Here’s a headline for you: Millions of Adults Will Believe a Headline without Question. Especially if they see it on social media.
For all that people profess to distrust the mainstream media, for all that they should know that social media is a cesspit of lies, too many people are still ludicrously gullible.
At least when it suits their prejudices.
For instance, the left believed without question that “It’s OK to be White” was a KKK slogan, because that’s what they wanted to hear. The right believed without question that Klaus Schwab’s father was a close confidant of Hitler, because that’s what they wanted to hear.
And because everyone is convinced that Americans are as dumb as hammers, they believe without question when a headline tells them: Nearly 10% of American adults believe chocolate milk come from brown cows, finds study.
If you actually believe that without question, then you’re as gullible as someone who really would think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
As I’ve repeatedly warned, with the first two of my Three Laws of the Media:
First: Never believe a headline.
Second: When an article claims, “science says…” or “new study shows…”, assume that it doesn’t until proven otherwise.
When the media tell you that a “study shows” this or that, don’t ever, ever take their word for it. The more remarkable the claim, the more sceptical you should be.
The first thing you should do, when presented with an extraordinary “study finds” headline is search out the original study for yourself. As I recently showed, with regard to a survey on rising anti-Semitic incidents on campus, the Australian government-funded broadcaster made the story about neo-Nazis. But, if you read the original survey, neo-Nazis are almost never mentioned. Instead, it is plain that the anti-Semitism mostly comes from left-wing students and staff and the Palestinian movement: something the ABC deliberately failed to mention even once in its coverage.
And the “chocolate milk” study? Good luck even finding it.
Most of the outlets reporting this story link to either a Washington Post article, or a Food and Wine article. But the WaPo article only links to the Food and Wine article, not the original study. The Food and Wine article link is no longer even there.
And the original study is not publicly available.
That should set the warning bells ringing loud and hard. Whenever a source claims that their survey shows something, but refuses to make the actual survey available, you’ve good grounds to suspect they’re hiding something.
The chocolate milk survey is described as a nationally representative survey of 1,000 American adults, but this is impossible to verify without seeing how respondents were selected. Likewise, how the survey was conducted – whether it was a phone or online survey, for instance – can have significant impacts on its accuracy. Research suggests that phone surveys may be less accurate than online surveys because they require people to give their responses out loud to another person instead of quietly clicking away in privacy […]
Likewise, it’s difficult to interpret the results of the chocolate milk question without seeing how it was worded. Poorly phrased or confusing questions abound in survey research and complicate the process of interpreting findings.
The little we can wring out of the survey producers only firm suspicions that someone is telling porkies.
An NPR interview with Jean Ragalie-Carr, president of the National Dairy Council, is the closest we can get to the actual wording of potential responses: “there was brown cows, or black-and-white cows, or they didn’t know.” But as Glendora Meikle of the Columbia Journalism Review points out, we don’t know if those were the only options presented to respondents.
The “didn’t know” claim raises even more red flags.
Early media coverage focused on the 7 percent statistic but left out the fact that 48 percent of respondents said they don’t know where chocolate milk comes from. This gives context to the 7 percent number. While it’s conceivable that 7 percent of the population doesn’t know that chocolate milk is just milk with chocolate, the idea that a full 55 percent — over half of adults — don’t know or gave an incorrect response begins to strain credulity. This points toward a confusing survey question.
In reporting the supposed “chocolate milk” survey, the WaPo also included another “fact”: One Department of Agriculture study, commissioned in the early ’90s, found that nearly 1 in 5 adults did not know that hamburgers are made from beef. As it happens, this study is publicly available — and it doesn’t actually show what the media claim.
In fact, what the study found was that between 7% of adults and 20% of high school students, said that the statement “Hamburger is made from the meat of pigs” is true. Not only is that not that foolish a belief, if the question had been phrased as, say, “Are hamburgers made from the meat of: cows, pigs, or chickens?”, the answers would likely have been very different.
So, why did this story gain so much unquestioning traction?
The rapid spread of this story is likely related to the desire, unfortunately prominent among many liberals, to see and label other people as ignorant.
In other words, as I said, too many people believe anything they want to believe.
Studies suggest we are more likely to accept new information when it confirms what we already want to believe. In this case, the chocolate milk statistic fits well with the notion that Americans are fools, so it’s accepted and republished widely despite the numerous red flags that should give scientifically minded people pause.
But the fact remains that many reporters and news outlets decided to run the story without having seen the original results, instead citing one another’s reporting.
The Conversation
Which, in the realm of politics especially, is only too common in the media.
But it doesn’t let us off the hook for falling for it.
