher sentencing. Another might as-

sert that the drop is due to such causes as an aging population and the success 

of antiviolence programs. Both of these interpretations of the drop in crime 

are (possibly) examples of what is called hasty generalization or overgeneral-

ization—reaching a conclusion without necessarily understanding all of the 

factors that could be influencing the phenomenon in question. Even when 

given plenty of time to study the statistics and thoughtfully consider all pos-

sible factors, people will still disagree about what the statistics really mean. So 

even though those with an agenda to push or an argument to win may claim 

statistical authority, may assert that “the hard numbers prove I’m right,” too 

often the numbers are not as hard as advertised and what they prove or dis-

prove is less than clear-cut.

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Another troubling aspect of the interpretation of statistics is when some-

one misinterprets a statistic and that misinterpretation gets picked up and 

repeated by others. This is why going to the primary source to examine a 

statistic, versus accepting a statistic secondhand from someone who may have 

unintentionally (or intentionally) misinterpreted it, is key to evaluating the 

credibility of a statistic.

A FEW BASIC STATISTICAL CONCEPTS

The problem of complex statistics aside, it does not hurt to have an under-

standing of at least a few fundamental statistical concepts.

Percentage

Percentage is a ratio with a denominator of 100. If five out of twenty 

students are getting an A in a chemistry class, the ratio can be expressed as 

5/20. The percentage of students getting an A can be calculated by finding 

the equivalent ratio whose denominator is 100. (The word percentage literally 

means “per 100.”)

 5 =  5 × 5  =   25  = 25 percent

20     20 × 5     100

Percentage has many uses, one of the most common being making com-

parisons among groups: “According to a recent poll, Proposition R is sup-

ported by 21 percent of voters who identify as Democrats, 47 percent of 

voters who identify as Independents, and 67 percent of voters who identify 

as Republicans.” A common error is to confuse percentages with raw num-

bers. In the previous example, the 47 percent support among Independents 

most likely translates to many fewer voters than is represented by 21 percent 

of Democrats due to the fact that there are so many more Democrats than 

Independents. Another example of confusing percentage with raw numbers 

is seen in the example of course grades. In a chemistry class in which it is 

possible to earn a maximum of two thousand points during the course of the 

semester, missing a final grade of A by 2 percent is not the same as missing 

an A by two points. (With two thousand possible points, 2 percent is equal 

to forty points.)

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Average

The tricky thing about the word average is that it can be used to describe a 

number of different mathematical concepts. The three types of averages you 

are likely to encounter are as follows.

Arithmetic Mean

Arithmetic mean is the sum of a collection of numbers divided by the 

number of numbers in that collection. Consider this example of annual in-

comes in table 6.2.

The arithmetic mean of the three annual salaries is $44,334.

$136,000 ÷ 3 = $44,334

Arithmetic mean is the most common way to determine average. One way 

that arithmetic mean can be misleading is when there is a skewed distribu-

tion. A skewed distribution occurs when one or a few numbers in a collection 

of numbers differ widely from other numbers in the collection. For example, 

if in the previous example the $57,000 annual salary were, instead, $570,000, 

the average of the three salaries would be $216,334, a figure that is not at all 

representative of the typical employee’s salary.

Mode

Mode is the number that occurs most frequently in a collection of num-

bers. In the following collection of numbers representing grade point aver-

ages, the mode is 3.4.

1.7, 1.8, 2.9, 3.3, 3.4, 3.4, 3.4, 3.4, 3.7, 3.8, 4.0, 4.0

Mode is useful for understanding a skewed distribution when there are 

a few numbers on one or both extremes of a distribution. Mode can also be 

Table 6.2.    Example of Annual Incomes

Worker

Annual Income

Worker A

$57,000

Worker B

$37,000

Worker C

$42,000

Total

$136,000

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143

used for nonnumerical data. For example, because white is the most popular 

color for automobiles, white can be considered the mode of car colors.

Median

Median represents the midpoint of any collection of numbers. Like mode, 

median is useful when an extreme outlier or two would otherwise skew an 

average. Say that in a rural community seventeen houses are for sale, with six-

teen of those houses selling for between $120,00 and $250,000. However, the 

seventeenth house on the market happens to be the spectacular $15,500,000 

mansion belonging to the hometown girl who made it big as a country music 

star. In such as case, the median price of houses for sale would give a much 

more realistic picture of what a prospective buyer might pay than would the 

average price.

No matter what the range of a collection of numbers may be, half of those 

numbers will be above the median while half will be below the median. This 

holds true regardless of how high or low those numbers may be. For example, 

if you ranked NFL Hall of Fame quarterbacks by career passer ratings, half 

of those Hall of Fame players would, by definition, fall below the median. 

Of course, this does not mean those players were bad quarterbacks; it merely 

means that they fell into the lower half of an extremely elite group. Indeed, a 

handful of completed passes over the course of a long career might be all that 

separates the lowest-ranked quarterback above the median from the highest-

ranked quarterback below the median. By the same token, being above the 

median in a not-very-illustrious group—say, for example, the one hundred 

least-productive quarterbacks in NFL history—is not much of an achievement.

Margin of Error

When a random sample is used, the margin of error describes the amount 

of possible error due to the uncertainties of using a random sample. The 

smaller the margin of error, the more confidence there is that the random 

sample accurately represents the entire population.

Reliability and Validity

Reliability refers to the consistency of any measurement. For example, if a 

person were administered a psychological personality test three times and the 

results were consistent each time, the test would have high reliability.

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Validity refers to how accurately something has been measured. If a 

preelection poll accurately predicts the outcome of the election, it has high 

validity.

One way to think of these two concepts is to use the metaphor of archery. If 

an archer were to shoot five arrows and they landed in a tight cluster, this rep-

resents a high degree of reliability (even if the group of arrows happened to be 

clustered far from the intended target). If the same archer were to shoot an ar-

row at a target and hit the center of the bulls-eye, this represents a high degree 

of validity. While every researcher strives for is both validity and reliability, 

the two concepts are separate phenomena and not intrinsically connected.

Statistical Significance

The phrase statistically significant sounds an awful lot like “The results of 

this study are true.” But that is not what statistical significance actually means. 

Instead, what it means is that, by the standards of the study, the results are 

statistically significant. If the study itself is flawed—maybe the sample was 

not representative or errors were made during a laboratory experiment—the 

result of the study are still invalid even if the numbers came out as being sta-

tistically significant.

This previous lightning review of statistical concepts hardly scratches the 

surface of what there is to know about statistics. As mentioned before, anyone 

who really wants to become statistically literate needs to put some time and 

effort into studying the vast, complex, and fascinating subject of statistics.

RECAP

For all the ways in which statistics can mislead and/or be misused, they are 

too essential for understanding the human and natural worlds to be dismissed 

as mere hokum. Without statistics, human beings have no way of knowing 

how big or small a problem is or whether solutions to problems are actually 

working as intended. Or if solutions are working at all.

Evaluating statistics involves many of the same steps taken when evalu-

ating any other form of information (see chapter 5). When presented with 

statistics, it is important to be aware that advocates often employ statistics in 

ways that can be misleading. For statistics to be credible, there must be clear 

definitions of what is being measured, samples must be truly representative, 

and comparisons cannot be apples to oranges. Statistical projections should 

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145

be approached with caution, with the level of caution increasing the further 

into the future the projections extend. Surveys are powerful tools for assess-

ing public opinion or quantifying human experiences, but the keys for survey 

credibility are (1) the representativeness of the sample and (2) the nature of 

the questions asked. Because statistics received secondhand may have been 

misinterpreted or misrepresented, thoroughly evaluating statistics requires 

examining the primary source that generated the statistics in the first place. 

And, finally, in spite of the fact that the numerical basis of statistics may make 

them seem inherently factual, the ultimate meaning of any statistic is open to 

greater or lesser levels of interpretation.

7

Scholarly Information

Identifying, Evaluating,  

and Understanding It

Scholarly information is a type of information created by people known as 

(surprise!) scholars. While anyone who attends school can be called a scholar, 

in the scholarly information sense of the word scholar refers to someone who 

is very learned in a particular field, usually as a result of advanced education 

and years of study. Scholars can be divided into two broad categories: aca-

demic scholars and nonacademic scholars.

Academic scholars include the faculty, other academic employees (post-

doctoral researchers, lecturers, librarians, etc.), and (in some cases) students 

affiliated with institutions of higher education, chiefly universities and col-

leges. Academic scholars tend to be especially prolific when it comes to 

creating information because most of them are, to greater or lesser extents, 

evaluated on and rewarded for producing articles, books, data sets, and other 

scholarly information related to their research. Nonacademic scholars are 

those scholars not employed by, or otherwise directly affiliated with, institu-

tions of higher education. Nonacademic scholars may work in government 

or private industry, though some nonacademic scholars work independently.

So why does scholarly information matter? It matters because scholarly 

information is how scholars share the results of their work, and the work 

of scholars is vitally important to the modern world. A study presented in 

2017 found that academic scholars contributed to 74 percent of the most 

significant inventions created since 1950 and were “the most important or a 

147

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C H A P T E R   7

very important actor in four in 10 cases.”1 (Note that these numbers do not 

include the substantial contributions of nonacademic scholars.) Whether the 

modern innovation is in health care, military technology, energy, or agricul-

ture, scholars are likely part of that innovation’s DNA. Arguably the most 

significant innovation of the last half century, the Internet, began as a univer-

sity research project and remained as such for years before it was put to other 

uses. (Ironically, if not for academic scholars, online pundits and commenta-

tors would not have any platform on which to post their observations about 

everything that is wrong with higher education and why the world would be 

better off without it.)

Table 7.1 lists most of the major fields of scholarly studies arranged under 

four broad categories of scholarship. Note that some areas of study (such as 

history, law, and politics) fall under more than one category.

Innovations in science and technology are not the only way that scholars 

and scholarly information shape the world. In the arena of business, schol-

ars often originate, test, and improve upon ideas impacting management, 

finance, and economic policy. Scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sci-

ences contribute to the richness and greater understanding of the world’s cul-

tures. For example, independent scholar Ron Chernow’s scholarly biography 

of Alexander Hamilton inspired the creation of the hit Broadway production 

Hamilton! An American Musical. Chernow does not work for a college or uni-

Table 7.1.    Major Fields of Scholarly Studies under Four Broad Categories of Scholarship

Arts and Humanities

Social Sciences

Sciences

Technology

Anthropology

Anthropology

Agriculture

Aerospace engineering

Archaeology

Communications

Astronomy

Bioengineering

Classics

Economics

Biology

Civil engineering

History

Education

Chemistry

Computer engineering

Linguistics and 

Geography

Computer Science

Electrical engineering

languages

Law and Politics

History

Earth sciences

Information science

Literature

Law

Materials science

Mechanical engineering

Performing arts

Linguistics

Mathematics

Nanotechnology

Philosophy

Political science

Medicine

Nuclear engineering

Religion

Psychology

Physics

Robotics

Visual arts

Sociology

Statistics

Software engineering

Note: Some areas of study (such as history, law, and politics) fall under more than one category. 

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149

versity but, like most independent, nonacademic scholars, holds an academic 

degree and conducts research.

In addition to its impact on almost every facet of daily life, scholarly in-

formation is special because it represents the gold standard for information 

credibility. At least in the ideal to which honest scholars aspire, scholarly in-

formation is the most thoroughly researched, well-reasoned, well-vetted, and 

overall credible type of information humans can aspire to create. The goal 

of this chapter is to explain not only how to identify scholarly information, 

but also how scholarly information is created, the high standards to which it 

aspires, and why, in some cases, scholarly information fails to achieve its own 

high standards.

RESEARCH, SCHOLARS, AND SCHOLARLY INFORMATION

Around the world, a great deal of research is conducted at research univer-

sities. The faculty at research universities are expected to conduct original 

research and publish the results of that research. Research universities also 

employ nonfaculty academics who conduct research, including many post-

doctoral researchers (commonly known as postdocs). A postdoc is an aca-

demic researcher who has completed a doctorate but is employed as academic 

staff rather than as faculty (i.e., postdocs are not professors). Finally, research 

universities are home to large cohorts of graduate students, most of whom 

conduct research under the guidance of one or more faculty members while 

pursuing an advanced degree. Non-research universities, four-year colleges, 

and two-year colleges tend to emphasize teaching over research; however, the 

faculty of such institutions may conduct research and create scholarly infor-

mation in addition to teaching.

When academic scholars conduct research, they typically publish the re-

sults of that research in order to share it widely. Especially in the STEM fields 

(science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) the most important type 

of publication is the scholarly article. In the arts and humanities, the book re-

mains the most important form of publication. In the social sciences, there is 

a split between the importance of books and articles, with some social science 

fields emphasizing articles, some fields emphasizing books, and some treating 

both forms as equally important. Which is not to say that there is no cross-

over: physicists publish books just as surely as historians publish scholarly 

articles. In addition, scholars in all fields are increasingly publishing in new 

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formats made possible by digital technology. For example, in the last decade a 

new field of study known as “digital humanities” has emerged in which digital 

technologies are applied to the study of such traditional humanities fields as 

history, literature, anthropology, and philosophy.

Faculty stand to reap personal rewards for the information they cre-

ate when they go up for promotion or tenure, a formal review process that 

typically involves a committee of senior faculty reviewing a junior faculty 

member’s professional portfolio. While promotion-and-tenure committees 

consider a faculty member’s entire professional portfolio (teaching, publi-

cations, research, grants received, and service), the quantity and quality of 

scholarly information a faculty member has published often weighs heavily 

on whether promotion or tenure are awarded. The importance of publication 

in the promotion-and-tenure process is the inspiration for the saying “pub-

lish or perish.” Nonfaculty researchers—such as postdocs and nonacademic 

scholars working in government or private industry—also publish the results 

of their research but are not typically subject to formal promotion-and-tenure 

processes.

Graduate students may also publish articles and (less commonly) books 

prior to graduation. Having published while still a student enhances a gradu-

ate student’s prospects of landing a desirable job postgraduation. The most 

important publication for a graduate student is either the thesis or the dis-

sertation. A typical thesis is a major research paper and the final requirement 

for earning a master’s degree. A dissertation is required to complete most 

doctoral degree programs. Written under the guidance of a faculty adviser, 

the thesis or dissertation is the graduate student’s magnum opus (literally, 

“great work”). The classic doctoral dissertation is a book-length work focused 

on a fairly narrow academic topic, based on original research, and organized 

as follows:

■

Introduction: background, thesis statement, and literature review

■

Middle chapters: methods, results, discussion

■

Final chapter: conclusion

There are exceptions to the classic dissertation format. In some fields, it is 

possible for a graduate student to produce what is known as a thesis by pub-

lication in place of a traditional dissertation. Rather than being a coherent, 

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151

book-like composition, a thesis by publication is a collection of the graduate 

student’s previously published articles, book chapters, and/or conference 

papers. In the fine arts fields, a thesis may take the form of a creative work, 

such as a novel, screenplay, musical composition, portfolio of artworks, or 

film. Writers of traditional theses and dissertations formally cite sources in 

accordance with the style guide that applies to their area of study. Following 

graduation, authors may seek to have their thesis or dissertation published 

in book form by an academic or commercial press, a process that usually 

involves considerable revision.

Scholars employed by private industry often work in research and devel-

opment. While these nonacademic scholars may publish the results of their 

research, they are rewarded more for their contribution to the company’s 

bottom line than for their contributions to scholarship. In cases where a 

nonacademic scholar’s research may lead to patentable ideas, the scholar may 

be prohibited from publishing in order to protect the company’s financial 

interests.

Federal, state, and local government agencies also employ scholars who 

conduct research. For example, the US Department of Agriculture employs 

plant scientists to do research related to agricultural productivity, while 

the US Department of Energy runs huge research laboratories employing 

thousands of research scientists studying topics ranging from nanoparticles 

to computational science. Government scientists are generally allowed and 

encouraged to publish the results of their research except where national 

security concerns take precedence.

Scholars publish scholarly information both to share what they know with 

the world and to reap the rewards that come with publication. In addition to 

the role publications play in promotion and tenure, publications also help 

establish scholars’ status among their professional peers. If there were such 

a thing as baseball cards for scholars, the back sides of those cards would list 

the scholars’ publications.

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

A model for studying both the natural and human worlds, the scientific 

method is employed by scientists, technologists, and social scientists around 

the world. In fact, you probably use a simplified form of the scientific method 

in your daily life without really realizing it:

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You wake up in the morning to the sound of water drops hitting 

your window. This provokes a question: “Is it raining?”

This question then provokes a hypothesis: “I believe it is rain-

ing.”

You test your hypothesis by opening the curtains to look outside. 

Water droplets are falling from low, gray clouds. The ground is 

wet. Water drips from trees and bushes. People walking by hold 

umbrellas over their heads. You have made an observation and 

collected information.

You analyze what you have observed and come to a conclusion: 

“My hypothesis is confirmed by the empirical evidence. It is 

raining.”

As a rational person, in reaching your conclusion you eliminate 

unlikely possibilities not supported by the empirical evidence you 

observed while looking out the window:

■

“It is unlikely that the fire department is pranking me by spray-

ing water from a fire truck parked just out of sight.”

■

“Because I live over two hundred miles from the coast, it is 

unlikely that the drops are coming from the blowhole of an 

exceptionally large whale.”

(Common sense, it turns out, plays an important role in the sci-

entific method.) 

Finally, you announce, “Hey, it’s raining,” as a way of sharing 

your knowledge.

The scientific method is, in its fullest form, a complex and nuanced con-

cept. In addition, the specific ways in which the scientific method is applied 

vary from discipline to discipline and from researcher to researcher. That 

said, the basic idea of the scientific method is rather straightforward: the 

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153

acquisition of new knowledge must follow a rational process that commonly 

involves formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis through the obser-

vation of empirical evidence, analyzing the evidence, and reaching a conclu-

sion.

Another important tenet of the scientific method is that results must be 

reproducible. Suppose a pair of educational researchers develop and test a 

new method of teaching mathematics to elementary students. The researchers 

eventually publish a scholarly article that concludes that their new teaching 

method results in students achieving significantly higher scores on stan-

dardized math tests. However, when other educational researchers repeat 

the experiment by employing the new teaching method with students, their 

results show no improvement in test scores. As long as other researchers are 

unable to reproduce the original researchers’ results, the conclusion that the 

new teaching method is superior cannot be considered valid under the rules 

of the scientific method. On the other hand, if a chemist observes that heat of 

vaporization for mercury is 59.11 kJ/mol and other chemists independently 

confirm that this observation is accurate, the observation must be considered 

scientifically valid unless and until new empirical evidence proves otherwise.

One way to envision the scientific method is think of it as a cycle of ques-

tioning, testing, observation, and analysis in which every new study builds on 

the results of previous studies (see figure 7.1).

Research studies that employ the scientific method’s principles of forming 

a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and observing the results are known as 

empirical studies. Empirical studies that produce numerical data are known 

as  quantitative research. Research that is more exploratory in approach is 

known as qualitative research. Qualitative research is conducted in order to 

gain a broad understanding of what is being studied. Common methods of 

qualitative research include focus groups, surveys, and interviews, often in-

volving small sample sizes that are not intended to be representative of entire 

populations. For example, psychologists in London conducted a qualitative 

study “to understand the experience over time of home-dwelling older people 

deemed frail, in order to enhance the evidence base for person-centred [sic] 

approaches to frail elder care.”2 The researchers employed a combination 

of sophisticated qualitative research techniques that involved visiting and 

observing the subjects of the study. As happens with qualitative studies, the 

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C H A P T E R   7

FIGURE 7.1

The cycle of the scientific method. Donald A. Barclay

preceding qualitative study on home-dwelling frail elders was later used to 

inform a follow-up quantitative study of frail elderly persons.3

Scholarly information plays in important role in the scientific method. 

First of all, reading scholarly information leads researchers to make ob-

servations and ask questions. Say, for example, while reading a scholarly 

article about the role of race in voter turnout, a political scientist formulates 

a research question. This research question leads, in turn, to a new testable 

hypothesis about race and voter turnout. Next, the political scientist searches 

the scholarly literature for examples of applicable methods for testing the new 

hypothesis, eventually finding a survey and adapting it for the purpose of 

researching voter turnout (see figure 7.2). After completing the research, the 

political scientist creates new scholarly information in the form of a scholarly 

journal article and a related data set.

One important point about the scientific method is that it is more of a phi-

losophy about how humans gain knowledge than a one-size-fits-all formula. 

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155

FIGURE 7.2

A researcher in the field collects data that will later be analyzed 

to test the researcher’s hypothesis. Elena Zhukova, University 

of California, Merced

A second important point is that the scientific method does not bestow infal-

libility on researchers or the results they produce. As mere human beings, 

researchers who employ the scientific method may intentionally cheat, make 

mistakes, or interpret the same findings in different ways. Even so, the scien-

tific method is the best method available for creating credible information.

IDENTIFYING THE FORMATS OF SCHOLARLY INFORMATION

If scholarly information is so special, a good question to ask is “How do I 

know if information is scholarly or not?” One way to identify scholarly in-

formation is to become familiar with the most common formats in which it 

appears.

Scholarly Journals

Teachers and professors often instruct students to use articles from schol-

arly journals in their research, though they may not use the exact words 

“scholarly journals.” Synonyms for scholarly journal include

■

academic journal

■

professional journal

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C H A P T E R   7

■

peer-reviewed journal

■

refereed journal

To avoid confusion, this book will use the term scholarly journal to signify 

all of the above. The purpose of the scholarly journal is to allow scholars to 

share information—primarily information reporting original research—with 

other scholars. The first scholarly journals started appearing in the middle 

of the seventeenth century, a product of the Age of Enlightenment and the 

scientific revolution that was at the time taking hold throughout Europe. A 

study published in 2009 found there were 26,406 active scholarly journals.4 

(The exact numbers are not easy to pin down.) During the first decade of the 

twenty-first century, almost all scholarly journals transitioned from print to 

online publication, with online publication now being the dominant format 

though which scholarly journals are distributed and accessed. The best way to 

know if you are looking at a scholarly journal is to become familiar with the 

characteristics that identify a publication as a scholarly journal.

One characteristic of scholarly journals is that most have a specific subject 

focus. The following scholarly journals, each of which focuses on a relatively 

narrow subject area, are typical:

■

Journal of Modern Literature

■

Chaucer Review

■

Research in African Literature

■

Western American Literature

■

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The preceding list consists of just five of the hundreds of scholarly literature 

journals published around the world, most of which focus on a distinct field 

of literary studies. There are exceptions to the rule that scholarly journals 

have a specific subject focus—one example is the well-regarded scholarly 

journal Science, which publishes articles on a variety of scientific topics—but 

such exceptions are few.

The true hallmark of scholarly journals is that they feature scholarly articles 

(described in detail later) written by scholars rather than nonscholarly articles 

written by journalists. For example, in August of 2017 a team of physicists 

published in the scholarly journal Science an article about an experiment in 

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157

which they successfully desalinated water using carbon nanotubes.5 The tar-

get audience for their article was other scientists and engineers with research 

interests in desalination and/or nanotubes. Because the potential practical 

applications of the physicists’ work made for a newsworthy story, journal-

ists quickly wrote popular news stories about the physicists’ findings. One 

such example is a story published in the Verge, a news and media network 

that reports on technology for an audience of general readers.6 Even though 

both articles are reporting the same event, the article written by physicists 

and published in the journal Science is scholarly while the article written by a 

journalist and published in the Verge is popular rather than scholarly.

Not every item published in a scholarly journal is necessarily a scholarly 

article. In addition to scholarly articles, scholarly journals may also publish

■

letters commenting on previously published articles

■

editorials expressing opinions on topics relating to the journal’s subject 

focus

■

news stories relating to the journal’s subject focus

■

errata correcting errors contained in previously published articles

■

reviews of books relating to the journal’s subject focus

■

announcements of upcoming conferences

Unlike popular magazines, most scholarly journals do not carry advertise-

ments, though there are exceptions. Advertisements for relevant scholarly 

books are published in many scholarly journals, while advertisements for 

medications and medical equipment appear in a number of medical journals.

Scholarly journals are overseen by editorial boards: teams of volunteer 

scholars who set editorial standards and provide high-level guidance on the 

management and long-term goals of the journal. The more prestigious a jour-

nal, the more prestigious the membership of its editorial board.

Peer Review

Most, though not all, scholarly journals employ peer review. In a publica-

tion that does not employ peer review—such as a magazine, newspaper, or 

web-based publication aimed at a popular audience—an author submits an 

article to an editor who ultimately decides (possibly in consultation with other 

editors) whether to accept the article for publication. It is also up to the edi-

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tor (or editors) to call for any changes necessary to render the article suitable 

for publication. In contrast, in a peer-reviewed journal the author submits an 

article to an editor, who makes an initial decision about whether the article 

might be right for the journal. The editor then sends out a copy of the article 

to a group of two or more referees, who read the article, decide if it should be 

accepted for publication, and suggest any changes. In the world of scholarly 

journals, referees are scholars with expertise in the topic addressed by the ar-

ticle. For example, an article on radiation oncology would be sent to referees 

who are experts in radiation oncology. An article on congressional redistrict-

ing would be sent to referees who are experts on congressional redistricting. 

And so on. The most rigorous form of peer review is blind peer review, in 

which the name of the author is removed from the copies sent to the referees 

so that their decisions are not influenced by what they may previously know, 

or not know, about the author. The referees send their recommendations 

and comments back to the editor, who then communicates with the author. 

If scholarly publication is the gold standard for credible information, then 

peer review is the gold standard for scholarly publication. Properly carried 

out, peer review ensures that all published articles meet a high standard of 

scholarship and that they are impartially evaluated on their scholarly merit.

How do you know if a journal employs peer review? On a peer-reviewed 

journal’s website, there will usually be information about its peer-review pro-

cess in either the “About” section or the “Information for Authors” section. 

Most scholarly journals have an entry in Wikipedia that will tell you if the 

journal is peer reviewed, though the usual cautions about using Wikipedia 

apply (see chapter 5). If your library provides access to the online publication 

UlrichsWEB, you can look up a journal by title and find information about 

whether or not it employs peer review. (Note that some journals will use the 

word refereed in place of, or interchangeably with, peer review.)

Journal Rankings

In most fields of scholarship there is a definite pecking order for scholarly 

journals in which they are ranked according to prestige. The traditional way 

to rank journals is by impact factor. The basic idea of the impact factor is that 

the more often articles published in Journal X are cited by other scholars, the 

higher Journal X’s impact factor. As a rule, scholars strive to publish in highly 

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ranked journals on the grounds that doing so enhances a scholar’s profes-

sional reputation.

In recent years the concept of impact factor has become controversial, 

especially when it is used as a means of evaluating individual scholars, some-

thing that was never the intended purpose of the impact factor.7 Scholars are 

increasingly considering a variety of evaluation tools collectively known as 

altmetrics as an alternative or supplement to impact factors.8 Even so, schol-

ars—especially academic scholars in the STEM fields—continue to feel pres-

sure to publish in highly ranked journals as a mark of professional prestige.

P R E D A T O R Y   J O U R N A L S

At the bottom of the journal rankings lie predatory journals, a 

type of online publication that looks a lot like a scholarly jour-

nal but does not behave like one. A phenomenon of the Digital 

Age, predatory journals actively (some would say aggressively) 

solicit papers from scholarly authors. Predatory journals require 

that authors pay a fee known as an article publication charge 

(APC) before a paper is published, often failing to mention the 

fee until after the scholar’s paper has been accepted. But here is 

the catch: unlike legitimate scholarly journals, predatory journals 

accept just about every paper that is submitted. While predatory 

journals claim to employ peer review and enforce rigorous edito-

rial standards, they do neither, publishing papers based on an 

author’s willingness to pay an APC and without any regard for 

the quality of the research or the writing. Predatory journals also 

often lie about their rankings and impact factors in order to con-

vince scholars to buy into the predatory journals’ pay-to-publish 

scheme. In short, predatory journals are moneymaking scams 

whose editors will publish just about anything for a price. Some 

scholars who publish in predatory journals do so unwittingly, 

though an unscrupulous scholar will turn to predatory journals 

as an easy means of padding the list of publications in his or 

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her curriculum vitae (the scholar’s version of a résumé). This 

strategy fails, however, if professional colleagues discover that 

the articles listed in a scholar’s curriculum vitae  were actually 

published in predatory journals.

Telling the difference between a predatory journal and a legitimate 

scholarly journal can be difficult. First of all, the fact that a journal 

charges an APC does not mean that it is a predatory journal. Many 

legitimate scholarly journals accept APCs. The reason authors pay 

APCs to legitimate journals is so that their articles can be imme-

diately published in open access formats that are free for anyone 

to read. (See the later description of open access publishing.) The 

difference between legitimate scholarly journals and predatory 

journals is that legitimate scholarly journals hold every submitted 

article to a high standard of peer review and/or editorial rigor. Un-

like predatory journals, legitimate scholarly journals do not accept 

and publish substandard articles in order to pocket APCs.

For several years an academic librarian named Jeffrey Beall 

singlehandedly maintained a blog called Beall’s List of Predatory 

Journals and Publishers; however, Beall gave up maintaining 

his blog in January 2017.9 Shortly after Jeffery Beall stopped 

maintaining Beall’s List came the launch of the Journal Blacklist, 

an online, subscription-based publication that lists and evaluates 

predatory journals.10 

If your library doesn’t have a subscription to the Journal Blacklist, 

the Directory of Open Access Journals (https://doaj.org), which 

has recently strengthened its criteria for inclusion to weed out 

predatory journals, is a useful open access tool for evaluating 

journals. Think. Check. Submit (http://thinkchecksubmit.org) is 

yet another useful open access resource. Intended to help au-

thors identify predatory journals before they submit manuscripts, 

Think. Check. Submit is also useful for separating the legitimate 

journals from the predators.  In addition to consulting these re-

sources, a good first step in determining a journal’s credibility is 

to visit its website:

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■

If the journal’s website does not look very professional, the 

journal may be predatory. Try comparing the website of a 

suspect journal with the website of a scholarly journal that is 

known to be legitimate. In most cases, the difference will be 

striking.

■

Look at the information the journal provides for prospective au-

thors. If the journal emphasizes quick peer review or otherwise 

promises quick turnaround times between submission and 

publication, it may be a predatory journal.

■

Run a few of the names listed as members of the journal’s edi-

torial board through a search engine to see if they are qualified 

scholars. Be aware that predatory journals are known to list as 

editors people with no real scholarly qualifications.11

■

Journals that accept papers from broad areas of knowledge 

rather than focusing on a specific subfield may be predatory 

journals, though there are exceptions (such as the scholarly 

journal Science mentioned earlier).

■

If a journal charges APCs, then the terms of the APCs, including 

cost, should be easy to find on the journal’s website. Predatory 

journals often keep the cost of APC hidden until after the au-

thor’s work has been accepted.

■

If a journal claims to be endorsed by an outside organization, 

visit that organization’s website and/or run the organization’s 

name through a search engine to see if it is legitimate. (Be 

aware that predatory journals may falsely claim to be endorsed 

by organizations to which they have no real connection.)

■

If you can determine that a journal has been publishing for 

many decades, this is a sign that it is not a predatory journal. 

While there certainly are legitimate journals that have been 

publishing for only a few years, no predatory journals have 

been publishing for thirty, forty, fifty, or more years. In fact, it 

is highly unlikely that any journal that was publishing articles 

prior to the year 2000 would turn out to be a predatory journal.

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■

While you certainly cannot trust every random comment you 

read online, if a search of the title of a suspect journal along 

with the phrase “predatory journal” turns up multiple instances 

of what seem to be legitimate scholars labeling the journal as 

predatory, that is not a good sign for the journal’s legitimacy.

Though none of these markers is, by itself, smoking-gun evi-

dence that a journal is predatory, if several of the markers apply, 

then there is a good chance the journal is predatory. Business 

ethics aside, the real problem with predatory journals is that they 

undermine the credibility of scholarship by dressing up noncred-

ible information in the clothing of the scholarly article—perhaps 

the most credible form of information there is. While it is hard to 

be fooled by a raving blog post written by someone who clearly 

has no idea what they are talking about, it is much easier to be 

fooled by a piece of writing that looks and reads exactly like a 

scholarly article and is published in a predatory journal doing its 

best to pass itself off as a legitimate scholarly journal.

Scholarly Articles

Scholarly articles are the bedrock of scholarly journals. The most common 

type of scholarly article reports original research, such as an experiment, a 

study, or other new discovery. It is possible for a scholarly article to have more 

than one author; indeed, in many STEM fields multiple coauthors are more 

common than single authors. Although not every scholarly article contains 

all of the following features, these features are typically part of the format of 

scholarly articles in the STEM fields and the social sciences:

■

Abstract: a one-paragraph summary of the article.

■

Introduction: background information that provides context for the re-

search, such as why the research was done in the first place or a statement 

of the problem under consideration. The introduction will also include a 

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thesis statement (a sentence that summarizes the main point or claim of 

the article) or a hypothesis (a statement that can be proved or disproved).

■

Literature review: a list and discussion of previously published studies on 

the topic covered by the article.

■

Methods: a description of how the research was conducted. This could 

include such things as the procedures followed during an experiment, 

the sampling techniques used, the survey questions asked, and so on. The 

methods section should describe the research in enough detail that another 

researcher could replicate the research in order to either verify or disprove 

its findings.

■

Results: a summary description of the findings of the research. Results can 

be numerical, as when the results section of a study on airline travel delays 

finds that 8 percent of delays experienced by budget air carriers are due 

to weather conditions. On the other hand, results can be nonnumerical, 

as when a qualitative study of job satisfaction among a focus group of el-

ementary school teachers finds that burnout does not seem to be a concern 

among teachers with less than ten years in the classroom.

■

Discussion: a section that addresses the limitations of the study, compares 

the study to other studies, and describes possible areas for future research.

■

Conclusion: the final summing-up of the article.

■

Works cited: a list of all the works formally cited in the article. The “Works 

Cited” section may go by a number of other names, including “References,” 

“Notes,” or “Bibliography.”

■

Appendixes: sections that might include such items as survey questions, 

charts, illustrations, and so on.

■

A DOI (digital object identifier): a number used to permanently identify a 

digital object such as an article, data set, or report. Unlike a URL, which can 

vanish or change, a DOI stays with its assigned object regardless of where 

that object may be found on the Internet. While DOIs may be applied to 

objects other than scholarly journal articles, almost every online scholarly 

journal article has a unique DOI. Citations found in scholarly databases 

(such as Google Scholar and the subject-focused scholarly databases listed 

in table 7.2) usually include DOIs for scholarly articles. Also, a DOI usually 

appears on the first page of a scholarly article. Example of a DOI: dx.doi.org/ 

10.1080/01616846.2017.1327767.

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In fields outside of STEM and the social sciences, scholarly articles may 

take forms that vary from what is described here. For example, in journals 

devoted to literary criticism, articles tend to take the form of nuanced essays 

that interpret one or more literary works. As a rule, articles in arts and hu-

manities journals are more free form than those found in STEM and social 

science journals.

Review Articles

Another important type of article published in scholarly journals is the 

review article. Rather than reporting on original research, a review article 

broadly considers all the previous published research on a specific, typically 

quite narrow topic. After introducing the topic to be covered, a review article 

will list and evaluate significant publications on that topic. A review article 

may also identify the leading individuals doing research in the field, the major 

foci of current research, gaps in the research, and possible future directions 

for research. Because of their broad approach, review articles can be especially 

helpful for introducing a nonexpert to an unfamiliar area of study. 

A special type of review article is the systematic review. The authors of a 

systematic review consider the published research on a particular topic and, 

through sophisticated statistical analysis, summarize the consensus of all that 

research. Systematic reviews are especially useful in medicine, where they 

can be used to point out the scientific consensus of multiple clinical trials. 

For example, if there have been ten separate clinical trials testing the safety 

and effectiveness of drug X for treating lower back pain, a systematic review 

will bring together the results of those ten clinical trials, synthesize their 

collective findings, and point to the current scientific consensus. Scientific 

consensus is an important concept in that it reflects the collective (though 

not unanimous) thinking of the community of scientists in a specific field of 

study. Even though scientific consensus can change as new evidence emerges, 

the scientific consensus on any topic tends to be right far more often than it 

is wrong. Review articles typically have the word review in the title, and the 

advanced search feature of some subject-focused databases allow searchers to 

limit search results to review articles only.

The following is an actual example of the power of a systematic review. 

In the early 1970s many claims were being made about the medicinal value 

of vitamin C (ascorbic acid). One of the people making such claims was the 

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distinguished chemist and biochemist Linus Pauling. One of the most in-

fluential and important scientists of the twentieth century, Pauling was the 

recipient of two Nobel Prizes—one for chemistry (in 1954) and one for peace 

(in 1962). As you might imagine, when a scientist with the well-deserved 

credibility of Linus Pauling talks about the virtues of vitamin C, people listen. 

But not everyone was convinced. In 1975 a researcher analyzed the results of 

fourteen clinical trials testing the ability of vitamin C to prevent and treat the 

common cold. In his published systematic review the researcher concluded 

that “the very minor potential benefit that might result from taking ascorbic 

acid three times a day for life” was not “worth either the effort or the risk, no 

matter how slight the latter might be.”12 Additional original research resulted 

in the scientific consensus that taking vitamin C does little or nothing for 

those suffering from the common cold. Besides demonstrating the power and 

usefulness of systematic reviews, this example illustrates another point about 

scholarly information—no matter how great an individual’s contributions 

to knowledge and scholarly reputation may be, no scholar’s word is law and 

every scholar’s hypotheses must meet the same standards of proof required 

of every other scholar.

Conference Proceedings

Conference proceedings, which are sometimes known as simply proceed-

ings, are published collections of papers presented at scholarly conferences. 

Similar in format to scholarly articles, papers presented at conferences may 

end up being revised and published as scholarly articles. In some cases, the 

papers that make up the proceedings of a conference may be collectively pub-

lished as a special issue of, or supplement to, a scholarly journal. The rigor 

of acceptance standards for conference papers varies from one conference 

to the next. For some conferences, papers are accepted or rejected based on 

the decision of a single reviewer, while other conferences employ peer review 

and require revision before a paper is accepted for presentation. Because a 

conference paper can be shared on a shorter time line than is required for a 

published article, conference papers are important for sharing cutting-edge 

research, especially in fast-moving STEM fields. Presenting a paper at an 

important conference may, in some cases, be as prestigious as publishing an 

article in a scholarly journal.

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Conference proceedings can usually be identified by virtue of having the 

name of a conference somewhere in the title. For example:

■

International Conference on AC and DC Power Transmission

■

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Object Orientation in 

Operating Systems

■

IEE Colloquium on RACE Optical Systems and Demonstrators

Scholarly Monographs

A scholarly monograph is a book written by a scholar and focused on a 

single topic. For example, Brian M. Ingrassia’s The Rise of Gridiron Univer-

sity: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football is a scholarly 

monograph on the early history of college football. Stephen J. Gould’s The 

Structure of Evolutionary Theory is a scholarly monograph on the topic of 

evolutionary theory. Henry Petroski’s Design Paradigms: Case Histories of 

Error and Judgment in Engineering is a scholarly monograph on the topic 

of engineering mistakes. As the three examples suggest, one characteristic 

of scholarly monographs is that their titles usually provide accurate descrip-

tions of what the monograph is about. Another characteristic of scholarly 

monographs is that they are often, though not always, published by university 

presses or the presses of scholarly societies; with some exceptions, scholars 

hold publication via such presses to be more prestigious than publication via 

commercial presses. Like scholarly articles, scholarly monographs include 

formal citations in the form of footnotes, endnotes, and/or bibliographies.

A scholarly monograph can be part of a monographic series—a set of schol-

arly monographs in which each work stands on its own while all the works in 

the series are connected through a unifying theme. For example, the Ameri-

can Academy of Ophthalmology Monograph Series is a series of monographs 

on ophthalmological topics that is published by Oxford University Press.

Edited Scholarly Books

An edited scholarly book (often simply called an edited book) consists of 

a collection of chapters written by different scholars in which all the chapters 

are focused on a single unifying theme. Take, for example, the edited book 

Sacred Darkness: A Global Perspective on the Ritual Use of Caves. The editor 

of this book is Holley Moyes, an archaeology professor. As is common for an 

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edited scholarly book, Moyes, as editor, wrote the introduction to the book. 

The bulk of the book consists of chapters written by various scholarly authors. 

While all of the chapters in Sacred Darkness relate to the central theme of 

the ritual use of caves, each chapter functions very much like a stand-alone 

scholarly article. Besides serving as editor, Moyes is the coauthor of two of the 

chapters included in Sacred Darkness. It is common for an editor of an edited 

scholarly book to author (or coauthor) one or more of the chapters included 

in the book.

Other Types of Scholarly Books

A scholarly anthology is a book that is composed of previously published 

works. These works might be journal articles, fiction, poetry, book chapters, 

selections from books, or primary source materials. The editor (or editors) 

of a scholarly anthology will typically write a substantial introduction to the 

entire anthology as well shorter introductions to sections of the anthology 

and/or individual works included in the anthology. One example of a schol-

arly anthology is The Anthology of Rap, edited by Adam Bradley, Andrew 

DuBois; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Chuck D, and Common. Published by Yale 

University Press in 2010, The Anthology of Rap is a collection of three hun-

dred rap lyrics chosen to represent the wealth and diversity of rap music’s 

poetic tradition.

A textbook is specifically written for students to use in a course. A textbook 

may cover either a broad subject area (e.g., Introduction to Psychology) or 

focus on a narrow topic (e.g., Defect and Impurity-Engineered Semiconduc-

tors and Devices). Textbooks may include features such as review questions, 

homework problems, and quizzes. The format of a textbook may be print, 

digital, or both. Besides its role as a course text, a well-written textbook can 

provide a good introduction to a subject.

Reference books (print or digital) contain information that is intended to be 

quickly looked up and read in small doses. Examples of reference works in-

clude encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, almanacs, and catalogs. In the 

twenty-first century, digital publication has become the dominant format for 

reference works. The venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica stopped producing 

print copies in 2012 and has since existed as an online-only publication.13 Ref-

erence works are considered scholarly if they employ high editorial standards 

and the contents are written by scholars. An example of a scholarly reference 

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work is the freely available Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stan 

ford.edu), which is comprised of contributions from scholars in philosophy 

and related fields.

Dissertations and Theses

As described earlier, dissertations and theses are written by graduate stu-

dents in order to complete their degree programs. In addition to their subject 

content, theses and dissertations typically contain substantial bibliographies 

that are extremely useful for locating scholarly information relevant to the 

subject content.

Emerging Formats for Scholarly Information

Increasingly, scholarly research is shared via formats that do not fit into 

traditional forms of publication.14 Databases, software, digital maps, videos, 

and other digital formats are taking their rightful place alongside traditional 

publications as part of the twenty-first-century scholar’s professional portfo-

lio. One such example, the family of scholarly journals published under the 

JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experimentation) trademark, consists entirely 

of peer-reviewed scholarly videos documenting scientific experiments. An-

other example is Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American 

Civil War (valley.lib.virginia.edu). A digital humanities archive focusing on 

one northern and one southern community in the Civil War, Valley of the 

Shadow is a searchable archive that includes data on population, agricul-

ture, manufacturing, and slavery as well as diaries, maps, images, and other 

primary-source materials.

DOLLARS AND SCHOLARS:  

THE ECONOMICS OF SCHOLARLY INFORMATION

Because both research and publication come with price tags attached, it is no 

surprise that money plays a role in the production of scholarly information.

Writing for (Non) Profit

Unlike journalists, novelists, and other writers, scholars are typically not 

paid, or are paid very little, for their scholarly writing. In the case of scholarly 

articles, scholars receive no payment from the scholarly journals in which 

they publish. Why do scholars give away their articles for free? One reason is 

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169

U S I N G   S U B J E C T - F O C U S E D   D A T A B A S E S   T O   

F I N D   S C H O L A R L Y   I N F O R M A T I O N

There are several hundred subject-focused databases that pro-

vide information about, and often direct links to, scholarly ar-

ticles, books, and other scholarly information resources. A few 

prominent examples of subject-focused databases are shown in 

table 7.2.

Table 7.2.    Examples of Subject-Focused Scholarly Databases 

Database

Subject Focus

America: History and Life

U.S. and Canadian history

Ei Compendex

Engineering

MLA International Bibliography

Modern languages and literature

PsycInfo

Behavioral and social science

SciFinder Scholar

Chemistry

The advantage of using a database that is both scholarly and sub-

ject focused rather than, say, a general-purpose search engine, is 

that most, if not all, of the information you retrieve with the for-

mer will be scholarly rather than a mix of scholarly and popular 

information. At the same time, the information will be relevant 

to the subject on which the database is focused. Many subject-

focused databases offer advanced search features typically not 

found in general-purpose search engines, such as

■

limiting search results to empirical studies

■

limiting search results to review articles

■

providing information on the number of times an article has 

been cited and by whom

■

limiting search results to specific scholarly formats (articles, 

book chapters, dissertations, etc.)

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Because most scholarly, subject-focused databases require a 

subscription, access will usually be through a subscription pro-

vided by a library. When you visit your library’s home page, look 

for a link that says something like “Databases” or “Find Articles” 

in order to determine which databases are available.

Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) is a free search engine 

that is a powerful tool for finding scholarly information, mostly 

articles and books. Rather than being subject-focused, Google 

Scholar covers all areas of scholarly study. One especially useful 

(though not unique) feature provided by Google Scholar is direct 

links to open access versions of articles. (See later in the chapter 

for information on open access.)

that most scholars are more interested in sharing their findings with others 

than with profiting directly from their writing. Another reason is that scholars 

who publish journal articles stand to later reap rewards in the form of promo-

tion and tenure earned, at least in part, through their scholarly publications. 

Similarly, scholars who serve as referees for, or sit on the editorial boards of, 

scholarly journals are not paid by the journals for their services. However, 

many academic scholars are expected to serve as referees or members of edi-

torial boards as part of their job duties, and service on highly ranked journals 

contributes to a scholar’s overall professional reputation and prestige.

In the case of scholarly books, authors are paid royalties based on the 

number of copies sold. For most scholarly books, author royalties do not 

add up to significant amounts of money, though the rare scholarly book sells 

well enough to produce significant royalties. A successful textbook, on the 

other hand, is likely to generate significant royalties for a scholarly author. 

As is the case with publishing journal articles, publishing a scholarly book is 

a pathway to promotion and tenure, especially for academic scholars in the 

arts and humanities.

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Grant Funding

The most significant impact of money on scholarly information is in the 

funding of research through grants. Unsurprisingly, it costs money to con-

duct research. Depending on the field of study, research costs may include 

such expenses as travel, equipment, information technology, materials, sup-

port staff, publication costs, and so on. Some forms of research, such as tradi-

tional humanities research, are not particularly costly while other forms, such 

as major research projects involving advanced science and technology, can 

cost millions. In order to conduct research, scholars typically seek out grants, 

principally from government agencies but also from private funders. Because 

most grants are awarded on a competitive basis, there exists a grant/research/

publication cycle in which grants feed research, research feeds publication, 

and publication feeds grants. Just as a scholar’s record of publication plays a 

role in promotion and tenure, it also plays a role in a scholar’s ability to secure 

grants that, in turn, play a role in promotion and tenure.

Open Access Publishing

The business of publishing scholarly journals operates on an economic 

model that is perhaps unique. Original research is funded through grants 

(most of which are, in turn, funded by taxpayers). The articles resulting 

from grant-funded research are published by scholarly journals that don’t 

pay authors, referees, or editorial board members for their services. When 

the articles are finally published, academic libraries pay for subscriptions to 

scholarly journals, often using tax dollars to do so.

Each year, the sums paid to the publishers of scholarly journals are not 

small. Worldwide, the scholarly information marketplace annually grosses 

about 10 billion dollars.15 Publishers contend that the high cost of scholarly 

information is justified due to the large amount of work required to manage 

peer review, prepare manuscripts for publication, and publish the final ver-

sions of articles. While nobody denies that there are real costs associated with 

publishing scholarly articles, the fact that for-profit publishers of scholarly 

information have consistently returned some of the highest profit margins of 

any type of business is troubling to many scholars.16 The annual cost of schol-

arly information—in particular, the cost of scholarly journal subscriptions in 

the STEM fields—consumes an ever-growing chunk of academic library bud-

gets, leading many academic librarians and scholars to the conclusion that it 

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is possible for scholars to reclaim ownership of their scholarly articles and, 

by making articles freely available via the Internet, greatly reduce the costs of 

scholarly publishing while simultaneously making articles freely available to 

all. This vision for scholarly publishing is known as open access.

For libraries, the attraction of open access publishing is that it could reduce 

the huge financial burden of academic journal subscriptions. For scholars, 

open access means that their work can be read by anyone, regardless of abil-

ity to pay. As a bonus, the fact that open access publications tend to get cited 

more than publications that are behind a paywall means that publishing open 

access increases a scholar’s impact. (In the jargon of open access, the phrase 

behind a paywall refers to publications that require a subscription or other 

payment before they can be accessed.)

While there are many versions of open access, the two main forms are gold 

open access and green open access.

Gold Open Access

In the gold open access model, the author pays a one-time APC ensuring 

that, from the moment it is published, the article will be freely and perma-

nently available to anyone with access to the Internet. The funds for paying 

APCs usually come from grants or institutional funds rather than out of the 

scholar’s pocket. Gold open access scholarly journals may be for profit or 

nonprofit.  Hybrid journals is the term for journals that publish both open 

access articles (for which the author has paid an APC) as well as articles that 

remain behind a paywall (the author has not paid an APC).

Green Open Access

In the green open access model, authors self-archive their articles by de-

positing copies into an open access repository. When an article is originally 

published in a scholarly journal, there may be an embargo period (usually one 

year) between the time the article first appears in the scholarly journal and 

when the author may legally deposit a version of the article in a green open 

access repository. In some cases a preprint (the author’s final manuscript ver-

sion of the article) is deposited rather than the final published version of the 

article as it appears in the journal.

Academic scholars often deposit articles in institutional open access reposi-

tories managed by the college or university for which they work. Examples of 

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institutional open access repositories include the University of California’s 

eScholarship (escholarship.org) and the University of Kansas’s KU Scholar 

Works (kuscholarworks.ku.edu).

A second version of the open access repository is the discipline-based re-

pository in which papers from related fields of study (a.k.a. disciplines) are de-

posited. A leading example of a discipline-based repository is the arXiv (arxiv 

.org) repository that brings together preprints of articles from the disciplines 

of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative 

finance, and statistics.

Yet another type of green open access repository is represented by PubMed 

Central, a government open access repository managed by the US National 

Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine. In August 2017, PubMed 

Central contained 4.4 million open access articles.17 The reason for the large 

number of articles in PubMed Central is that, beginning in 2008, it became a 

requirement that all articles published as a result of grant funding provided 

by the National Institutes of Health be deposited in PubMed Central no later 

than twelve months after publication in a journal or other outlet. Around the 

world, an increasing number of grant funding entities, both governmental 

and private, have instituted similar policies requiring that articles originating 

from the research they fund be made available in open access form.

Because open access is in its infancy, it remains to be seen how it will all 

play out and whether open access will actually reduce the cost of scholarly 

publishing. Even if the cost of scholarly publishing does not drop, open ac-

cess is at least making scholarly information more accessible by removing the 

barrier of the paywall.

The Scholarly Book Crisis

The high cost of scholarly journals has produced a crisis for scholarly 

books. The problem is that academic libraries have been spending such a large 

percentage of their collection budgets to cover the increasing cost of subscrip-

tions to scholarly journals that they cannot afford to buy as many scholarly 

books as they once did, driving the sales of print-format scholarly books to 

historic lows.18 A study conducted by the British Library and the Arts and 

Humanities Research Council found that, from 2005 to 2014, average sales of 

scholarly books in the United Kingdom fell from one hundred sales per title 

to sixty.19 To some extent the drop in sales of print-format scholarly books is 

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being offset by academic libraries’ acquisition of scholarly books in electronic 

formats, but e-book acquisitions are not enough to turn around a downward 

trend that has been building momentum for years.

Open access publishing, however, presents an alternative that could save 

the scholarly book. In open access book publishing, a scholarly author whose 

book manuscript has been accepted for publication by a scholarly press pays 

an up-front fee to cover the editorial and other costs associated with creating 

the book. The book is then made available online at no charge, making it ac-

cessible to millions of potential readers. Readers who wish to obtain a print 

copy of the book can pay for an on-demand copy from the publisher. Though 

a growing number of scholarly publishers are experimenting with open access 

models for books, it remains to be seen if open access will solve the crisis in 

scholarly book publishing.

CHALLENGES FACING SCHOLARLY INFORMATION

While scholarly information is highly credible, it is not infallible. Perhaps 

the biggest challenge facing scholarly information, predatory journals, is de-

scribed earlier. What follows are challenges of which anyone wishing to fully 

evaluate scholarly information should be aware.

Fakery Happens

While predatory journals constitute one type of fake publication, there are 

other variations on the theme. Between 2002 and 2005 Elsevier, the world’s 

largest, best known, and most profitable publisher of scholarly journals, 

published six fake journals that were secretly sponsored by pharmaceuti-

cal companies.20 In the digital world, it has become all too easy to pass off 

nonscholarly information as the real thing. In 2005 a group of MIT students 

created a spoofing tool called SciGen that creates what appear to be scientific 

papers but are really just random accumulations of words supplemented by 

meaningless charts and diagrams. Sadly, many papers created with SciGen 

have been accepted by conferences and journals that either are completely 

predatory or simply too lackadaisical about their editorial processes.21

Human Factors Come into Play

Scholars are human beings and behave as such. Scholars sometimes make 

mistakes. Scholars bring their baggage of personal biases with them when 

they interpret evidence. Both are unavoidable parts of being human. What is 

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avoidable is resorting to such human failings as falsifying results, plagiarizing, 

or turning to predatory publishers—all things that (a relatively few) scholars 

have been known to do. Why do these few scholars cross the line? To be a 

scholar is to participate in a highly competitive business. When a scholar’s 

career is at stake, the urge to take shortcuts can overwhelm even a sincere 

commitment to ethical behavior. It is not so much surprising that scholars 

occasionally cheat as it is that they do not cheat more often than they do.

Impact Factors Are Overrated

The way in which journal impact factors are used has created a number of 

problems. One problem is that a journal’s impact factor is sometimes used as 

a shortcut means of evaluating the scholars who publish in that journal rather 

than as a way to evaluate the journal itself (the latter being the original and 

intended purpose of impact factors). In some fields of study, this has created 

an environment in which getting published in a highly rated journal becomes 

the overriding concern of researchers. It can reach the point where, given 

the choice between the following two options, researchers feel compelled to 

choose A over B:

A. Doing research that stands a good chance of being published in a highly 

ranked journal

B.  Doing research that is less publishable but more likely to truly advance 

knowledge

Another problem arises from the fact that scholarly journals use high im-

pact factors as justification for charging premium prices for subscriptions. In 

their eagerness to increase their impact factors (and income), some scholarly 

journals have resorted to gaming the system through what is known as “coer-

cive citation.”22 It works like this: A scholar submits a manuscript to Journal 

X. The editors of Journal X say to the author, “We would like to publish your 

article. However, you only cite one article from Journal X in your manuscript. 

We would like you to revise your manuscript so that you cite five articles from 

Journal X.” While the extra citations do nothing to improve the quality of the 

published article, they help increase the impact factor of Journal X. Similarly, 

scholars have been known to cite their own work as a way of driving up the 

number of times their articles are cited, thereby making their impact appear 

greater than it actually is.

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Funders Influence Researchers

Scholarly researchers are constantly in search of grants to support their 

work, but there can be conflicts between scholarly ethics and the goals of 

funders. One well-known example were the scientists employed by big to-

bacco whose research consistently disavowed or downplayed links between 

smoking and diseases like cancer, heart disease, and emphysema. Similarly, 

there are deep concerns about the impartiality of clinical trials funded by 

pharmaceutical companies.23 In the United States, the opioid epidemic that 

has claimed thousands of lives and has been blamed in part on the wide-

spread overprescription of painkillers “fueled by a multifaceted campaign un-

derwritten by pharmaceutical companies” that included funding biased 

research.24 Pharmaceutical companies are not the only bad actors. Climate 

scientist Katherine Hayhoe has written about the conflicts she felt on learning 

that Exxon Corporation was spreading disinformation about climate change 

at the same time it was funding her climate research.25 Another way in which 

funding influences research is when research funding is withheld as a way 

of quashing open inquiry. An example of this is when government funding 

agencies are ordered to stop funding certain types of research for reasons that 

are politically motivated.

Negative Results Are Not Sexy

If a researcher develops and tests a hypothesis but gets results that do not 

have the predicted content, this is called a null result or negative result. While 

a null result can make an important contribution to human knowledge, many 

journals so greatly prefer to publish positive results that publishing an article 

with a null result becomes almost impossible. Similarly, producing negative 

results is not a great way to further one’s scholarly career. Experimental re-

sults that find that drug X does nothing to slow the spread of prostate cancer 

is simply not as exciting as results that find drug Y shows promise as an ef-

fective anticancer drug.

Peer Review Is Not Perfect

While peer review is a powerful mechanism for ensuring the quality of 

scholarly information, it is not a perfect mechanism. Because the referees 

who conduct peer review are human, they bring their biases to the table when 

they review the work of others. Referees may vote against the publication of 

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research that contradicts their own work or that conflicts with mainstream 

thinking within their field of study. Historically, there have been cases of 

important articles initially being rejected by referees who failed to see the 

value of groundbreaking new research. In 1797, physician Edward Jenner’s 

short paper describing his success in immunizing humans against the deadly 

disease smallpox was rejected by the Royal Society and went unpublished 

until Jenner had it published as a pamphlet at his own expense.26 At the same 

time, there are cases of bogus papers being accepted because the referees did 

not pay sufficient (or possibly any) attention to the content of what they were 

reading. There have even been cases of scholars creating fake identities so 

that they could serve as referees for their own articles.27 No, peer review is not 

broken. For the most part, it works well. But it is not infallible.

Replication Studies Are Not Valued

An important tenet of the scientific method is that experimental results 

must be reproducible. Replication studies are the only valid way to determine 

if experimental results are reproducible, but it is hard to find grant funding 

to carry out replication studies, many journals are reluctant to publish articles 

documenting replication studies, and scholars are rewarded far more for con-

ducting new research than for carrying out replication studies.

Scholarly Information Is Misrepresented

Though scholars are not to blame for this problem, the fact is that the 

results of scholarly research are too often misrepresented in popular media. 

Scholars know that any single study can produce atypical results. Unless the 

results of a study have been confirmed by replication studies or have been 

considered in context with other studies (as is done in a systematic review), 

the results of any single study cannot be taken as definitive. However, when 

a study produces a newsworthy finding, that finding often gets reported in 

the media as if it were the final word on the subject. Worse, the significance 

of research findings is often blown out of proportion when translated from 

scholarly articles (which are usually very guarded in terms of any claims 

made) to a popular news articles (which too often overstate the significance 

of research findings). Whenever the results of a scholarly study are reported 

in the popular media, it is always a good idea to go to the original study (the 

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primary source) and see what the original researchers have to say instead of 

receiving that information secondhand via popular media.

American author James Baldwin wrote, “The price one pays for pursuing 

any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”28 This is 

as true of the scholarly professions as of any other. However, the existence of 

an ugly side does not diminish all that is good about scholarly information. 

While not infallible, scholars form a worldwide community striving to carry 

out quality research and produce the most credible information possible for 

the benefit of people everywhere. This is both a high standard and an admi-

rable one.

RECAP

Scholarly information is created by scholars—people who are very learned 

in a particular field, usually as a result of advanced education and years of 

study. Scholars may be academic scholars (working in higher education) or 

nonacademic scholars (working in private industry, for a government agency, 

or independently).

When scholars do research they produce scholarly information based on 

their research. Scholarly information can come in the form of text, images, 

videos, maps, data sets, sound recordings, and more. While it is common to 

associate research with scientists working in labs, scholars in the various fields 

of technology, social sciences, humanities, and the arts routinely conduct re-

search and produce scholarly information.

The scientific method, a model for studying both the natural and the hu-

man world, is employed by scientists, technologists, and social scientists. The 

basic idea of the scientific method is that the acquisition of new knowledge 

commonly involves formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis through 

the observation of empirical evidence, analyzing the evidence, and reaching 

a conclusion. Another important tenet of the scientific method is that results 

must be reproducible.

In order to identify scholarly information, it is important to be familiar 

with its most common forms:

■

Scholarly journals

■

Scholarly articles (which are often peer reviewed)

■

Review articles

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179

■

Conference proceedings

■

Scholarly monographs

■

Edited scholarly books

■

Textbooks

■

Reference books

■

Dissertations and theses

■

Emerging formats: databases, software, digital maps, videos, and other 

digital formats

Scholarly, subject-focused databases are useful tools for locating scholarly 

information.

Predatory journals are a type of online publication that resemble schol-

arly journals but are, instead, moneymaking scams that publish substandard 

articles for a price. Distinguishing between legitimate scholarly journals and 

predatory journals can be challenging.

Money plays a role in the creation of scholarly information. The scholarly 

publishing industry grosses billions of dollars every year and major scholarly 

publishers enjoy high profit margins. In response to years of increases in the 

cost of scholarly information, scholars and librarians have become advocates 

for open access publishing, both as a way to reduce costs and as a way to make 

scholarly information freely available to all. Grant funding influences both 

who conducts research and what researchers study.

Although scholarly information constitutes, as a whole, a highly credible 

body of information that is essential for decision making and progress in the 

modern world, scholars are not infallible and the information they produce is 

not perfect. Being aware of the most pressing challenges that impact scholarly 

information is essential for evaluating scholarly information.

8

Help Is Where You Find It

Resources for  

Evaluating Information

As previous chapters have demonstrated, evaluating information is not for 

the faint of heart. You have to keep up your guard to make sure that you don’t 

fall for information that seems credible but is not. Even when your guard is 

up, evaluating any given piece of information can take considerable time and 

effort; so much so that no one can thoroughly evaluate all the information 

they encounter and must, instead, carefully ration the time spent on evalua-

tion. The good news is that there are information resources designed to help 

you check facts and/or gain perspective on an information resource’s reputa-

tion for credibility.

INFORMATION WATCHDOGS

According to the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies, by June 2016 

there were “more than 100 fact-checking projects active in approximately 

40 countries.”1 The good news is that this means there are now many infor-

mation watchdogs you can turn to for help in checking facts and evaluating 

information resources. The bad news is that keeping up with all the existing 

and newly emerging information watchdogs represents an ongoing challenge. 

Not only do you need to keep aware of what information watchdogs are out 

there, you need to know which of those are truly trustworthy. The fact that 

there are so many self-proclaimed information watchdogs means that the 

field is open to watchdog sites that claim to be impartial but that are, in fact, 

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highly partisan. After all, what better way to spread lies and propaganda than 

by claiming to be a resolute defender of the truth, the whole truth, and noth-

ing but the truth?

When turning to any information resource that endeavors to evaluate the 

credibility of other sources of information, it is good practice to learn what 

you can about the methodologies it uses for evaluation. Among information 

watchdogs, the methodologies used for evaluation are often described on an 

“About” page or on a separate page devoted to methodology. It is a red flag 

when anyone who evaluates anything fails to describe the methodologies they 

use for evaluation.

When checking facts, it is never a bad idea to consult more than one fact-

checking resource—if second and third opinions are readily available, always 

seek them out. It is also important to remember that even the most reliable 

information watchdog may change (for the better or for the worse) over time, 

demonstrate occasional bias, or simply make mistakes once in a while. One of 

the truths about journalism is that checking facts costs money, and as a result 

the failure to fully check facts is often more attributable to financial consider-

ations than it is to bias or incompetence.

A final point about information watchdogs is this: no matter how fair and 

impartial a watchdog may be, somebody, somewhere has blasted it as biased, 

unreliable, and/or in the pocket of special interests. The situation is very 

much like that of reviews of restaurants on public recommendation sites like 

Yelp—no matter how good a restaurant may be, there are always going to 

be at least a few negative reviews of it. Whether it is restaurants or websites 

that are being evaluated, your task is to look at the total picture and decide 

whether the praise given and the criticisms dished out are fair and reasonable.

Recognizing that no information resource is infallible or absolutely free 

from bias, the following resources can stake reasonable—though not irrefut-

able—claims as either reliable fact-checking resources or as reliable evaluators 

of the credibility of other information resources.

Allsides

Rather than evaluating information, Allsides presents multiple views (left, 

right, and center) of news stories with the goal of allowing the reader to de-

cide what information is most credible. Allsides also rates other media outlets 

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on a left-to-right bias scale. Funding for Allsides comes from contributions 

made by individuals and foundations.

Launched: 2012

Home page: www.allsides.com

About: www.allsides.com/about

American Fact Finder

Created and maintained by the US Census Bureau, American Fact Finder 

“provides access to data about the United States, Puerto Rico and the Island 

Areas.” American Fact Finder is especially useful for checking facts about US 

populations (national, state, and local), economic conditions, health, crime, 

and more. The funding for American Fact Finder is provided by the US gov-

ernment.

Founded: 2011

Home page: factfinder.census.gov

About: www.census.gov/about/what.html

Blue Feed, Red Feed

Blue Feed, Red Feed shows unedited and unverified liberal (blue) and con-

servative (red) Facebook content side by side in an effort to undo the echo 

chamber effect in which the views of only one side are heard. Blue Feed, Red 

Feed is a service of the Wall Street Journal.

Launched: 2016

Home page: graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed

About: graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/#methodology

Climate Feedback

The mission of Climate Feedback is to “help Internet users—from the 

general public to influential decision-makers—distinguish inaccurate climate 

change narratives from scientifically sound and trustworthy information in 

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the media.” The Climate Feedback team of reviewers is composed of research 

scientists who review popular articles on climate change, rating each article’s 

scientific credibility. Climate Feedback is funded by the University of Califor-

nia, Merced; the University of California’s Center for Information Research 

in the Interest of Society; and individual contributions.

Founded: 2015

Home page: climatefeedback.org

About: climatefeedback.org/About

Fact Checker

A feature of the Washington Post, Fact Checker is the work of journalist 

Glenn Kessler. The stated purpose of Fact Checker “is to ‘truth squad’ the 

statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they 

national, international or local.” The Washington Post is funded through 

advertising and subscription revenues and, since 2013, has been owned by 

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Launched: 2011

Home page: www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker

About: www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/about-the-fact 

-checker

FactCheck

FactCheck bills itself as “nonpartisan, nonprofit ‘consumer advocate’ for 

voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. poli-

tics.” FactCheck is supported by funding from the Annenberg Public Policy 

Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Launched: 2003

Home page: www.factcheck.org

About: www.factcheck.org/about/our-mission

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185

FiveThirtyEight

Taking its name from the number of electors in the US electoral college, 

FiveThirtyEight (also known as 538) uses statistical methodology to analyze 

public opinion and provide numerical analysis of politics, sports, science and 

health, economics, and culture. Founded in 2008 by statistician Nate Silver, 

FiveThirtyEight was affiliated with the New York Times from 2010 to 2012 

before being acquired by ESPN.

Launched: 2008

Home page: fivethirtyeight.com

About: fivethirtyeight.com/masthead

Full Fact

Billing itself as “the UK’s independent factchecking charity,” Full Fact 

is supported by individual contributions and foundation grants, including 

major gifts from investor George Soros and Iranian American eBay founder 

Pierre Omidyar. Full Fact focuses on such UK social and political issues as 

the economy, international relations, health, crime, immigration, education, 

and law.

Launched: 2009

Home page: fullfact.org

About: fullfact.org/about

Hoax-Slayer

Hoax-Slayer is a resource for checking up on the credibility of online 

hoaxes, social media rumors, scams, and Internet security matters. Hoax-

Slayer is supported through advertising and affiliate marketing.

Launched: 2003

Home page: www.hoax-slayer.net

About: www.hoax-slayer.net/about-this-blog

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Information Is Beautiful

The mission of Information Is Beautiful is “to distill the world’s data, in-

formation and knowledge into beautiful and useful graphics and diagrams.” 

The visualizations appearing on Information Is Beautiful cover an eclectic 

assortment of topics ranging from media-inflamed fears to gender pay gaps 

to misconceptions and myths. The site is self-funded.

Founded: 2009

Home page: www.informationisbeautiful.net

About: www.informationisbeautiful.net/about

Media Bias/Fact Check

Media Bias/Fact Check uses an explicit methodology to rate other media 

outlets on a scale that ranges from Left Bias to Right Bias and includes such 

categories as “Pro-Science,” “Conspiracy-Pseudoscience,” “Questionable 

Sources,” and “Satire.” Media Bias/Fact Check is supported by advertising, 

gifts from individuals, and “the pockets of our fact checkers.”

Launched: 2015

Home page: mediabiasfactcheck.com

About: mediabiasfactcheck.com/about

MedlinePlus

A service of the US National Library of Medicine, MedlinePlus offers “reli-

able, up-to-date health information, anytime, anywhere, for free.” Medline- 

Plus is especially useful for fact-checking information found on commercial 

and nonprofit sites offering health information. The funding for MedlinePlus 

is provided by the US government.

Founded: 1998

Home page: medlineplus.gov

About: medlineplus.gov/aboutmedlineplus.html

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OpenSecrets

OpenSecrets is the website of the Center for Responsive Politics. The 

mission of OpenSecrets is “tracking money in US politics and its effect on 

elections and public policy.” OpenSecrets is supported by grants, individual 

contributions, licensing data, and payment for custom research.

Launched: 1996

Home page: www.opensecrets.org

About: www.opensecrets.org/about

Politifact

Run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times, Politifact bills 

itself as “a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected 

officials and others who speak up in American politics.” Politifact is sup-

ported by funding from the Tampa Bay Times, grants, online partnerships, 

and advertising.

Founded: 2017

Home page: www.politifact.com

About: www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/nov/01/principles 

-politifact-punditfact-and-truth-o-meter

Sense about Science

UK-based Sense about Science describes itself as “an independent cam-

paigning charity that challenges the misrepresentation of science and evi-

dence in public life.” Sense about Science is funded by gifts from individuals, 

scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations.

Founded: 2002

Home page: senseaboutscience.org

About: senseaboutscience.org/who-we-are

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Sunlight Foundation

The mission of the Sunlight Foundation is to use “civic technology, open 

data, policy analysis and journalism to make our government and politics 

more accountable and transparent to all.” For example, the Sunlight Founda-

tion makes government information available through its “Hall of Justice” 

web page (hallofjustice.sunlightfoundation.com), which provides access to 

state and national data sets relating to criminal justice. The Sunlight Founda-

tion is supported by gifts from private individuals and foundations.

Launched: 2006

Home page: sunlightfoundation.com

About: sunlightfoundation.com/about

Snopes

Also known as the “Urban Legends Reference Pages,” Snopes addresses 

urban legends, Internet rumors, and stories of dubious origin. The sole source 

of income for Snopes comes from advertisements that appear on the website.

Launched: 1994

Home page: www.snopes.com

About: www.snopes.com/about-snopes

TruthOrFiction

TruthOrFiction describes itself as “a non-partisan website where Internet 

users can quickly and easily get information about e-rumors, warnings, offers, 

requests for help, myths, hoaxes, virus warnings, and humorous or inspira-

tional stories that are circulated by email.” TruthOrFiction tends not to focus 

on current events.

Launched: 1999

Home page: www.truthorfiction.com

About: www.truthorfiction.com/about-us

H E L P   I S   W H E R E   Y O U   F I N D   I T  

189

World Factbook

Created and maintained by the US Central Intelligence Agency, World 

Factbook “provides information on the history, people, government, econ-

omy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transna-

tional issues for 267 world entities.” World Factbook also includes numerous 

political and geographic maps covering the entire world.

Founded: 1962

Home page: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the 

-world-factbook/index.html

About: www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/

docs/history.html

W H E N   C H E C K I N G   M A T T E R S   M O S T

Recapping some points made in previous chapters, there are cer-

tain situations when making use of information watchdogs like 

the ones listed here is especially well advised:

■

When you encounter information that plays on your emotions 

by making you feel especially angry, happy, fearful, vindicated, 

and so on.

■

When you encounter information promoting conclusions that 

are especially outrageous, unconventional, or iconoclastic. 

Any information that “defies all the experts” or “changes ev-

erything” merits careful scrutiny before it can be accepted as 

credible.

■

When the stakes are high—as when there is much to be lost 

if the information turns out to be noncredible—it is especially 

important to make sure that information is credible.

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C H A P T E R   8

FOLLOW THE MONEY

For any information resource, but especially for those that claim to fact-check 

other information resources, it is worth finding out what you can about the 

source of funding. In the online world, you can often find information about 

funding sources on a site’s “About” page. Any credible information resource 

will be up front about its sources of funding. Typically, funding for informa-

tion resources comes from one or more of the following sources:

Advertisements

When an information resource is funded by advertisements, the impor-

tant question to ask is, “What influence, if any, do advertisers have on the 

information content?” While the ideal is for advertisers to have no influence 

at all, that ideal is easier met in theory than in practice. For example, if an 

information resource carries advertisements from fast-food restaurants, can 

it be fully truthful when it comes to reporting anything that is critical of the 

fast food industry? Maybe yes. Maybe no. In either case, the question about 

the relationship between advertisers and credibility still needs to be asked.

Gifts

Many online information resources avoid, or at least minimize, the problem 

of accepting advertising dollars by instead financing their operations through 

gifts from individuals and foundations. While it is unlikely that an individual 

who contributes a few dollars a year to a favorite information resource is in a 

position to influence content, a wealthy individual or deep-pockets foundation 

that provides significant support may expect something in return. The potential 

influence of large gifts raises similar concerns to those raised by advertising 

revenue. For example, the Full Fact website described earlier is funded in part 

by billionaire George Soros, a major supporter of Democratic Party candidates 

in US elections. While it is possible for funders to take a hands-off approach 

that leaves content decisions to independent editors and writers, the possible 

influence of major donors on sites like Full Fact must certainly be taken into 

consideration when evaluating their credibility and impartiality.

Government Funding

It should come as no surprise that governments are quite capable of lying. 

This means that it is perfectly reasonable to ask if politics could influence the 

H E L P   I S   W H E R E   Y O U   F I N D   I T  

191

content of government-supported information resources. World Factbook 

(mentioned earlier) is a perfect example, seeing that it is funded by the US 

Central Intelligence Agency—an organization with a long history of play-

ing fast and loose with the truth. In its defense, because World Factbook 

presents nonclassified information that is largely statistical in nature (such 

as population, economic, and geographic data), its sponsorship by a clan-

destine intelligence organization is not as problematic as if World Factbook 

were presenting subjective information that is more susceptible to politically 

motivated manipulation. An important distinction to make when evaluating 

government-supported information resources is the difference between in-

formation resources produced by government agencies in fulfillment of their 

official missions (such as the information provided by the Census Bureau or 

the National Institutes of Health) versus overtly political sources of govern-

ment information (such as the web pages of elected officials). While the for-

mer may or may not be influenced by political considerations, the latter are, 

by their very nature, entirely political.

FIGHTING THE SPREAD OF FAKE NEWS

A number of initiatives have been launched in recent years to fight the spread 

of noncredible information, many surfacing in the wake of the furor over fake 

news that erupted in the latter half of 2016. While it is unlikely that such ef-

forts can entirely eliminate fake news, the question remains, “Do these initia-

tives have the potential to push back on the problem of fake news and, more 

broadly, the spread of information that is simply not credible?”

Emerging Efforts

One example of emerging efforts to fight fake news is the April 2017 pledge 

of the philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network to donate $100 mil-

lion over three years for the purpose of “supporting independent media, 

tackling misinformation and hate speech, and looking at ways in which 

technology can help repair relationships between citizens and government.”2 

Similarly, and at approximately the same time, Jimmy Wells, the founder of 

Wikipedia, announced plans to launch Wikitribune, a project to pair experi-

enced journalists with volunteer amateurs for the purpose of creating a cred-

ible, factually based, ad-free source for news.3

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C H A P T E R   8

Social Media

A number of social media outlets (see figure 8.1) have taken blame for their 

role as conduits of fake news. In response to criticism from individuals, politi-

cians, and (perhaps most persuasively) major advertisers, such social media 

outlets as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have promised to take steps to 

reduce fake news on social media:

■

Shortly after the US elections of 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg 

promised that Facebook would institute measures to combat the prolifera-

tion of fake news.4

■

In 2017, both Google and Bing began adding “fact check” tags to stories that 

have been judged truthful by multiple news publishers and fact-checking 

organizations.5

■

Also in 2017, Twitter began looking for ways to allow its users to flag fake 

news.6

Whether these or other efforts will succeed remains to be seen. Both 

Google and Facebook failed a major test of their abilities to fight fake news 

in October 2017 when they posted fake news regarding the Las Vegas Strip 

shooting alongside reports from credible information sources.7 Realistically, 

social media outlets face formidable financial and practical hurdles if they are 

to fight fake news. Besides staying afloat financially, any social media outlets 

wishing to stem the proliferation of fake news must confront the complexity 

and nuance of what does or does not constitute fake news while avoiding ac-

tions that reflect either partisanship or censorship.

AI Solutions?

Could technology, in the form of machine learning tools or straight-up ar-

tificial intelligence (AI), solve the problem of separating credible information 

from noncredible information? Some are trying that approach. In November 

2016, Google provided funding to Full Fact (described earlier) to develop au-

tomated fact-checking software.8 In August 2017 journalists began trying out 

the Full Fact fact-checking software, quickly discovering it to be somewhat 

fallible in the early stage of its development.9 While it is likely that automated 

fact-checking software will improve over time, there are strong arguments 

that artificial intelligence will never become good enough at negotiating the 

H E L P   I S   W H E R E   Y O U   F I N D   I T  

193

FIGURE 8.1

Popular social media outlets. istock/543077374

nuances of language, data, and opinion to fully automate the task of evaluat-

ing information.10

RECAP

Information watchdogs can be helpful to anyone seeking to evaluate infor-

mation. However, they are not a cure-all for fake news and noncredible in-

formation, and the same caveats apply to information watchdogs as apply to 

the information sources they strive to evaluate. Awareness of fake news has 

led to the emergence of new initiatives to push back against fake news as well 

194 

C H A P T E R   8

as attempts to use advanced technology to help people identify noncredible 

information. The newness of such efforts, coupled with the complexity of 

evaluating information, means that their ultimate success or failure remains 

to be seen.

Final Thoughts

As the United States was expanding westward during the second half of the 

nineteenth century, various pseudoscientists, land speculators, and politi-

cians promoted the unproven theory that “rain follows the plow.”1 Their 

reasoning (or lack thereof) held that cultivating the arid lands lying west of 

the one hundredth meridian would bring the rain necessary to raise the types 

of crops grown farther east. By simply applying the plow to the dry soil of 

the West, so the advocates’ reasoning went, farmers would initiate an annual 

cycle of snowy winters and rainy summers equivalent to those experienced in 

states like Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. The evidence supporting this argument 

was based on a few exceptionally wet years that happened to coincide with the 

early stages of westward migration. This, along with large doses of unbridled 

optimism and pure greed, was all it took to get the ball rolling.

“We tend to accept information that confirms our prior beliefs and ignore 

or discredit information that does not. This confirmation bias settles over 

our eyes like distorting spectacles for everything we look at.”

—Kyle Hill, science writer2

The idea that rain follows the plow proved to be an extremely appealing 

notion in a United States that was eagerly expanding westward. After all, 

wasn’t it America’s manifest destiny to settle the continent from coast to 

195

196 

F I N A L   T H O U G H T S

coast? And wasn’t the yeoman farmer—each man independently working 

his own plot of land—the keystone of Jeffersonian democracy? And weren’t 

there millions of square miles of the “Great American Desert” waiting to be 

turned into prosperous, rain-nourished farms? Hearing all these questions 

answered with a resounding “Yes,” Congress passed the Homestead Act of 

1862, thereby granting individuals the right to claim 160 acres of western land 

on which to establish freestanding farms.

“Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. 

When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, 

there are solutions.”

—Atifete Jahjaga, former president of Kosovo3

Not everyone, however, bought into the idea that cultivating western 

soil would cause the desert to bloom. John Wesley Powell, a geologist and 

government official who had actually explored the western United States, 

was one such naysayer. In his book Report on the Land of the Arid Regions 

of the United States, Powell argued that only the small percentage of western 

lands adjacent to reliable water sources were suitable for agriculture without 

the construction of major irrigation systems.4 Though Powell’s ideas about 

the best ways to sustainably develop the West were not entirely correct, they 

were far more correct than the notions of his opponents. Most of the western 

United States was, and remains, too arid for the type of agriculture practiced 

east of the one hundredth meridian, plowing the ground did nothing to make 

the rain fall any harder, and thousands of homesteaders ended up going bust 

in spite of the years of backbreaking labor they put into their claims. The 

impoverished Dust Bowl refugees who fled their dried-up farms in the 1930s 

were just one example of those who paid a high price for a nation’s badly 

informed choices. In the twenty-first century, the United States is still dealing 

with a host of economic, social, and environmental problems resulting, either 

directly or indirectly, from the entirely unsupported belief that rain follows 

the plow.

“For if the premise upon which our pluralistic society rests, which 

as I understand it is that if the people are given sufficient undiluted 

information, they will then somehow, even after long, sober second 

F I N A L   T H O U G H T S  

197

thoughts, reach the right conclusion. If that premise is wrong, then not only 

the corporate image but the corporations and the rest of us are done for.”

—Edward R. Murrow, journalist5

It is easy to look back with a knowing smile at those gullible enough to 

believe that the act of plowing the ground could make it rain. But the truth is 

that the people who evaluated the proposition that rain follows the plow faced 

essentially the same sort of information dilemma faced by people living today. 

On one hand, there was information supporting the idea that working the soil 

would bring rain; on the other, there was information supporting the oppo-

site point of view. And because there are always more than two sides to every 

controversy, there was information that fell between the extremes. It was up 

to the people of that time to choose which information was most credible. In 

the end, they chose poorly.

“We’re not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have 

much more information—and that means the real skill now is learning how 

to pick out the useful information from all this noise.”

—Nate Silver, statistician and founder of FiveThirtyEight6

The story of rain follows the plow is a cautionary tale of how misinforma-

tion can lead to bad decisions. People in the Digital Age must make decisions 

on complex matters ranging from climate change to public health to personal 

finance to food choices. The one big difference between the present and the 

past is the vastly larger amount of information that exists today and the light-

ning speed at which information travels.

“Information sharing. That’s what the Internet was designed for; it’s what 

it does best. People’s lives improve and humankind makes progress when 

we share our best ideas and others can act on them. This overwhelms all 

the bad stuff.”

—Vint Cerf, computer scientist and Internet pioneer7

In the Digital Age, the quantity of information and speed at which it travels 

can be overwhelming. Some have coped with this reality by descending into 

a downward spiral of cynicism in which all information is dismissed as a lie, 

198 

F I N A L   T H O U G H T S

as elements of a vast conspiracy to make fools of us all. Some have coped 

by giving up on genuinely caring whether information is credible or not, 

choosing to accept whatever information suits their mood as casually as they 

might pick videos off a streaming service or songs from a playlist. While the 

adoption of these or similar “post-truth” coping mechanisms may seem like 

exercises of free will or affirmations of individualism, the end result is more 

akin to being set adrift than being set free. Human beings require informa-

tion—imperfect as it may be—to form rational opinions and make the best 

possible decisions, both as individuals and as members of a society.

“When the world throws you too much information, the only way you 

can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the 

blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that’s 

emerging?”

—Douglas Coupland, author and artist8

To not give up requires effort. But even with effort, evaluating information 

can be frustrating. There will be times when deciding where the truth really 

lies becomes all but impossible, when the pursuit of the truth leads to dead 

ends. There will be times when your skills for evaluating information let you 

down, when a fact or journal article or news story that passed your best cred-

ibility tests turns out to be not much more than a blatant lie. But this is the 

nature of working with that tricky, often slippery substance called informa-

tion. When your attempt to evaluate information goes wrong, you learn what 

you can from the experience and try to do better next time. Unless we are to 

put the fates of ourselves and our societies at the mercy of purveyors (both in-

tentional and unintentional) of misleading information, it is our duty to care 

about credibility and to practice due diligence in evaluating the information 

we encounter, share, and create.

“The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information—

the data—and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and 

minuses.”

—Emily Oster, economist9

Notes

PREFACE

1.  Paul G. Zurkowski, “The Information Service Environment Relationships 

and Priorities. Related Paper No. 5” (Washington, DC: National Commission on 

Libraries and Information Science, 1974), files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED100391.pdf.

2.  Mary F. Salony, “The History of Bibliographic Instruction: Changing Trends 

from Books to the Electronic World,” Reference Librarian 24, nos. 51–52 (1995): 

31–51, doi:10.1300/J120v24n51_06.

3.  Najmabadi Shannon, “Information Literacy—It’s Become a Priority in an Era of 

Fake News,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2017, www.chronicle.com/

article/Information-Literacy/239264.

4.  Donald A. Barclay, “The Challenge Facing Libraries in an Era of Fake News,” 

Conversation, January 2017, theconversation.com/the-challenge-facing-libraries-in 

-an-era-of-fake-news-70828.

CHAPTER 1

1.  Faiz Siddiqui and Susan Svrluga, “N.C. Man Told Police He Went to D.C. 

Pizzeria with Gun to Investigate Conspiracy Theory,” Washington Post, December 5, 

2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/12/04/d-c-police 

-respond-to-report-of-a-man-with-a-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-restaurant/?utm 

_term=.37de81332599.

199

200 

N O T E S

  2.  United States Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, 

United States Public Health Service, Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory 

Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service (Washington, DC: US 

Government Printing Office, 1964), books.google.com/books?id=yPtqAAAAMAAJ.

 3. Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes—America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the 

Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Alfred A. 

Knopf, 1996), 260.

  4.  CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, “Trends in Current Cigarette Smoking 

among High School Students and Adults, United States, 1965–2014,” Centers for 

Disease Control and Prevention, 2014, www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/

trends/cig_smoking/.

  5.  Ahmed Jamal et al., “Current Cigarette Smoking Among Adults—United States, 

2005–2014,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) 64, no. 44 (2015): 

1233–40, www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6444a2.htm.

  6.  Stanford University and Center for the Study of Language and Information 

(U.S.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University, 1997), 

plato.stanford.edu/entries/practical-reason/.

  7.  Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, “Electrochemically Induced Nuclear 

Fusion of Deuterium,” Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and Interfacial 

Electrochemistry 261, no. 2 (1989): 301–8. doi:dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-

0728(89)80006-3.

  8.  “US Police Shootings: How Many Die Each Year?” BBC News, accessed June 8, 

2017, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36826297.

  9.  National Aeronautics and Space Administration, The Apollo 11 Telemetry Data 

Recordings: A Final Report, 2009, www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/Apollo_11_TV_Tapes 

_Report.pdf.

10.  Tim Weiner, “W. Mark Felt, Watergate Deep Throat, Dies at 95,” New York 

Times, December 19, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/washington/19felt.html.

11.  Tor Halmrast, “Tune In to ISO 16 ! The Long and Oscillating History of 

Standard Tuning Frequency,” ISO Focus +: The Magazine of the International 

Organization for Standardization, 2012, 25–27, http://tor.halmrast.no/

HistoryTuningPitch%20ISO16.pdf.

N O T E S  

201

12.  Michael J. Hayde, My Name’s Friday: The Unauthorized but True Story of 

Dragnet and the Films of Jack Webb (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2001), 72–73.

13.  William W. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth I. Ward, Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga 

(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press in Association with the National 

Museum of Natural History, 2000).

14.  The Trial of William Wemms, James Hartegan, William M’Cauley, Hugh White, 

Matthew Killroy, William Warren, John Carrol, and Hugh Montgomery: Soldiers in 

His Majesty’s 29th Regiment of Foot, for the Murder of Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, 

Samuel Maverick (Boston, MA: Printed by J. Flemming, 1770).

15.  Treason Unmask’d: or the Queen’s Title, the Revolution, and the Hanover 

Succession. Against the Treasonable Positions, of a Book Lately Publish’d, Intitled, 

The Hereditary Right of the Crown of England Asserted; the History of the Succession 

Since the Conquest Clear’d, and the True English Constitution Vindicated, from the 

Misrepresentations of Dr. Higden’s View. 1713. London: printed, and sold by the 

booksellers of London and Westminster, 255.

16.  “The Republicans in New Orleans; Reagan’s Address: Hailing Fruits of the 

Party’s Dream of 1980,” New York Times, August 16, 1988.

17.  Except that the greatest baseball player of all time was, in fact, Willie Mays. 

Everybody knows that.

18.  Liam Stack and Christina Anderson, “Sweden’s Defense and National Security 

Adviser? ‘We Don’t Know This Guy,’” New York Times, February 27, 2017, www 

.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/world/europe/sweden-fraud-fox-news-commentator-

trump.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=067C9C63DCADDB05036AB2AEFFE7

E46B&gwt=pay.

19.  Will Rogers, “From Nuts to the Soup,” New York Times, August 31, 1924.  

20.  The Idaho Spud candy bar is delicious. You really need to try one if you never 

have.

CHAPTER 2

1.  Claire Wardle, “Fake News. It’s Complicated.,” FirstDraft, 2017, firstdraftnews 

.com/fake-news-complicated/.

202 

N O T E S

  2.  Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 

Election,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 2 (2017): 211–36, www.aeaweb 

.org/full_issue.php?doi=10.1257/jep.31.2#page=213.

  3.  Don Tynan, “How Facebook Powers Money Machines for Obscure Political 

‘News’ Sites,” Guardian, August 24, 2016.

  4.  Scott Pelly, “How Fake News Becomes a Popular, Trending Topic,” 60 Minutes, 

2017, www.cbsnews.com/news/how-fake-news-find-your-social-media-feeds/.

  5.  Javier C. Hernandez, “Chinese Mistake Satire on Trump for Real News,” New 

York Times, March 8, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/world/asia/china-trump 

-media-satire.html?_r=0.

  6.  Karl E. Meyer, “The Editorial Notebook–Trenchcoats, Then and Now,” New 

York Times, June 24, 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial 

-notebook-trenchcoats-then-and-now.html.

  7.  Leslie Jones, “The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War,” History 

Today, June 2013, www.historytoday.com/blog/2013/06/german-jewish-soldiers 

-first-world-war.

  8.  Alec MacGillis, “Penn State’s Post-Sandusky Public Relations Repair Gets a 

Helping Hand,” New Republic, February 2014, newrepublic.com/article/116766/

penn-states-post-sandusky-public-relations-repair-gets-helping-hand.

  9.  “Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising,” accessed June 16, 

2017, tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/exhibit.php?token=fm_museum_mt044 

.php.

10.  Examples of cigarette “cast ads” can still be viewed on YouTube: 

Slightlymentholated, “Beverly Hillbillies—Cast Ad #03—Winston Cigarettes,” 

YouTube video, August 3, 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEx44ETP8Ac; 

Brunoreo, “Flintstones Winston Cigarettes Commercial,” YouTube video, June 19, 

2006, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqdTBDkUEEQ.

11.  James D Sargent, Jennifer J. Tickle, Michael L. Beach, Madeline A. Dalton, M. 

Bridget Ahrens, and Todd F. Heatherton, “Brand Appearances in Contemporary 

Cinema Films and Contribution to Global Marketing of Cigarettes,” Lancet 357, no. 

9249 (January 2001): 29–32, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(00)03568-6.

N O T E S  

203

12.  Joe B. Tye, Kenneth E. Warner, and Stanton A. Glantz, “Tobacco Advertising 

and Consumption: Evidence of a Causal Relationship,” Journal of Public Health 

Policy 8, no. 4 (1987): 492–508, www.jstor.org/stable/3342275.

13.  “Our First 10 Years,” BBC News, 2007, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in 

_depth/629/629/7057140.stm.

14.  Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833–1918 (New York: 

George H. Doran, 1918), 64–101, hdl.handle.net/2027/miun.agd0447.0001.001?urlap

pend=%3Bseq=80.

15.  Patrick E. Tyler and Lewis M. Simons, “‘Jimmy’ Episode Evokes Outrage, 

Sadness,” Washington Post, April 17, 1981, https://www.washingtonpost.com/

archive/politics/1981/04/17/jimmy-episode-evokes-outrage-sadness/531a6b43-0d49 

-40f0-800a-17624bac25c9/?utm_term=.6c06a203d8d9.

16.  Cary D. Adkinson, “The Amazing Spider-Man and the Evolution of the Comics 

Code: A Case Study in Cultural Criminology,” Journal of Criminal Justice and 

Popular Culture 15, no. 3 (2008): 241–61.

17.  Allcott and Gentzkow, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” 232.

18.  Brooke Kroeger and Cary Abrams, “Anatomy of the Great Banana-Smoking 

Hoax of 1967,” East Village Other, 2017, localeastvillage.com/2012/02/18/anatomy 

-of-the-great-banana-smoking-hoax-of-1967/.

19.  Felix Kessler, “Light Up a Banana: Students Bake Peels to Kick Up Their Heels,” 

Wall Street Journal, March 30, 1967. 

20.  William H. Dutton, “Fake News, Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles: 

Underresearched and Overhyped,” Conversation, May 2017, theconversation 

.com/fake-news-echo-chambers-and-filter-bubbles-underresearched-and-

overhyped-76688.

21.  James R Lewis, “Satanic Ritual Abuse,” in The Oxford Handbook of New 

Religious Movements, ed. James R. Lewis and Inga B. Tollefsen, vol. 2 (New York: 

Oxford University Press, 2016), 210–21.

22.  “The Size of the World Wide Web (the Internet),” WorldWideWebSize.com, 

2017, www.worldwidewebsize.com/.

23.  “Twitter: Number of Active Users 2010–2017. Statista,” Statista, 2017, www 

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24.  Seth Fiegerman, “Facebook Tops 1.9 Billion Monthly Users–May. 3, 2017,” 

CNNtech, 2017, money.cnn.com/2017/05/03/technology/facebook-earnings/index 

.html.

25.  John Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 1978), 286.

26.  Eugene R. Hanson, “College Libraries: The Colonial Period to the Twentieth 

Century,” Advances in Library Administration and Organization 8 (1989): 171–172, 

99.

27.  Winton U. Solberg, “Edmund Janes James Builds a Library: The University of 

Illinois Library, 1904–1920,” Libraries & Culture 39, no. 1 (2004): 36–37, 75.

28.  “Facts and Figures: UC Libraries,” University of California Libraries, 2017, 

libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/about/facts-and-figures.

29.  Carla Marinucci, “Doctored Kerry Photo Brings Anger, Threat of Suit/Software, 

Net Make It Easy to Warp Reality,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 20, 2004.

30.  Sebastian Anthony, “Adobe Demos ‘Photoshop for Audio,’ Lets You Edit 

Speech as Easily as Text,” arsTechnica, 2016, arstechnica.com/information 

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31.  Bence Kollanyi, Philip N. Howard, and Samuel C. Woolley, “Bots and 

Automation over Twitter during the First US Presidential Debate,” 2016, 1, assets 

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32.  Caitlin Dewey, “One in Four Debate Tweets Comes from a Bot. Here’s How to 

Spot Them.,” Washington Post, October 19, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/

the-intersect/wp/2016/10/19/one-in-four-debate-tweets-comes-from-a-bot-heres 

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33.  “Botometer by OSoMe,” Botometer, accessed June 20, 2017, botometer.iuni 

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34.  Klint Finley, “This News-Writing Bot Is Now Free for Everyone,” Wired, 

October 2015, www.wired.com/2015/10/this-news-writing-bot-is-now-free-for 

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35.  Jonathan Hochman, “What Is Search Engine Optimization Manipulation?” 

National Law Review, May 2016, www.natlawreview.com/article/what-search 

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N O T E S  

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CHAPTER 3

  1.  Videos demonstrating the glowing soda-pop trick can still be found on 

YouTube and other sites, though by now they have been identified as fakes by 

commentators. 

  2.  “Glurge–TV Tropes,” TV Tropes, accessed June 23, 2017, tvtropes.org/pmwiki/

pmwiki.php/Main/Glurge.

  3.  Kimberly L Barrett, “Exploring Community Levels of Lead (Pb) and Youth 

Violence,” Sociological Spectrum, June 16, 2017, 1–18, doi:10.1080/02732173.2017.1

319307.

 4. Bill Nye, Bill Nye’s History of the United States (Chicago: Thompson & Thomas, 

1894), file://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006251512.

  5.  Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun. New York, 1833–1918 (New York: 

George H. Doran Company, 1918), 64–101. 

  6.  Mary Grace Garis, “Marilyn Monroe Misquotations: A Brief Overview,” Elle, 

2014, www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a15424/marilyn-monroe-misquotations/.

  7.  Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies [Zur 

Elektrodynamik Bewegter Körper],” Annalen Der Physik 17, no. 10 (1905): 891–921, 

einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol2-trans/154.

  8.  “‘Hitler’s Last Birthday’,” New York Times, April 21, 1944. 

  9.  Samantha Grossman, “Making a Murderer: Here’s the Evidence That Was Left 

Out,” Time, January 2016, time.com/4167699/netflix-making-a-murderer-evidence-

left-out/.

10.  Elizabeth F. Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony (Harvard University Press, 1996).

11.  “The Amazing, Untrue Story of a September 11 Survivor,” National Public 

Radio, 2012, www.npr.org/2012/04/14/149399210/the-amazing-untrue-story-of-a 

-sept-11-survivor.

12.  Derek Bok, Higher Education in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 

Press, 2013).

13.  Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino, “Frequency and the 

Conference of Referential Validity,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 

16, no. 1 (1977): 107–12.

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14.  Josh Quittner, “The War between Alt.tasteless and Rec.pets.cats,” Wired, May 

1994, www.wired.com/1994/05/alt-tasteless/.

15.  Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How 

Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-

Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6 (1999): 1121–34.

16.  Khalid Mahmood, “Do People Overestimate Their Information Literacy 

Skills? A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence on the Dunning-Kruger Effect,” 

Communications in Information Literacy 10, no. 2 (2016): 199–213.

CHAPTER 5

1.  Michael E. Ruane, “Alexander Gardner: The Mysteries of the Civil War’s 

Photographic Giant,” Washington Post, December 23, 2011, www.washingtonpost 

.com/local/alexander-gardner-the-mysteries-of-the-civil-wars-photographic 

-giant/2011/12/12/gIQAptHhDP_story.html?utm_term=.bf027afba0c0.

2.  Wikipedia, s.v. “Wikipedia: Protection Policy,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Wikipedia:Protection_policy, accessed July 26, 2017.

CHAPTER 6

1.  Joel Best, Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, 

Politicians, and Activists, updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 

2012), 1–4.

2.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “WISQARS (Web-Based Injury 

Statistics Query and Reporting System) | Injury Center | CDC,” www.cdc.gov/

injury/wisqars/index.html, accessed August 2, 2017.

3.  Mary DeYoung, “A Painted Devil: Constructing the Satanic Ritual Abuse of 

Children Problem,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 1, no. 3 (1996): 235–48.

4.  Michael Schroeder, “Enron Debacle Spurs Calls for Controls,” Wall Street 

Journal, Eastern edition, December 14, 2001.

5.  Michael Teitelbaum and Jay Winter, “Why People Fight So Much About the 

Census,” Washington Post, August 30, 1998, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/

politics/daily/aug98/census30.htm.

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  6.  Pervill Squire, “Why the 1936 Literary Digest Poll Failed,” Public Opinion 

Quarterly 52, no. 1 (1988): 125–33. doi:doi.org/10.1086/269085.

  7.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “WISQARS.”

  8.  Lauren Averett Byers and Charles M. Rudin, “Small Cell Lung Cancer: Where 

Do We Go from Here?” Cancer 121, no. 5 (March 1, 2015): 664–72. doi:10.1002/

cncr.29098.

  9.  World Health Organization, “Road Traffic Deaths and Proportion of Road 

Users by Country/Area Country/Area General,” 2015, www.who.int/violence 

_injury_prevention/road_safety_status/2015/TableA2.pdf?ua=1.

10.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Motor Vehicle Crash Deaths | 

VitalSigns | CDC,” 2016, www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.html.

11.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Motor Vehicle Crash Deaths.”

12.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Motor Vehicle Crash Deaths.” 

13.  Leo Kanner, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” Nervous Child 2, no. 3 

(1943): 217–50. mail.neurodiversity.com/library_kanner_1943.pdf.

14.  Lorna Wing and David Potter, “The Epidemiology of Autistic Spectrum 

Disorders: Is the Prevalence Rising?” Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews 8, 

no. 3 (2002): 151–61.

CHAPTER 7

1.  Ellie Bothwell, “University Researchers Key ‘in 40% of Top Inventions Since 

1950s,’” Times Higher Education, May 21, 2017, www.timeshighereducation.com/

news/university-researchers-key-40-top-inventions-1950s.

2.  Caroline Nicholson, Julienne Meyer, Mary Flatley, and Cheryl Holman, “The 

Experience of Living at Home with Frailty in Old Age: A Psychosocial Qualitative 

Study,” International Journal of Nursing Studies 50, no. 9 (2013): 1172–79.

3.  Zahra Ebrahimi, Synneve Dahlin-Ivanoff, Kajsa Eklund, Annika Jakobsson, 

and Katarina Wilhelmson, “Self-Rated Health and Health-Strengthening Factors 

in Community-Living Frail Older People,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 71, no. 4 

(2015): 825–36.

4.  Xin Gu and Karen L Blackmore, “Recent Trends in Academic Journal Growth,” 

Scientometrics 108, no. 2 (August 2016): 693–716. doi:10.1007/s11192-016-1985-3.

208 

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  5.  Ramya H. Tunuguntla, Robert Y Henley, Yun-Chiao Yao, Tuan Anh Pham, 

Meni Wanunu, and Aleksandr Noy, “Enhanced Water Permeability and Tunable 

Ion Selectivity in Subnanometer Carbon Nanotube Porins,” Science 357, no. 6353 

(2017): 792–96. doi:10.1126/science.aan2438.

  6.  Alessandra Potenza, “These Microscopic Tubes May One Day Help  

Turn Seawater to Drinking Water,” The Verge, August 2017, www.theverge 

.com/2017/8/24/16189762/drinkable-seawater-carbon-nanotubes-water-filters 

-aquaporins.

  7.  Ewen Callaway, “Publishing Elite Turns against Impact Factor,” Nature 535 

(2016): 210–11, www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.20224.1468429701!/menu/main/

topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/nature.2016.20224.pdf?origin=ppub.

  8.  Heather Piwowar, “Altmetrics: Value All Research Products,” Nature 493, no. 

7431 (2013): 159, eprints.icrisat.ac.in/12069/1/value-all-research-products.pdf.

  9.  Paul Basken, “Why Beall’s List Died—and What It Left Unresolved about Open 

Access,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 2017.

10.  Rick Anderson, “Cabell’s New Predatory Journal Blacklist: A Review,” Scholarly 

Kitchen, July 2017, scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/07/25/cabells-new-predatory 

-journal-blacklist-review/.

11.  Tom Spears, “How My Fake Science Paper Earned Me a Shot at an Editor’s 

Job,” Ottawa Citizen, November 24, 2014, ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ok 

-no-problem-fakery-is-fine-at-bottom-feeding-journal.

12.  Thomas C. Chalmers, “Effects of Ascorbic Acid on the Common Cold: An 

Evaluation of the Evidence,” American Journal of Medicine 58, no. 4 (1975): 532–36.

13.  Jorge Cauz, “Encyclopædia Britannica’s President on Killing Off a 244-Year-Old 

Product,” Harvard Business Review 91, no. 3 (2013): 39–42.

14.  Jennifer Lin and Martin Fenner, “Altmetrics in Evolution: Defining and 

Redefining the Ontology of Article-Level Metrics,” Information Standards Quarterly 

25, no. 2 (2013): 20–26.

15.  Bo-Christer Björk, “Scholarly Journal Publishing in Transition—from Restricted 

to Open Access,” Electronic Markets 27, no. 2 (2017): 101–9.

16.  Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, “The Oligopoly 

of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era,” PloS One 10, no. 6 (2015): e0127502. 

doi:doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.

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209

17.  PubMed Central, accessed August 26, 2017, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc.

18.  Donald A. Barclay, “Academic Print Books Are Dying. What’s the Future?” 

Conversation, 2015, theconversation.com/academic-print-books-are-dying-whats 

-the-future-46248.

19.  Michael Jubb, Academic Books and Their Futures: A Report to the AHRC and the 

British Library, London (London, 2017). academicbookfuture.files.wordpress 

.com/2017/06/academic-books-and-their-futures_jubb1.pdf.

20.  Bob Grant, “Elsevier Published 6 Fake Journals,” Scientist, May 2009, www.the 

-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27383/title/Elsevier-published-6-fake 

-journals.

21.  Alan Burdick, “‘Paging Dr. Fraud’: The Fake Publishers That Are Ruining 

Science,” New Yorker, March 2017, www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/paging-dr 

-fraud-the-fake-publishers-that-are-ruining-science.

22.  Allen W. Wilhite and Eric A. Fong, “Coercive Citation in Academic 

Publishing,” Science 335, no. 6068 (2012): 542–43.

23.  Emmanuel Stamatakis, Richard Weiler, and John Ioannidis, “Undue Industry 

Influences That Distort Healthcare Research, Strategy, Expenditure and Practice: A 

Review,” European Journal of Clinical Investigation 43, no. 5 (2013): 469–75.

24.  Andrew Kolodny, “The Opioid Epidemic in 6 Charts,” Conversation, October 

2017. theconversation.com/the-opioid-epidemic-in-6-charts-81601.

25.  Katherine Hayhoe, “I Was an Exxon-Funded Climate Scientist,” Conversation, 

August 24, 2017, theconversation.com/i-was-an-exxon-funded-climate 

-scientist-49855.

26.  Stefan Riedel, “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination,” 

Proceedings (Baylor University. Medical Center) 18, no. 1 (January 2005): 21–25, 

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16200144.

27.  Cat Ferguson, Adam Marcus, and Ivan Oransky, “The Peer-Review Scam,” 

Nature 515, no. 7528 (2014): 480.

28.  James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” in The Price of the 

Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 302.

210 

N O T E S

CHAPTER 8

  1.  Alexios Mantzarlis, “There’s Been an Explosion of International Fact-Checkers, 

but They Face Big Challenges,” Poynter, 2016, www.poynter.org/news/theres-been 

-explosion-international-fact-checkers-they-face-big-challenges.

  2.  Anita Singh, “eBay Founder Pierre Omidyar Commits $100M to Fight 

‘Fake News’ and Hate Speech,” Telegraph, April 5, 2017, www.telegraph.co.uk/

news/2017/04/04/ebay-founder-pierre-omidyar-commits-100m-fight-fake-news 

-hate/.

 3. “Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Creates News Service Wikitribune,” BBC News, 

2017, www.bbc.com/news/technology-39695767.

  4.  Mike Isaac, “Facebook Considering Ways to Combat Fake News, Mark 

Zuckerberg Says,” New York Times, November 19, 2016, https://www.nytimes 

.com/2016/11/20/business/media/facebook-considering-ways-to-combat-fake-news 

-mark-zuckerberg-says.html.

  5.  Jacob Kastrenakes, “Bing Now Shows Fact Checks in Search Results,” The 

Verge, 2017, www.theverge.com/2017/9/16/16318924/bing-fact-check-label-added 

-search-results.

  6.  Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Twitter Is Looking for Ways to Let Users Flag Fake News, 

Offensive Content,” Washington Post, June 29, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/

news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/29/twitter-is-looking-for-ways-to-let-users-flag-fake 

-news/?utm_term=.d534f61b96fb.

  7.  David Pierson, “Facebook and Google Pledged to Stop Fake News. So Why Did 

They Promote Las Vegas-Shooting Hoaxes?” Los Angeles Times, October 2, 2017, 

www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-vegas-fake-news-20171002-story.html.

  8.  Caroline Mortimer, “Google Funds Automated Fact-Checking Software in Bid 

to Fight Fake News,” Independent, November 17, 2016, www.independent.co.uk/

life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-fake-news-fight-facebook-fact-check 

-fullfact-a7422861.html.

  9.  Robert Booth, “Journalists to Use ‘Immune System’ Software against Fake 

News,” Guardian, August 8, 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/08/

fake-news-full-fact-software-immune-system-journalism-soros-omidyar.

10.  Tom Simonite, “Humans Can’t Expect AI to Just Fight Fake News for Them,” 

Wired, June 2017, www.wired.com/story/fake-news-challenge-artificial-intelligence.

N O T E S  

211

FINAL THOUGHTS

1.  Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the 

Second Opening of the West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 2–4.

2.  Kyle Hill, “Argumentum Ad Monsantum: Bill Maher and The Lure of a Liberal 

Logical Fallacy,” Scientific American Blog Network, 2013, blogs.scientificamerican 

.com/but-not-simpler/argumentum-ad-monsantum-bill-maher-and-the-lure-of-a 

-liberal-logical-fallacy/.

3.  Atifete Jahjaga, “Kosovar President Atifete Jahjaga: The Four Key Ingredients for 

Peace,” The Hill, 2012. thehill.com/policy/international/232703-kosovar-president 

-atifete-jahjaga-the-four-key-ingredients-for-peace.

4.  John Wesley Powell, Report on the Land of the Arid Regions of the United Sates, 

2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879). hdl.handle.net/2027/

mdp.39015028143686.

5.  Edward R. Murrow, “Wires and Lights in a Box: Speech before the Radio-

Television News Directors Association,” Radio Television Digital News 

Association,1958, www.rtdna.org/content/edward_r_murrow_s_1958_wires_lights 

_in_a_box_speech

6.  Nate Silver, “‘Signal’ and ‘Noise’: Prediction as Art and Science,” NPR Fresh Air, 

2010. www.npr.org/2012/10/10/162594751/signal-and-noise-prediction-as-art-and 

-science.

7.  Rich Karlgaard, “Internet Guru: Google Evangelist Vint Cerf,” Forbes, May 2011, 

www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0606/opinions-rich-karlgaard-innovation-rules 

-internet-guru.html.

8.  Douglas Coupland, “The Interview: Douglas Coupland,” Maclean’s, September 

2009, www.macleans.ca/culture/its-precipitating-a-real-philosophical-crisis-that-i 

-find-quite-fascinating/.

9.  Emily Oster, “Take Back Your Pregnancy; Modern Pregnancy Comes with a 

Long List of Strict Rules, But Does It Have To? An Economist Examines the Data 

and Finds Room for Choice Amid the Familiar Limits,” Wall Street Journal, August 

9, 2013.

Index

9/11 attacks, 82–83, 109

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 83,  

60 Minutes, 32

135

538. See FiveThirtyEight

advertising, 11, 31–32, 35, 37–38, 43, 

747 (aircraft), 15

60, 62, 105, 112, 124, 157, 184–188, 

1936 election, United States, 128–129

190, 192

2001: A Space Odyssey, 80

Africa, 12

2016 election, United States, ix, 32, 46, 

African American, 134

48, 69

Age of Enlightenment, 1, 156

AI. See artificial intelligence 

A above middle C (musical note), 18

Alberta, Canada, 125

Abagnale, Frank, 24

aliens (extraterrestrials), 44

abstracts, 162

Allcot, Hunt, 31

Academy Award, 80

Allies (World War II), 33

accreditation (U.S. colleges and 

Allsides (website), 182–183

universities), 75

almanacs, 167

active learning, x

alt.tasteless, 88

ad hominem, 68, 91, 92

alteration of information. See 

ad populum fallacy, 92

information, alteration of 

ad verecundiam. See appeal to authority 

alternative facts, ix, 213

Adams, John, 19–20

alternative history, 7

Adobe Systems, 52

altmetrics, 159

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai 

Amazon.com, 107, 184

across the 8th Dimension, 23

America: History and Life, 169

213

214 

I N D E X

American Academy for the 

artificial intelligence, 192–193

Advancement of Science, 107

arts (field of study), 148–149, 151, 164, 

American Academy of Ophthalmology 

170, 178 

Monograph Series, 166

Arts and Research Council (United 

American Fact Finder (website), 183

Kingdom), 173

American Historical Association, 107

arXiv (open access repository), 173

American Library Association, 107

ascorbic acid, 164–165

American Medical Association, 75

Asian, 134

American Psychiatric Association, 134

Associated Press, 54

analogies, 87–88

attribution. See citing sources of 

Ancient Rome, 33

information 

anecdotal evidence, 119

authors, 102–103, 105; scholarly, 151, 

Angelou, Maya, 10

157–162, 164, 167, 170–172, 174–175 

anger, 40, 46, 60–61, 90

autism, 66, 133–134

Annenberg Public Policy Center, 184

average, 142–144

anonymity, 88

awards, as guides to credibility of 

anonymous sources of information, 76, 

information, 107

102, 113

Axis Powers, 33

anthologies, scholarly, 167; format of, 

162–164; media, 177–178

BAFTA (award), 80

The Anthology of Rap, 167

Baldwin, James, 178

antismoking efforts, 7, 95

Balloon Hoax, 43

APC. See article publication charges 

bananadine (hoax), 47

Apollo 11, 13, 80

bandwagon fallacy, 93–94

appeal to authority, 92

baseball cards, 151

appendixes (section of a scholarly 

BBC (British Broadcasting 

article), 163

Corporation), 41

apples-and-oranges comparisons, 121, 

Beall, Jeffrey, 160

131

Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and 

archives, 168

Publishers, 160

arithmetic mean, 142

the Beatles, 3

Army: British, 22; German, 34–35; 

Berkeley Barb, 47

United States, 21, 32, 81, 83

Bernstein, Carl, 13

article publication charges (APC), 

Best, Joel, 117–119

159–161, 172

The Beverly Hillbillies, 38

articles: fake, 174; popular, 156–157; 

Bezos, Jeff, 184

scholarly, 74, 149, 154, 156–157, 

bias, 23, 34, 48, 50, 54, 59, 61, 62, 78, 

162–165, 168–169, 171–172, 177–178

82, 84–85, 90, 96, 103–104, 112, 114, 

I N D E X  

215

182, 186; in scholarly information, 

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 

174, 176. See also confirmation bias; 

United States, 189, 191

statistics, bias in 

Cerf, Vint, 197

bibliographies, 163, 166, 168

CGI (computer-generated imagery), 52

Big Tobacco, 6, 176

charts, 69

Bigfoot, 11

Chaucer Review, 156

Bill Nye’s History of the United States,  

Chernow, Ron, 148–149

68

children, xiii, 18, 37, 59, 76, 117, 125 

Bing, 54, 192

Chuck D (musician), 167

black-hat SEO. See search engine 

Churchill, Winston, 77

optimization 

cigarette smoking, 3–7

Blankfein, Lloyd, 76

cigarettes, advertising, 37–38

Blue Feed, Red Feed (website), 183

citing sources, 17, 75–78, 106, 112

Bolivia, 17

Civil War, United States, x, 43, 45, 109, 

Bolsheviks, 34

168; Confederacy in, 79–80, 96

books, scholarly, 149, 170; crisis,  

Clemens, Samuel L. See Twain, Mark 

173–174; edited, 166–167, 179 

click-bait, 4, 32

Boston Massacre, 19, 61

climate change, 50, 139, 176, 183–184

Botometer, 53

Climate Feedback (website), 183–184

bots, political, 53, 56

clinical trials, 164–165

Bradley, Adam, 167

Clinton, Hillary, 1, 32, 53, 69

British Library, 173

Coca-Cola, 13

coercive citation, 175

Cambridge University, 49

cold, common, 165

Camel (cigarette brand), 38

cold fusion, 11–12

Captain America, 35, 83

College Humor (website), 109

card catalog, x

Columbus, Christopher, 18

cast ads, 38

comic books, 46

catalogs, 167

Comics Code Authority, 46

Catch Me If You Can, 24

comments, online, 4, 73, 88, 107, 162

censorship, 46, 192

commercial presses, 166

census. See United States Decennial 

Common (musician), 167

Census 

common knowledge, 17

Census Bureau, United States, 183, 191

common sense, 94, 152

Center for Responsive Politics, 187

conclusion (section of a scholarly 

Centers for Disease Control and 

article), 163

Prevention, United States, 117, 130, 

conference proceedings, 165–166, 179 

131–132

confirmation bias, 94, 195

216 

I N D E X

conflict of interest, 103, 105, 112

decision making and information, 2, 

Congress of the United States, 196

7–9, 28, 14, 24–28, 38, 49, 57, 60, 63, 

Connecticut, 123

85, 119–123, 179, 197–198

conspiracy theories, 1, 31, 40, 50, 86, 

Deep Throat (Watergate informant),  

114, 186, 198

13

Cornell University, 89

Defect and Impurity-Engineered 

correlation and causation, 66–67, 97

Semiconductors and Devices, 167

Cottingley Fairies (hoax), 51–52

Delaware, 96

Coupland, Douglas, 198

Democrats (U.S. political party), 69, 128, 

Cracked.com (website), 109

141, 190

creative works, 151

Denver, Colorado, 17

credibility continuum, 10, 26, 101

Department of Agriculture, United 

crime rates, 65, 140, 188

States, 151

critical thinking, x

Department of Energy, United States, 

CrossFit, 138

151

cryptids, 44

Design Paradigms: Case Histories of 

cui bono, 103

Error and Judgment in Engineering, 

Cullman, Howard, 6

166

curriculum vitae, 160

Designated Hitter Rule, 66

cynicism, 197

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 134

diagrams, 186

Dade County, Florida, 126

Diana, Princess of Wales, death of, 

Daily Prophet, 39–41

39–41

Dallas, Texas, 3

dictionaries, 167

Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling 

Digital Age, 2, 27, 42, 48, 50, 51, 54, 56, 

Numbers from the Media, Politicians, 

88, 110, 159, 168, 197

and Activists, 117, 119

digital humanities, 150

Darius the Great, 33

digital object identifier (DOI), 163

data, 12–13, 69, 85, 153, 155, 168, 184, 

discussion (section of a scholarly 

186, 188, 193, 198; sets, 102, 147, 154, 

article), 163

163, 178, 188; statistical, 117, 119, 

disinformation, 176

121–124, 133–137, 139, 143, 191

dismissive fallacy, 94

databases: bibliographic, ix, 74, 163; 

dissertations, 150–151, 168, 179 

nonbibliographic, 12, 75, 168, 179; 

divine fallacy, 94–95

scholarly, 163, 169–170, 179; subject-

Doctor Finder (website), 75

focused, 163–164, 169–170, 179

doctoral degree, 150

Death Star, 14

documentary films, 81

The Deathly Hallows, 41

DOI. See digital object identifier 

I N D E X  

217

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 51

expertise, 8–9, 22–23, 28, 102–103; 

Dragnet, 15, 18 

faking, 72–74

DuBois, Andrew, 167

experts, checking credentials of,  

due diligence, 26, 28, 57, 198

74–75

Dumbledore, Albus Percival Wulfric 

Exxon Corporation, 176

Brian, 40

eyewitness accounts, 75, 82–84

Dunning, David, 89

Dunning-Kruger Effect, 89–90

Facebook, 4–6, 11, 25, 48–51, 113, 183, 

Duranty, Walter, 34, 104

192

Dust Bowl, 196

fact and fiction, mixing, 34, 51, 80–81

Fact Checker (website), 184

Ebola, 32

fact checking, 58, 104, 113; resources, 

echo chambers (as sources of 

181–194; software, 192

information), 41, 48, 50, 82, 183

FactCheck (website), 184

Ed Sullivan Show, 3

facts, 15–18, 28, 125; conditional, 

editorial boards, 157, 170–171

15–18; incontrovertible, 15, 101; 

editorials, 157

interpretation of, 18–24; omission of, 

editors, 112, 157–159, 166–167

81–82; pseudo, 18

EI Compendex, 169

“Facts are stubborn things,” 19–20

Eighteenth Century Fiction, 156

faculty (college and university), xi, 74, 

Einstein, Albert, 10, 77

147, 149–150 

either/or fallacy, 95

fake news, 1–2, 29–56; as moral panic, 

Elsevier, 174

45–48, 56; definition of, 29–31, 54; 

embargo period (scholarly publishing), 

efforts to fight, 191–194; history of, 

172

42–45; mercenary, 31–32, 43. See also 

emotions. See information, emotional 

propaganda; satire 

responses to 

fake photographs. See images, deceptive

empirical evidence, 152–153

fallacies. See logical fallacies 

empirical studies, 153, 169

falsehoods, 18

Encyclopedia Britannica, 114, 167

famine (1933, Soviet Union), 34

encyclopedias, 167

fear, 63–64, 90

Enron Corporation, 125

Felt, Mark, 13

envy, 63

fiction. See fact and fiction, mixing 

equivocation, 78–79

films (motion pictures), 14, 23–24, 

eScholarship, 173

37–38, 46, 52, 80, 85, 103; 

ESPN, 185

documentaries, 76, 81, 101–102, 107; 

evaluating information. See information, 

product placement in, 38

evaluation of

firearms, 117–119, 130

218 

I N D E X

Fisher, Carrie, 52

green open access. See open access 

FiveThirtyEight (website), 185, 197

publishing, green 

Flat Earth Theory, 18

group loyalties, 58, 62, 82

The Flintstones, 38

Guardian (newspaper), 32

focus groups, 153

Fonda, Jane, 51

Haines Index, 14

forgeries, 51–52

hair splitting, 78–79

Fox News, 54

Hall of Justice (website), 188

France, 35

Hamilton, Alexander, 148

Friday, Joe, 15, 18

Hamilton! An American Musical, 148

Full Fact (website), 185, 190, 192

handbooks, 167

Harry Potter (book series), 39–41, 59

Gallup Poll, 128

Harvard University, x; Library, 49

gambling, 127

hasty generalization, 96–97, 140

Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 167

Hayhoe, Katherine, 176

genetic fallacy, 95–96

headlines, 105–106

Gentzkow, Matthew, 31

health information, 25, 104–105, 123, 

gifts, 190

136, 173, 183, 185–186, 191 

glurge, 64–65

heart transplant, 15

gluttony, 62–63

Herschel, Sir John, 42, 77

Godwin’s Law, 97

higher education, 147–150

gold open access. See open access 

Hill, Kyle, 195

publishing, gold

Hispanic, 134

Golden Globe, 80

historical facts, misuse of, 79–80

Goldman Sachs, 76

History of United States Naval 

Goldwater, Barry, 6–7

Operations in World War II, 83

Good Housekeeping, 37

Hitler, Adolph, 34–35, 81, 97

Google, 54, 89, 192

Hoax-Slayer (website), 185

Google Scholar, 74, 163, 170

Holmes, Sherlock 51

Gould, Stephen J., 166

Holocaust, 97

government funding, 190

Homestead Act of 1862, 196

graduate students, 149, 168

Homicide: Life on the Streets, 46

Granger, Hermione Jean, 39

humanities, 148, 150, 164, 168, 170–171, 

grants. See research, scholarly, funding 

178

of 

humor, 11, 32–33, 67. See also satire 

graphs, 186

hybrid journal, 172

Great American Desert, 196

hypocrisy, 67–68, 97, 109

greed, 60–61

hypothesis, 153, 155, 163, 165

I N D E X  

219

Idaho Spud, 25

information overload, x, 40–41, 44–46, 

IEE Colloquium on RACE Optical 

48–50, 56, 198; coping mechanisms, 

Systems and Demonstrators, 166

50

Illinois, 195

information watchdogs, 181–182

images, deceptive, 51–52, 56, 69–71

Ingrassia, Brian M., 166

immunization, 66

innovation, 147–148

impact factor (scholarly journals), 

Instagram, 25, 49

158–159, 175

institutional open access repositories. 

incident commander, 8–9, 14–15

See open access repositories, 

Indiana, 195

institutional

Industrial Revolution, 1

International Conference on AC and DC 

Information Age. See Digital Age 

Power Transmission, 166

information: alteration of, 51–53, 56; 

Internet, history of, 148

cost of distribution, 50–51, 56; 

interviews, 153

credibility of creators, 102–103; date 

introduction (section of a scholarly 

created, 106; emotional responses 

article), 161

to, 59–6, 90, 122; evaluation of, ix–x, 

Introduction to Psychology, 167

xii, 1–2, 9–10, 15, 24–28, 48, 53–56, 

Iowa, 195

58–61, 64–65, 77–78, 81, 88–90, 91, 

Ireland, 32

101–116, 181–182, 190–191, 193–

ISIS, 92

194, 198; influence of money  

Island Areas (of the United States), 183

on, 31–32, 43, 60, 159, 168, 171–174, 

179, 182, 190, 192; statistical, 

Jack the Ripper, 110

evaluation of, 119, 125, 139–141, 

Jahjaga, Atifete, 196

144–145

Japanese internment, 63

information, scholarly, xii, 147–179; 

Jeffersonian democracy, 196

challenges to, 174–179; economics  

Jenner, Edward, 177

of, 168, 170–174, 179; evaluation  

Jews, 35

of, 159–160, 164, 174–175, 

“Jimmy’s World,” 43–44, 104

179; formats of, 155–168; 

Johns Hopkins University, 73

misrepresentation of in popular 

Johnson, Lyndon, 6, 51

intentionally falsified, 10. See also 

jokes. See humor 

information, statistical 

Journal Blacklist, 160

information bubbles, 48, 50

Journal of Modern Literature, 156

information guard, 57– 60, 63–65, 82, 

Journal of Visualized Experimentation 

90, 100

(JoVE), 168

Information Is Beautiful (website), 186

journals, predatory, 6, 159–162, 174, 

information literacy, ix–xi, 89–90

179; identifying, 161–162

220 

I N D E X

journals, scholarly, 117, 139, 155–165, 

LSD, 47

168, 170–175, 178, 179; fake, 174; 

Lusitania (passenger ship), 80

number, 156; online publication, 156;  lust, 62

rankings of, 158–159, 170; subject 

focus, 156; subscriptions, 171–173, 

machine learning, 192

175 

machine-written articles, 54, 56

joy, 64–65, 90

Madoff, Bernard, 11

magazines, x, 37, 39–40, 74, 77,  

Kennedy, John F., assassination of, 3, 50, 

102–103, 107, 157 

51–52

The Magnificent Seven, 37

Kentucky, 96

magnum opus, 150

Kerry, John, 51

Major League Baseball, 18, 21, 66

Kessler, Glenn, 184

majority rule, 93–94

Kosovo, 196

Making a Murderer, 81

Kruger, Justin, 89

Manhattan, Kansas, 87

KU Scholar Works (website), 173

Manhattan, New York, 81, 87

Kubrick, Stanley, 80–81

maps, 189; deceptive use of, 69–70; 

digital, 168, 179. See also Mercator 

labels, derogatory, 78

projection map

Landon, Alf, 128–129

margin of error, 143

Las Vegas, Nevada, 127

marijuana, 47, 99

Las Vegas Strip shooting (October 

Marlboro (cigarette brand), 37

2017), 192

Maryland, 96

lead (environmental pollutant), 65

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

legalisms, 78–79

(MIT), 174

libel, 45

master’s degree, 150

librarians, ix–xi, xv, 107, 124, 147, 160, 

Mays, Willie, 18, 21–22

171, 179

Media Bias/Fact Check (website),  

libraries, x, 49, 74, 158, 160, 170–174

186

Library of Alexandria, 13

median, 143–144

“lions led by donkeys,” 22

MedlinePlus (website), 104–105, 186

Literary Digest 1936 Presidential Poll, 

memes, 4, 5, 62

128–129

Mercator projection map, 69

literature review (section of a scholarly 

mercury (element), 153

article), 163

methodology (research), 139, 163

logical fallacies, xii, 91–100

methods (section of a scholarly article), 

London, United Kingdom, 87–88, 153

163

“the Lone Ranger song,” 37

Metropolitan Opera, 14–15

I N D E X  

221

microfilm, x

Navy: German, 35; United States, 106; 

Milton, John, 16

United States, Hydrographic Office, 

Missouri, 96

108

MLA International Bibliography, 169

Nazi Germany, 11, 33–34, 36, 41, 45, 

mobile devices, 45

95–96

mode, 142–143

negative results. See research results, 

“A Modest Proposal,” 32

negative 

money, historical value of, 134–135. See 

New World, 12, 18

also information, influence of money  New York Sun, 42–43

on

New York Times, ix, 34, 81, 104, 114, 185

monographic series, 166

New Yorker, 33, 37

monographs, scholarly, 166, 179. See 

newspapers, x, 3, 34, 37, 39–40, 43–44, 

also books, scholarly 

47, 49, 71–72, 74, 77, 102–103, 107, 

Monroe, Marilyn, 77

109, 157 

Moon Hoax, 42, 77

Newton, Isaac, 49

moon landings, 13, 80, 136. See also 

Nobel Prize, 59, 165

Apollo 11

North Carolina, 1

moral equivalence, 97

North Korea, 29, 33

moral panic, xi, 45–48

“Not a Cough in a Carload” (online 

Morrison, Samuel Elliot, 83

exhibit), 37

Moscow, Russia, 34

November criminals, 34

motor vehicle deaths, 131–132

null result. See research results, negative 

movies. See films 

Moyes, Holly, 166–167

Obamacare, 32

Murrow, Edward R., 197

OCLC WorldCat, 74

mushrooms, 25

Omidyar, Pierre, 185

Omidyar Network, 191

NASA, 105

“On the Electrodynamics of Moving 

NASCAR, 38

Bodies,” 77

Nation (magazine), 103

Onion, 11, 32–33

National Football League (NFL), 143

open access publishing, 160, 170, 171–

National Geographic, 37

173, 179; gold, 172; green, 172–173

National Institutes of Health, United 

open access repositories: discipline-

States, 173, 191

based, 173; governmental, 173; 

National Library of Medicine, United 

institutional, 172–173

States, 173, 186

OpenSecrets (website), 187

National Review, 103

opinion, 7, 9, 18–24, 28, 40, 58, 72, 

national security, 151

92–93, 104, 107, 124, 127, 129, 

222 

I N D E X

137–38, 139, 145, 157, 182, 185, 198; 

pharmaceutical companies, 174, 176

manipulation of, 53, 124, 137; pieces,  Phillip Morris (company), 6

34, 37, 157; surveys of, 72, 145

photocopiers, x

opioid epidemic, United States, 176

photographs, fake. See images, deceptive 

Opper, Frederick Burr, 44, 68

Photoshop, 52

Oregon Trail, 108–109

Poe, Edgar Allan, 43

Organa, Princess Leia, 52

polarization (social), 40, 45, 53, 

Organization of Petroleum Exporting 

police shootings, United States, 12

Countries (OPEC), 66

Politifact (website), 187

Oster, Emily, 198

polls, 6, 123–124, 128–129, 137, 141, 144

Oswald, Lee Harvey, 50

post hoc ergo propter hoc. See post hoc 

O’Toole, Kathleen, 76

fallacy 

overgeneralization. See hasty 

post hoc fallacy, 97–98

generalization 

post-doctoral researchers, 149

Oxford University, 53; Press, 166

post-truth world, 7, 45, 198

potholes, 120–122

package deal fallacy, 97

Potter, Harry James, 39–40

paparazzi, 39

Powell, John Wesley, 196

Paradise Lost, 16

Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 181

parents, xiii, 59, 85, 110

practical reason, 8

Paris, France, 94

preprints, 172

partisanship, 32, 40–41, 48–49, 55, 78, 

Presley, Elvis, 11, 44

182, 192

presses: commercial, 166; university, 

Patchogue, New York, 81

166. See also publishers, for-profit 

patents, 151

pride, 62

Paul Revere, 61

primary sources, 107–109, 178 

Pauling, Linus, 165

Prince Albert, 110

Payette National Forest, 123

Princeton University Library, 49

paywall (scholarly publishing), 172–173

proceedings. See conference proceedings

Pearl Harbor, attack on, 45

Proceedings of the Second International 

peer review, 117, 157–159, 168; blind, 

Workshop on Object Orientation in 

158; problems with, 176–177

Operating Systems, 166

Penn State University, sex-abuse 

product placement in films, 38

scandal, 35, 37

professors, 72, 74, 85, 149, 155, 166

Pentagon, 82

Project on Computation Propaganda, 53

percentage, 141

promotion, academic, 150, 170–171

Petroski, Henry, 166

propaganda, xii, 1–2, 28, 32–38, 40, 55, 

PhD. See doctoral degree 

103, 182; black, 33; gray, 33; white, 33

I N D E X  

223

proving a negative, 77

replication (of research results), 12, 153, 

PsycInfo, 169

163, 177–178

Public Health Service, United States, 4

Report on the Land of the Arid Regions 

public relations, 35–36

of the United States, 196

publish or perish, 150

reproducibility. See replication (of 

publishers, 103–105; for-profit, 171–173, 

research results) 

179

Republican National Convention, 1988, 

PubMed Central, 173

20

Puccinni, Giacomo, 14

Republicans (U.S. political party), 20, 

Puerto Rico, 183

69, 114, 128, 141

Pulitzer Prize, 44

research: qualitative, 153–154; 

Purdue OWL, 91–92

quantitative, 153–154; results, 

push polls, 137

negative, 176; scholarly, funding of, 

171–173, 176, 179; universities, 149

Qing Dynasty, 33

research and development, 151

Quibbler, 40–41

Research in African Literature, 156

quotations, misattribution of, 77

results (section of a scholarly article), 

163

R. J. Reynolds (company), 38

review articles, 164, 169, 178 

racism, 29–30, 68, 79–80, 114

reviews, 85–86, 107, 182

radio, x, 15, 18, 37, 41, 46, 65 

Revolutionary War, American, 45

rain follows the plow (pseudo-scientific 

RFID, 32

theory), 195–197

Rich Kids of the Internet, 62

ranking, systems of, 54–56, 85,  

The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher 

158–159

Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-

rap music, 167

Time Football, 166

rationality (logic), 15, 152–153, 198

road rage, 60

Reader’s Digest, 37

Rogers, Will, 24

Reagan, Ronald, 20

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, 52

reason (logic), 7–8, 45, 91, 98, 149, 195

Romeo and Juliet, 106

rec.pet.cats, 88

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 128–129

red herring, 98

Rowling, J. K., 39–41

refereed. See peer review 

Royal Society (scientific academy), 177

referees (scholarly publishing), 158, 

rumors, 1, 27, 31, 82, 86–87, 185, 188 

170–171, 176–177

Ruth, Babe, 18, 21–22

reference works, 17, 102, 110–114, 167, 

179

Sacred Darkness: A Global Perspective on 

repetition (as deceptive technique), 86

the Ritual Use of Caves, 166–167

224 

I N D E X

Satanic ritual abuse, 48, 125

Snopes (website), 188

satire, 11, 31–33, 56, 67. See also humor 

social media, ix, xii, 3, 6, 29, 46, 88, 103–

scams, 59, 61, 62, 109

104, 107, 185; criticism of, 82, 192

Schindler, Oscar, 11

social sciences, 117, 148–149, 162, 164, 

schizophrenia, 134

169, 178

scholars, 147–151, 156–162, 166–168, 

societies, scholarly, 166

170–172, 174–175, 177–178; ethics, 

software, 168, 179

174–175, 177

Soros, George, 185, 190

Science (scholarly journal), 156–157, 161 South Korea, 29

scientific consensus, 164

Soviet Union, 34

scientific method, 151–155, 178

Spain, 131–132

SciFinder Scholar, 169

Spanish-American War, 43

SciGen, 174

special relativity, 77

search engine, 20, 48, 74, 109, 161, 169–

Spurious Correlations (website), 67

170, 169; optimization, 54–56

“St. George and the Dragonet,” 18

Second Amendment (U.S. Constitution),  stab-in-the-back myth, 34–35

97, 130

Stalin, Josef, 34

secondary source, 107–109

standardized tests, 130, 153

secrets, 13, 86–87

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 91, 

self-citation, 175

168

self-confidence (overconfidence), 89–90

Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope, 14

Sense about Science (website), 187

statistical significance, 144

seven deadly sins, 63

statistics, xii, 117–145; basic 

Shakespeare, William, 106

concepts, 141–144; being misled 

The Shining (film), 80

by, 123–124; bias in, 123–125, 

Silver, Nate, 185, 197

129, 137, 139; comparisons, 

Skeeter, Rita, 40

130–134, 144; comparisons among 

skewed distribution, 142

different geographic locations, 

Skywalker, Luke, 14

133; comparisons among groups, 

slavery, 12, 79–80, 97

131–132, 141; comparisons over 

slippery slope, 98–99

time, 133–134; control groups, 131; 

sloth, 62

definitions, 129–130, 133, 137–138, 

small cell lung cancer, 131

144; inadequate measures, 136. See 

smallpox immunization, 177

also data, statistical 

Smoking and Health: Report of the 

STEM (science, technology, engineering, 

Advisory Committee to the Surgeon 

and mathematics), 149, 159, 162, 

General of the United States, 3–6

164–165, 171

smoking rates, United States, 7

Stone, Roger, 114

I N D E X  

225

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 

United Kingdom, 39, 51, 87, 173, 185, 

166

187

style guide, 151

United States Decennial Census, 126, 

Sunlight Foundation (website), 188

135

Surgeon General of the United States, 

universities and colleges, 147–150

3–7

University of California, 173; Center for 

surveys, 72, 124, 129, 137–139, 153,  

Information Research, 184; Libraries, 

154

49; Merced, 184

systematic reviews, 164–165

University of Kansas, 173

University of Pennsylvania, 184

tabloid newspapers, 44

university presses, 166

Tampa Bay Times, 187

Urban Legends Reference Pages. See 

teachers, xiii, 74, 107, 110, 155 163, 

Snopes 

television, x, 3, 15, 18, 37–40, 46, 49, 

URL, 163

103, 124, 129, 

USA Today, 37

tenure, academic, 150, 170–171

USS Philadelphia, 106

terrorism, 101–102. See also 9/11 attacks 

Terry, Luther, 3

Valley of the Shadow: Two 

textbooks, 167, 170, 179

Communities in the American Civil 

theses (publication), 150–151, 168,  

War, 168

179

the Verge (website), 157

thesis by publication, 150–151

Victoria, Queen, 110

thesis statements, 163

videos, 168, 179

Titanic (passenger ship), 80, 108

Vietnam War, 6, 45, 51

Trinity College (Cambridge University),  vitamin C, 164–165

49

VoCo (software), 52

trolling, 88–89

Voldemort, Lord, 39–40

truth effect, 86

TruthOrFiction (website), 188

Wall Street Journal, ix, 47, 73, 183

TV Tropes (website), 65

Washington Monthly, 37

Twain, Mark, 79–80, 83, 135

Washington Post, 13, 43–44, 104, 184 

tweets, 4, 6, 48, 51, 53–54, 56

Washington, D.C., 1, 27

Twitter, 48–49, 192 

WASPs (Women Airforce Service 

Pilots), 79

Ukraine, Soviet Union, 34

wave-particle duality, 111

UlrichsWEB, 158

Weasley, Ronald Bilius, 39

“Un Bel di Vedremo,” 14–15

web (computer network), x, 40–41, 

uniform resource locator. See URL 

44–46, 48 

226 

I N D E X

Weekly World News, 44

works cited (section of a scholarly 

Weimar Republic, 34–35

article), 163. See also bibliographies 

Welch v. United States, 76

World Factbook (website), 189, 191

Wells, Jimmy, 191

World Wide Web. See web (computer 

Western American Literature, 156

network) 

Wikipedia, 54, 110–114, 158; 

contributors to, 112–113; editorial 

Yale University, 108; Library, 49; Press, 

control, 112–113; Protection Policy, 

167

112; talk pages, 112; vandalism of, 

yellow journalism, 40, 43

112, 114

Yelp, 182

Wikitribune, 191

YouTube, 4, 49, 192 

“The William Tell Overture,” 37

wisdom of the crowd, 112

Zuckerberg, Mark, 192

women’s suffrage, 99

About the Author

Donald A. Barclay has worked as a librarian since 1990, initially focusing on 

reference service and library instruction, but eventually branching into infor-

mation technology and library administration. He has worked as a librarian 

at New Mexico State University (1990–1996), the University of Houston 

(1996–1997), and the Houston Academy of Medicine–Texas Medical Center 

Library (1997–2002). Since 2002 he has worked at the University of Califor-

nia, Merced, where he is currently the deputy university librarian. Prior to 

working as a librarian, he was an adjunct lecturer in English at Boise State 

University (1985–1990) as well as a US Forest Service firefighter (1976–1986). 

He holds a BA in English from Boise State University (1981), an MA in Eng-

lish from the University California, Berkeley (1985), and a master of library 

and information studies from the University of California, Berkeley (1990). 

He has published a number of books on library topics as well as books on the 

literature of the American West.

Barclay is a nationally recognized leader in the areas of evaluating infor-

mation and teaching people to identify fake news. He published a widely 

read article, “The Challenge Facing Libraries in the Era of Fake News,” in 

the Conversation (January 2017), was interviewed about fake news on the 

Matt Townsend radio program (February 2017), presented on “The Role 

of Librarians in an Era of Fake News, Alternative Facts, and Information 

227

228 

A B O U T   T H E   A U T H O R

Overload” at the Coalition for Networked Information Meeting (April 

2017), and was chosen by the American Library Association to lead a na-

tional webinar, “Fake News, Real Concerns: Developing Information Liter-

ate Students” (July 2017).

Document Outline

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Ch01. Credible Information

Ch02. Fake News as Phenomenon

Ch03. Tricks of the Trade

Ch04. Logical Fallacies

Ch05. Evaluating an Information Source

Ch06. Power in Numbers

Ch07. Scholarly Information

Ch08. Help Is Where You Find It

Final Thoughts

Notes

Index

About the Author