How to Recognize and Disprove a Crappy Article

There are enough articles on the web that anyone can find a number of articles to back up almost any viewpoint, no matter how blatantly false. The dilemma one has is separating the good from the bad. However, even articles that write about the truth can fail to hold any water when they provide nothing to back up their claims.

Here are the six types of crappy articles I most often see:

1. The contents of the article don't back up the title (or worse, contradict it).
2. Easily discredited falsehoods or hearsay used to back up claim.
3. Uses assumptions with no attempt to back up claim.
4. Limited and irrelevant data used to back up a broad claim.
5. Science doesn't back up the claim.
6. History doesn't back up the claim.

Examples of Crappy Articles

Example 1:

A Fire Dog Lake article by Jon Walker that claims that health reform’s excise tax was designed to weaken employer-provided plans

This article comments on a feud going on between other journalists over the Affordable Care Act.

The line it uses to try to prove its point says that the person in question, an Ezra Klein, “fully admitted it [the ACA] could result in less generous insurance.”

Let's examine this statement. If someone says that something could possibly happen as a result of a law, that isn't the same as saying that the possible event was the actual goal of the law. Walker provides a link to Ezra Klein's article; however, an article is required to stand on its own to at least some degree. If an article's own text contradicts the claim of the title, it's a crappy article.

However, the beginning of the article is no better. The article quotes Ezra Klein where he is saying that the law wouldn't make Johnson's health insurance less generous. The article then goes on to make the statement which contradicts the article's title as I showed in the prior paragraph. That Klein admits that the law could make someone's insurance less generous would seem to support at least one thing in this article. Sadly, this isn't the case. This is because Klein's quote which is being used against him is being taken out of context (or is provided with no context, take your pick).

In Klein's article (and in the ACA), it states that health care premiums over $21,000 for families, and $8,000 for individuals, get a 40 percent surtax. This article by Jon Walker fails to determine (or share) whether Johnson's health care premiums meet this requirement. For all I, the reader, know, Johnson's premiums are exempt, and from the text of this article, it appears Jon Walker doesn't know either. One thing that is known, according to Klein's article, is that very few premiums will meet that requirement.

Therefore, this article uses assumptions (Crappy Article Type #3) and the contents contradict the title (Crappy Article Type #1).

Going by the contents of Klein's article which was linked to in Walker's article, it seems much more logical to assert as follows:

1. The ACA was designed to decrease the cost of health care.
2. The excise tax was designed to make health insurance more affordable by providing a disincentive to charging excessive money for health insurance.
3. When the cost of health care decreases, charging an excessive amount for the insurance should be discouraged by a tax.

If I were to write an article claiming the above, I would cite sources revealing creators of the ACA saying that they designed the ACA to achieve those specific goals. Otherwise, I would have to assert that the law is only likely to cause those three events and provide reasons that those events would occur.

That Fire Dog Lake would even host an article that only backs up its claim by hoping that the reader won't notice there is no supporting material shows that it has the same journalistic integrity as Fox News. This doesn't seem surprising from a website that seems to be home for liberals that hate liberals. At least, that's my opinion.

Example 2:

A Townhall.com article by Terry Jeffrey that asks whether or not Wisconsin public schools deserve to survive

The gist of this article is that private schools cost less and provide better test scores than public schools.

First, he asserts that the Wisconsin teachers were protesting because they didn't want to pay more of a percentage of their pensions. However, the teachers had agreed to pay more of their pensions and were protesting the removal of their ability to collectively bargain. So far, this article hasn't even gotten a secondary piece of information correct.

Second, Jeffrey claims private schools test better than public schools. For this, he only compares Catholic schools to public schools. This bogus comparison doesn't compare all private schools to all public schools. The difference in test scores is also marginal. He compares the test scores of public versus private eighth-graders where there is an average 17 point difference out of 500 points (or a 3% difference). Interestingly, he mentions that Wisconsin public schools are better than the national average. This should rather deflate his attack on Wisconsin public schools. Instead, he goes on to claim that only 30 percent of public school eighth-graders received a "proficient" or better rating in reading. It must be noted that he fails to list how well private schools did. Like all good propagandists, the author is good at removing context.

When he compares costs, he compares all public schools of Wisconsin against only a few Catholic schools belonging to the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. He is also comparing the “money spent on each student by public schools” against the amounts charged for tuition in Catholic schools. Those are two different things. If you are comparing tuition, you need to ask how much taxpayers are paying for public schools, not the amount spent on each student.

At no point does he provide any reason to think that it is the teachers in these schools that cause the marginal test score improvement. Whereas, it is likely that students with parents that pay out of pocket are more likely to be more involved.

• All the parents (or at least one parent or guardian) of students at private schools are paying for their kids to attend that school. So, these parents are already involved in their kid's education just by paying the bill.
• Pitting only students whose parents are involved and can afford a private education against a wide range of students, some of which are poor and who may have parents who don't care about their education, is not a fair comparison when the only factors being blamed for poor performance are the teachers and the school.

Many believe that teachers are not as important in test scores as are students and parents. However, this is not conclusive. Jeffrey fails to even address this issue. He also fails to address whether public teachers are overpaid. Should teachers willing to teach difficult students in bad neighborhoods be paid less than private teachers who mostly teach better behaved students from well-to-do families? Who has the more difficult job? Frankly, the cushy job is less demanding.

So, it becomes apparent, by his own admission, that his main desire is for kids to be indoctrinated into the religion that he prefers. To try to prove his claim, he uses comparisons which pit a broad selection of the schools he dislikes against a narrow selection of the schools which he prefers, meaning that the reader has no idea whether he is comparing averages against averages. In fact, pretty much all of his comparisons are apples to oranges.

This crappy article, which is an example of Crappy Article Types #3 and #4, is hosted on Townhall.com which is home to numerous such articles. After all, Townhall.com is where conservatives preach to other conservatives who have already made up their minds to believe whatever Townhall.com has to say with no critical thinking. Lack of critical thinking on the part of the reader is harmful to the reader no matter what is being read. It is especially important with articles such as this one which give the illusion that it provides useful data.