Closer Evaluation of Minimumwage.com
What?
Here’s a summary of how we might evaluate MinimumWage.com using lateral reading, in combination with critical lines of question like what, who, why, and how. While we will find information about the website’s creators by leaving the website, we’ll also use cues from the website to inform how we search outside of the website.
What is this source generally about? What do I already know about that topic/issue? More specific What questions might include:
- What is at stake with this topic/issue? What/who are the stakeholders?
- What differing perspectives or concerns are there on this topic/issue?
Minimumwage.com is a project of the Employment Policies Institute (EPI). We know from the lateral reading we did in tutorial 1 that the EPI is a front group of Berman & Co., which opposes and lobbies against raising the minimum wage. As we also learned in tutorial 1 when looking at the Source Watch article about the Employment Policies Institute, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Minimumwage.com also spreads misinformation about the potential effects of raising the minimum wage.
Who?
Who is behind the source (individual/group/organization)? More specific Who questions might include:
- Who created this site?
- Is the creator affiliated with a larger organization or entity?
- Are specific individuals affiliated with the site?
- What are the expertise and the motives of those affiliated with the site?
Minimumwage.com was created by the Employment Policies Institute (EPI). As noted above, the EPI is a front group that opposes raising the minimum wage. So the EPI has a particular political agenda. Keep in mind that we should critically evaluate anything that this site claims, given the reasons for skepticism that we already have.
If we want to dig deeper, we can nonetheless look more closely at who is behind the organization. The EPI’s About page references one person: Michael Saltsman. Saltsman does appear to have some degree of relevant expertise, though not necessarily a deep knowledge of economics. (This site indicates he has degrees in Economics and Political Science from the University of Michigan, but does not state what types of degrees they are. It also indicates that he worked for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but does not identify the role he played there.) Even if Saltsman did appear to have a higher degree of expertise, since we already have some concerns about this site, we should look at what others say about him before concluding he is trustworthy.
Why?
Why might the creator/s have produced or distributed this information? More specific Why questions might include:
- Why would the creator/s care about the topic/issue?
- What might their purpose or motivation be?
Based on what we know about the Employment Policy Institute that runs Minimumwage.com, the primary purpose of the website is most likely to lobby against raising the minimum wage and to support the EPI’s corporate interests.
As we’ve learned already, MinimumWage.com’s creators oppose raising the minimum wage. This fact, in addition to the other information we found that raises questions about the site and its creators, indicates that we should exercise caution with any information that we find from this source.
How?
How was this source created and distributed? More specific How questions might include:
- Were certain review or editorial processes used that influence the accuracy or perspective reflected in the source (e.g., fact-checking, editorial or peer review)?
- Is this the original place in which the information was published, or is the information drawn from another source?
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Remember the last part of SIFT - Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context. If the information that you actually need to evaluate is being reported on from a secondary source, you may need to go back to the original source. |
- Does the source’s use of evidence and supporting information offer insight into its process for creating content or making claims?
- Does the source’s use of evidence and supporting information offer insight into its process for creating content or making claims?
Here we may need to look more closely at the website itself. There is no clear description of their process for gathering or reporting information. (When an organization does have such a process, they will often share it in an obvious place on their website, such at their About page.)
While there is a lack of information provided about Minimumwage.com, we can also look at the types of sources and evidence that it provides and that could reflect its process for creating content and making its central claim to not raise the minimum wage. For example, we might note the following:
The Minimumwage.com home page features many articles that argue for not raising the minimum wage. These articles include links to outside sources. To determine if those sources are credible evidence for the central claim that raising the minimum wage would be detrimental to the United States and its people, we would need to evaluate the credibility of those sources more carefully. At the same time, we’d need to consider if Minimumwage.com is accurately representing those sources. (Often a less credible source may reference highly credible sources, but misrepresent those sources.)
- The Research page links out to the Employment Policies Institute, which features many of the same articles found on the Home page.
- The “Ads” page includes promotional materials from the Employment Policies Institute. Many of these materials have a sensational tone (e.g., all caps lettering in large font, short quotes that emphasize anecdote over research). The fact that these are ads indicates that they are for promotional purposes and suggests that the creators have a particular agenda. To evaluate any of the arguments made in these ads we would need to do more research in order to contextualize and to evaluate the information presented.
Wrapping Up
As we’ve demonstrated here, this closer evaluation process can be time-consuming, depending on how deeply you dig. A really deep investigation into a source may sometimes require a certain level of domain expertise, though usually you can get a pretty good sense of a website’s credibility without this expertise and by spending a few minutes with lateral reading. In other words, sometimes it’s more efficient to see what investigation has already been done on a source, though you still need to think critically about the degree of credibility of any source that you use. As you gain more experience with lateral reading, you’ll also build up more knowledge of sources that are overall reputable and trustworthy. This too will make lateral reading easier and more efficient.
Image credit: "Through the magnifying glass" by Lanzen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
CC-BY-NC-SA
This guide was created by Andrea Baer and Dan Kipnis at Rowan University and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA).