Organic food turns people into jerks, and other deceitful headlines

Recently, a news story made the rounds about a study that concluded that organic food turns people into jerks. NBC News' Today show was one of many mainstream media that ran virtually identical headlines on this topic.

This instance of media bias may have been merely sloppy headline writing or some overworked copy editor in search of a good headline, but the effect was to mislead readers. It's a perfect example of how merely consuming the news media, even generally respected sites, can make you LESS informed, not more, if you do so uncritically.

The headline implies that eating organic food turns people into jerks, according to the study. But when you actually read the articles and use those critical thinking skills, you find out that the subjects don't actually EAT any organic food. They are merely SHOWN PICTURES of organic food.

So an intellectually honest headline would read, "Does *seeing pictures* of organic food turn you into a jerk?"

What's worse is that none of these news outlets bothered to raise questions about the credibility of research on the effects of organic food where none of the subjects actually ate organic food as part of the study. How such a flimsy study got such wide and uncritical media play perhaps creates a greater suspicion of media bias.

The importance of critical reading

The explosion of anonymous and semi-anonymous blogs and other non-traditional outlets makes critical reading skills even more key. But even with "mainstream" news outlets, this skill remains important.

For example, take this story from Bloomberg.

Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year.

Conservative bloggers have jumped all over this, citing it as 'proof' of the hypocrisy of climate change activists, jaunting around the world, sipping their chardonnay. They're probably French too!

20,000 cars sounds like a huge amount of pollution if you have no frame of reference. And this 'objective' news article provided no frame of reference.

20,000 cars represents less than 0.01 percent of all the motor vehicles in the United States alone. This means American-owned cars will cause more pollution in 8 hours than this conference.

Another fact: there are over 20,000 cars in Essex County, one of the most rural, least populous counties in New York state.

This conference climate is going tackling planet-wide issues of climate change, problems that could cause havoc across the globe. The pollution equivalent to that produced by cars in one small US county is a mere drop in the bucket if some of these planetary issues can be addressed.

That is the real perspective needed.