Pre-Activity Feedback
Here’s what we did to evaluate ACSH. Though there is no one “right way” to evaluate the source, our process is an example of an effective way to approach this source.
We'll use SIFT (Four Moves):
- STOP. Pause.
- INVESTIGATE the Source
- FIND trusted coverage
- TRACE claims, quotes, and media back to the original context.
More detailed information explaining SIFT.
SIFT in Action
First, we'll Stop/Pause and ask ourselves what we know about the publisher of this information? We’re not familiar with this site, but we see that it belongs to the American Council on Science and Health. We also see that at the top of the site, new to the website title, is the logo “Promoting science and debunking junk since 1978.” The page includes a “Popular Articles” box, followed by topic-based sections like “Chemicals & Chemistry” and “Food & Nutrition.” This provides us with enough context to know that this site could be a reputable scientific organization, but could also be an organization with certain political motivations. We need to learn more about the organization from other sources.
We now move to the second and third parts of SIFT:
Investigate the source and Find trusted coverage.
On the date that we last investigated this source, when we moved off the ACSH website and searched Google for American Council on Science and Health Wikipedia, we saw the following information on the Wikipedia page for ACSH, under the section Industry Influence:
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“One notable critic was Ralph Nader who stated that "ACSH is a consumer front organization for its business backers. It has seized the language and style of the existing consumer organizations, but its real purpose, you might say, is to glove the hand that feeds it."[35] Environmental scientist Haydn Washington and cognitive scientist John Cook have described ACSH in Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand as a greenscamming organization, i.e. as one of many groups that are formed to "masquerade as groups concerned about the environment, but actually work against the interests implied in their names". Bracketed numbers indicate References listed within the Wikipedia page, at the time this tutorial was last updated. |
These perspectives (all from individuals with certain expertise, as we could learn from looking at the Wikipedia articles about them that are linked to within the ACSH Wikipedia page) clearly raise questions about ACSH’s motivations and credibility. Another citation from the Wikipedia site links to an article from Mother Jones, a respected American magazine, describing ACSH’s funding model. This articles states,
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“ACSH depends heavily on funding from corporations that have a financial stake in the scientific debates it aims to shape. The group also directly solicits donations from these industry sources around specific issues. ACSH’s financial links to corporations involved in hot-button health and safety controversies have been highlighted in the past, but these documents offer a more extensive accounting of ACSH’s reliance on industry money—giving a rare window into the operations of a prominent and frequent defender of industry in the science wars.” |
Based on their financial connections and a pro-industry advocacy the ACSH website is likely to be Not at all credible and at best is Mostly not credible.
Image credit: "Feedback" by Skley is licensed under CC BY-ND 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).