There are think tanks, and there are propaganda mills, and it really isn’t all that hard to tell between them. Via Brad DeLong, Mark Kleiman has a simple, straightforward bullshit test anyone can apply:

Is there any hope of getting the press to distinguish between (1) the original “think tank” — the RAND Corporation — and comparably respectable universities-without-students (Brookings, the Urban Institute) where real social scientists (and real natural scientists, engineers, mathematicians, historians, and policy analysts) do real research and analysis looking for real answers to real questions and (2) faux “think tanks” (Heritage, Cato, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse) set up for the purpose of providing “studies” in support of pre-determined ideological points?

The distinction isn’t hard to make. If you have to read the report to know the conclusion, it’s a real think tank. If you know the conclusion as soon as you know the topic and where it was written, you’re dealing with a phony.

He goes on to say this trick works for faux news outlets to like…uhm…Fox… This is such a simple, Obvious thing, that in a way it’s a damning indictment of the U.S. news media that it even needs to be pointed out. How much of what you hear on the news comes from these propaganda mills, funded by right wing billionaires, and how much of what you hear amounts to actual fact-finding? Let’s face it, very little. And it’s not the fault of the propaganda mills, they’re just doing their jobs. Its the fault of our news media, that just doesn’t give a good goddamn about facts anymore. Sometime in the past few decades, facts stopped being important. And that was also the day America stopped being important to them.

I’ve been saying for years now that citing Paul Cameron or any of his bogus statistics in a discussion about homosexuality automatically makes that person either a liar or a cheat: someone either way who doesn’t care about what is and is not true. You can make the same case about a reporter who cites any of the big propaganda mills for a story. In an opinion piece it’s one thing…that’s a different playing field. But reportage that contains so much as a single piece of punctuation from one anyplace like Cato or Heritage or the Institute For Policy Studies isn’t journalism, it’s second hand propaganda, and that reporter is selling out not only their trade, not only the country that wrote freedom of the press into its constitution, but their human identity and yours and mine.

That’s what’s going on here. When you see fundamentalist zealots attacking science and science education, when you see them insisting that schools teach not the facts but the controversy, when you see them demanding that science place their vein throbbing religious babbling on equal footing with Newton and Gauss and Heisenberg and Einstein and Darwin and Watson and Crick, think of all the major daily newspapers and network news broadcasts nowadays that do that very thing. So newspapers give us words that mean nothing. So schools teach children lessons that mean nothing. And so America becomes nothing. And so we become nothing. As Jacob Bronowski once said, when you discard the test of fact in what a star is, you discard in it also what a human is.