Does Your News Feed Pass The SMELL Test?

From the Chicago Public Library

Friends,

My mother is in town this week, so I’m sharing an updated piece from the archive. It should be new to at least half of you.

I’m reminded every day of how important information literacy is. It used to be part of what we just called “literacy,” but even the more technical-sounding term is gaining little traction these days in higher ed.

I believe that the method I discuss in this piece still stands up to any information we encounter on any platform, and that it can be an asset in sniffing out AI-generated garbage. My sense is also that the independent critical thinking required by the SMELL test is not yet capable of automation. Perhaps you’ll let me know in the comments if you agree.

Josh

Does Your News Feed Pass The SMELL Test?

I knew a contractor in Iowa who cared deeply about his work. He retiled our bathrooms for us, replaced siding, and repaired our crumbling front step. I was talking to him once about the tradeoffs of water softeners, how they could cause pipes to slough off heavy metals, and he said, casually, that he’d heard from a guy on a cruise that the whole Flint water crisis had been a hoax to leech money from the federal government.

I stood speechless for a moment before marshaling some counterevidence, beginning with the fact that the crisis began when a pediatrician noticed elevated lead levels in her patients after the city switched its water source. But even after doing my best I realized that he’d already been exposed to the best news coverage the United States could offer, including photographs and videos of children affected by lead poisoning and high quality investigative reporting, and he’d given all of that the same weight as hearsay from a guy on a cruise.

He heard me out and didn’t dismiss anything I said, but in the end he shrugged his mouth and said, “Sometimes a guy just doesn’t know who to believe.”

Nothing captures the bad rep that English teachers have earned as grammar cops more than rules for citation. It makes sense that professional scholarship would need to reference sources consistently, that you wouldn’t want a Wild West of parentheticals and footnotes. And students need to understand that you’ll run into real trouble if you simply steal your language from others without attribution. Everyone knows that the Credible Hulk cites his sources. (AI knows this, too, it just happens to cite fictitious sources in some cases.)

But for the vast majority of college graduates, the fine points of documentation style fall under the column where “academic” is synonymous with “useless.” People are so universally befuddled about whether to include or omit “pg.” in a parenthetical citation that failing to master this precise code is not going to hold you back. In fact, I’d argue that many successful people have learned how to not care about minutia like this. And don’t give me the line about how if the NASA engineers for the Challenger had just learned how to format their MLA bibliography correctly, they’d have paid more attention to the O-rings.

The maddening thing about documentation style, when I was still obligated to teach it, was that it kept changing. Every few years, it seemed, the high priests at the Modern Language Association would update their rituals and then demand that their minions adapt. If the rules for citation had been etched in stone like the Ten Commandments, I might have been able to explain to students why it was simply the law we had to follow. I can’t imagine the annoyance students must feel after learning MLA style one way as a first-year and then being told in a senior seminar that they’re doing it wrong because the manual has changed. I often felt the same way while submitting scholarship to journals that all had their own house styles, in which case The MLA Style Manual was no help at all. 

In fact, I think many professors secretly feel the same way as their students and would love nothing more than to smash the citation manual, much like the Office Space cast beats down their exasperating fax machine. 

When documentation style is too baroque, and when English professors insist too much on those jots and tittles, they confirm the general public’s worst suspicions about scornful elites in higher education. A simpler system would serve everyone better, not only because it would require less time correcting things that truly don’t matter, such as whether someone used periods or commas throughout a bibliographic citation, but also because it would create more space for teaching information literacy. Questions about credibility, borrowed language, confirmation bias, and other byproducts of our information wars ought to be the real priorities. 

The same principle applied when I was a firefighter with the Forest Service. For years the agency taught the 10 Fire Orders and 18 Watch Out Situations. Maybe there were some Boy Scouts who memorized the whole list, but I never met any of them. The sheer volume of information made most firefighters disregard the whole exercise, which meant that in dangerous situations they relied more on what their amygdala was telling them than on any of their training.

Paul Gleason did thousands of young people a favor when he simplified the old list to LCES: Lookouts, Communications, Escape Routes, and Safety Zones. 

Similarly, I’d argue that much of the time wasted on documentation style ought to be devoted, instead, to the SMELL Test. I’m grateful to my colleague Mary for introducing me to this simple heuristic, which we used for many years to help our students evaluate the authority of their sources.

From Hiram College Library

These four areas cover all of the challenges we face in an age of alternative facts, alleged fake news, and bot-generated sources. And like Gleason’s four guidelines for firefighting, each element of the SMELL test is interdependent. Typically if the evidence smells fishy, the logic is rancid, as well. I used to make a joke of it, wrinkling my nose and waving away an imaginary stench while discussing egregious examples in class. That’s part of how learning sticks with us, if it makes the journey from head knowledge to a sensory response.

There is a lot of putrid and dangerous information out there. Dan Bongino was probably right when he said in this interview that his audience dwarfs The New Yorker’s. And at least Alex Jones is honest about the fact that there is an active war for our minds. It used to irk me to no end when conservative media tried to imitate the hallmarks of scholarship — using specious peer review, for instance — but it’s harder to know who is imitating who at the moment. Multimedia companies like InfoWars exist with the sole purpose of pumping out lies, and others have argued that Fox News is now the model that other news corporations follow because of its ratings prowess.

The corporate culture that is corrupting higher education first colonized media. Every company has enough money now to look and sound like a credible source. The glossy logo is the first step, but slick talking heads are also a dime a dozen. I had to block a relative’s email address after he kept blitzing me with articles from The Epoch Times, which claims to be nonpartisan and “dedicated to truthful reporting,” but clearly is an alt-right publication.

I won’t run through the whole SMELL test for a publication like this, but what is Left Out is a big part of why it is unreliable, and you have to wonder what its Motivation is for publishing a piece like “National Women’s Range Day Celebrates Second Amendment Rights as Women’s Rights.”

But I’d be hard pressed to explain why CNN or MSNBC is much better. I never watch television news unless I’m folding laundry and there’s nothing else on. Even then I can barely stand five minutes of it. Nearly every major news source is now a clickbait factory because of the money generated from digital advertising. It’s a simple formula: more web traffic = more revenue. Monetizing digital news in this way has led to the bizarre phenomenon of the plagiarized news site. It’s also why some digital newspapers and magazines seem to ironically prevent you from reading their content by forcing you to swat away a dozen pop-up videos or advertisements, each of which generates income for the publication whether you read the article you set out to find or not. 

One of the great harms that corporate consolidation has wrought is diluting the meaning of a source. A brand is not a source, it is a money-making device. And one can wonder, reasonably, how many news sources still identify watchdog reporting and truth telling as their top motivations.

I still tend to trust NPR, The PBS Newshour, and The New York Times because of their track record and because most of what they produce passes the SMELL test. But I’m also aware that The New York Times is what it is more because of market share than because of reliability, the way that Amazon and Walmart dominate by sheer economic force, not by quality. If you found a factual error in The New York Times, what would you do, cancel your subscription? And then subscribe to what? Chances are good that even your local newspaper is owned by a mass media company like Gannett, which is headquartered on one of the coasts. 

My former employer once invited the oil tycoon Harold Hamm to campus. My colleague Brian and I prepared a fact sheet for the Q&A period to challenge some of Hamm’s public claims about his company, and I’ll never forget Hamm’s response to one audience member, who introduced her question with the phrase “According to The New York Times…” Hamm let her finish, but the only answer he gave, which much of the crowd interpreted as a laugh line, was “Needless to say, I don’t read The New York Times.” Hamm is able to say this and get away with it because coastal media elites don’t “read” rural America. It’s why I’m grateful for my friend

Robert Leonard

and local journalists like

Art Cullen

. But there aren’t enough of them.

There is danger in concluding that the whole world is a tabloid, hustling controversy and drama, and that we therefore cannot trust anyone. This is how autocrats like Vladimir Putin maintain power: by actively sowing distrust in institutions and thereby encouraging a general passivity. Maintaining vigilance in a sea of bad information is difficult, even for highly educated people. How much more difficult it must be for the average person to resist the propaganda firehose trained at them from every angle. 

English professors can correct all the MLA mistakes they want, but the real literacy problem — one that we all share, regardless of our level of education — is embodied by the troubling memory that opened this essay: The Flint water crisis couldn’t pass my contractor’s sniff test. 

With college enrollments continuing to decline, and the value of higher education waning in the public imagination, one might reasonably wonder what toll it will take on our national future if literacy (in all its forms) slides further and further back into the past.

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If you enjoyed today’s essay, you’d probably love this piece of extended reporting on academic librarians.