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.

(more…)