As someone who has spent a most of my life working and was never told what to say or not say about his pay by his employer, my bullshit detector went into the redzone after reading the story that says 50% of employers tell workers not to discuss pay. Was I such an odd exception?

So I dug deeper, and discovered this was an activism piece, not a scientific study, by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research - not a group well known for objectivity.

They commissioned a poll but did not disclose the details of the poll such as the exact questions asked and the responses for each question, which is the basic minimum required to take a poll seriously.

Instead, they published a glossy "brief" - https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pay-Secrecy-Poli... - which claims 12% of employers prohibit discussing pay -- that's much more plausible than 50%. So how do you get to the headline 50%? Because that is how many people reported being "discouraged" -- but were they discouraged by their employer, by their peers, or by their own conscience? Here is where knowing the actual questions to the poll would be useful.

Please do not listen to any reports of a poll when only the summary results are provided but the specific questions and breakdowns of the answers are not provided. Particularly when the poll is commissioned by a pressure group not known for objectivity.

If you can afford to put together a big glossy "brief" then you have the bandwidth to host result text files that disclose what the questions were and the poll methodology. This is the minimum bar for credibility, an outfit like USA today used to be aware of this, and so is any think tank worth their salt.

Thus my spidey senses detected there is a good chance this is an activism piece that is intentionally misleading to promote some "greater cause".

A good approach is to look at what other stories the same author wrote, to see if there is a track record of spreading propaganda in the name of some moral cause or whether it's just shoddy work.

And indeed the author is a crusading reporter, that is, one who focuses on moral causes and issues rather than news. Real news is messy. Sometimes it supports your beliefs and other times it doesn't. But a look at his articles (as well as their social media presence) reveals an activist who cannot be objective or professional. E.g. the "news" story about racism causing food deserts and creating food "injustice". I get that this is an issue that many on the left are passionate about. But it's not news. it's a cause. And when you start reporting your causes as news stories, then you lose credibility and also hurt your cause.

Here the problem is the general compression: There is a process of learning the truth about a situation, coming to some conclusion about it, and then figuring out the appropriate course of action.

These can be separated into information gathering, issue debate, and then solution advocacy, and are best done by different people with different skillsets. Everyone must do their part well, which means everyone must have integrity. The reporter must seek the truth of the facts, not whatever servers their agenda, and the think tank must have integrity and a commitment to look deeply into issues.

Reporters are supposed to be uncovering hidden information. Not advocating well known issues like food deserts or that many people don't like to reveal their exact pay to their coworkers.

Think tanks who employ PhDs are supposed to be thinking through solutions and advocating solutions. Not pretending to uncover "news".

So when the reporter with a bachelors degree skips over the news gathering part and dives into synthesis or solution advocacy, you can be sure it is a poorly thought out synthesis or solution.

Just as when the think tank tries to create "news", you can be sure the think tank's press release is not newsworthy and sacrifices were made to try to make it "news". It's not like we get a steady stream of new issues to put on a newspaper.

Thus they both do a shoddy job because they lack professionalism and discipline, which unfortunately is the current state of both modern news as well as think tanks. Everyone wants a podium to stand on and shout about the injustice of the world, rather than, you know, being good at a job so that progress can be made.

For example, with this type of misinformation we don't even know what the problem is. If the study had been done right and the actual questions posted, we could have had useful breakdowns of how big of a problem this really is, what industries it's concentrated in, and the methods used by employers. This could then provide real actionable intelligence. But it wouldn't grab headlines. So this is an interesting area that a think tank can do a real study in. But we don't know the results -- all that useful information was sacrificed in order to inflate the problem to make it "news worthy".