Get good at lateral reading, a guide with a couple examples to cement the concept. And, because it's Friday, a church full of hippies.
Get good at lateral reading
If you ever study fact-checking, one thing you will see consistently offered is to stick to credible news sources. Those sources, after all, do their due diligence. They look for solid sources (e.g. peer-reviewed papers), and they follow the guidelines of journalistic ethics.
Except when they don't.
You cannot always expect even so-called dependable mainstream outlets to do their due diligence and give you a full accounting. You can't even (as you'll see in part 2 of this two-parter) expect peer-reviewed journals do it!
Given this reality, it behooves you to learn how to do the checking on your own. One way to do that is with what is called "lateral reading".
Lateral reading is a way to gauge the credibility and/or bias of any particular source. As I allude to above, it ought to be right up there at the top of the list for reporters, but it all too often is not. Or at least, as I often find, relevant results found with even a cursory lateral read are left out of a story; critically relevant details, necessary for a reader to assess the meaning of what they're told are all too often left out.
Lateral reading is something you've seen numerous times on this page, though perhaps not by that name. You have likely done it yourself in the past.
To help you get a sense for it (and help you do it better), I liked to a couple resources below. The first is a pretty accessible article by the News Literacy Project. Screenshot 1 is from this same link and gives a pretty good bullet-point summary of lateral reading.
The second link is to a pretty pretty quick video coming from the University of Louisville. Some new things, some of the same things seen from another angle, but worth a watch for tips.
I feel weird about this last recommendation because I started teaching at a time when sourcing from Wikipedia was an absolute no-no. You don't do it the English teachers all said because it's open to all and not reliable.
I'm not sure where the English teachers are on this nowadays, but I know that I have seen (and used--so now you know where I stand) Wikipedia have a better reputation of late.
It is, in fact, starting to be recommended as a good jumping off point for lateral reading if you can believe it. I think this is in large part because it can be a gathering place for more links and perspectives on an issue. Maybe not an authority in its own right, but Wikipedia knows a guy.
Get in the habit of doing lateral reading and do it for sources on social media up to the unimpeachable major, mainstream media outlets. Do it also for what you see on this page.
It will necessarily limit what you're able to read, but you have to ask yourself whether you'd rather know a few things well and independently or feel as though you know a large number of things while being led around by the nose on some.
https://newslit.org/tips-tools/expand-your-view-with-lateral-reading/
A couple examples of lateral reading failures.
In the post prior to this one, I defined what lateral reading is, and provided some tips for you to be able to pick up this skill on your own.
You need it because, despite their pretty rhetoric, all too often news outlets fail at this most basic skill of information literacy. It turns out that sometimes even academic journals do too.
This post offers a couple examples, one recent and one older, one intentional and one where I'll leave it to you to characterize motive (or lack thereof). Let's go in that order.
Back in 1996, a physics professor from New York, Alan Sokal, submitted a gag paper to a journal of cultural studies. If you want more than just some brief facts on the topic, give links 1 and 2 below a look.
Some background here is that this is about the time that postmodernism (see the third link for more if you want it) was taking root in the liberal arts portion of academia. If you've ever read or even read about this type of work, you'll note that it frequently carries the savor of blathering nonsense. If you're a fan, sorry, but that's how things like this have always fallen on my ears.
Sokal wrote a paper in this tradition, nominally about gravity. The title of his effort was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", and my guess is that you can pretty readily tell that it was chock full of nonsense. In fact, Sokal's goal was to show that even a peer-reviewed journal would publish this poorly-constructed word salad as long as it fit with what the editors already thought.
And publish they did! Sokal waited a few weeks and revealed his stunt.
Now I want you to turn to the Sun article linked fourth below. There's a lot there, but nominally this is an article about an out of state group that, quoting the article, "...wants to give the state’s towns and cities even more help slowing car and pedestrian fatalities. And so far, Denver, Grand Junction and Durango have accepted."
Fair enough. The reporter later goes on to characterize this group as advocating "...for more resilient cities and towns across North America."
I was intrigued.
Intrigued enough to do some lateral reading and look up this group on my own. Their "About" page is linked fifth below for what follows.
So what do these two cases have in common? In both cases a quick lateral read by the editors/reporter could have added detail to let readers (and editors) better assess the writing.
Even though the journal Sokal sent his paper to was supposed to be peer-reviewed, none of that review happened. The editors, presumably agreeing so strongly with what they read, didn't bother to look up Sokal's earlier work or send his paper to another physicist for review. Either of these easy and minor checks would have shown what was going on, either would have shown this to be a joke at the journal's expense, a poke at postmodernism.
If you look at the Strong Towns' (the subject of the Sun article) website, you see that resilience is perhaps not entirely what this group is after.** A look through screenshots 1 - 5 shows that this group advocates for a whole hell of a lot more than resilience.
Ending highway expansion, seeking to shift the priority of local streets away from "automobile throughput", housing density, etc. Knowing this, does your view of Strong Towns' offer to help assess "dangerous streets" change? Does it point to other (additional) motivations? As before, none of this was difficult to find.
And, as before again, get in the habit of doing some lateral reading regardless of the source of the information. Peer-review, journalistic ethics and practices are sometimes just words.
You cannot depend on others to do your checking for you.
**I wrote the reporter to see about her word choice here and what motivated it given the advocacy pursued by Strong Towns. I also wrote Strong Towns themselves to see if they reveal their donors. I've heard nothing from either. If that changes, I'll update.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
https://coloradosun.com/2024/09/16/dangerous-roads-strong-towns-city-planning/
https://www.strongtowns.org/about
I like this song, but every time I hear it I think of a church full of hippies.
That time of the week again, time for something for fun and not related to politics.
I used to teach at a Jesuit school (Arrupe Jesuit if you're familiar) in Denver. Was there for years and enjoyed it immensely: it was my formation for becoming a teacher, the community there was outstanding (students, families, and colleagues), and, though I'm not devout or particularly religious, I put a lot of value on some of the learning I did on Jesuit spirituality there.
Since it was a Catholic school, we did Mass once a month,** with,, of course, hymns sung. For a few years, we had a Franciscan nun teaching at the school and she brought with her a hymn I'd never heard below.
The YouTube version is linked below so you can listen to it if you've never heard it before.
The title is "Malo! Malo! Thanks be to God" and the hymn is in large part the words for "Thank You" in several languages put to music.
I like it. I did then, and I do now.
I like it because of the sentiment about expressing gratitude. Whether you are a strong-believer or a non-believer (or somewhere in between), there is value in regularly thinking over the things you are grateful for.
I also like it because I like words. I like languages.
Still, and this was how I felt even at the time I first heard it, I can't hear this song and NOT picture someone playing acoustic guitar for this song to a church full of hippies. If and when you listen to it, you'll know why.
That's it for now. Have a good rest of the day and back at it, coincidentally enough, on Sunday.
**I used to tease my students when they asked whether or not we had Mass on a particular day by reminding them that they have mass (the physics quantity) all the time. What high schooler doesn't appreciate wit like that?