People get outraged when news media publish fake news. They seldom consider the possibility that the people writing these stories aren’t lying but just ignorant. An outrageous example popped up recently in a USA Today article on road salt. It contains this astonishing sentence:

There’s less mystery about the chemistry. Road salt typically consists of sodium and chloride. While sodium is less water soluble and lodges in soil, the vast majority of chloride washes away with the rain.

There may not be a mystery about the chemistry, but there’s a mystery about what was going on in the head of Kyle Bagenstose, whose name is on the article. That statement is so ridiculous that anyone who wrote it in a fifth-grade essay would get an F. The author apparently thinks salt spontaneously breaks down into sodium, a flammable metal, and chlorine, a poisonous gas. Sodium doesn’t dissolve in water; it reacts violently, producing sodium hydroxide. Chlorination is good for water in small quantities, but it’s very toxic in large amounts. If road salt broke down into its component elements just by sitting in the road, we’d have plenty of reason to fear it. Or table salt, for that matter.

The article was posted on December 24. I’m writing this on December 29, and the blunder remains uncorrected. What explains something like that on a major news website? A really good holiday party, perhaps? Maybe all the regular writers were on vacation, and a member of the clean-up crew ghost-wrote it? No, sorry, clean-up crews have a better grasp of chemistry than that. They know enough not to mix bleach with ammonia.

The problem is that sites like USA Today value speed and quantity over accuracy. What really happened, I suspect, is that Bagenstose was told to turn out an article on road salt quickly and wanted to get home early that day. The editor probably had already left. Whether that sentence is the result of asking the kids for help, pulling something out of Google, or just making stuff up is anyone’s guess.

Finding a reliable news source is tough these days. I hop among many, hoping that they won’t all make the same blunders (though they often do). It’s little wonder people don’t trust the news.