It shouldn’t be this easy for false information to worm its way into mainstream news reporting. But it is. Several news outlets and polling aggregators were embarrassed last week after a new polling firm, Wedgewood Polling, was revealed to be a hoax operation. The firm had produced dozens of fabricated voter surveys, many of which favored Democratic candidates. Wedgewood now claims it was merely conducting a social experiment, to show how easily phony data can enter into election coverage.

The victims of the Wedgewood hoax are many, including Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, USA Today, Newsweek, and the New York Times, which removed 15 of the organization's baloney polls from its tracking page and issued an editor’s note.

The Wedgewood incident is, unfortunately, not unique. It is representative of a much deeper, more serious problem in media. Bad information, whether deliberate or accidental, routinely slips into mainstream reporting, touching subjects well beyond midterm elections, and often shaping political beliefs, health decisions, and even legislation. Consider the much-publicized claim that the right is responsible for most of the political violence in the U.S. Back when this claim first reared its head, it got plenty of play in the press.

The problem is that the underlying study is nonsense. The “right” is responsible for the lion’s share of all U.S. political violence – so long as we count prison fights as “political violence” and we classify inmates as “right-wing.”Note that no other group is held to this standard. It is a joke of a study — did anyone even read it? But it has had no trouble drawing frequent and breathless coverage.

The episode recalls 2018, when major media uncritically promoted Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test as proof of her Native American ancestry. “A DNA analysis done on Sen. Elizabeth Warren provides strong evidence she has Native American heritage, a claim her critics have long mocked,” declared the Associated Press.

Some coverage even took a tone of smug righteousness aimed squarely at President Trump, who had mocked Warren’s claimed ancestry. “The Trump [administration], for the second time in 12 hours: Don’t believe science,” wrote Aaron Blake, then Washington Post senior political reporter. But then readers did what the journalists and headline writers had apparently failed to do: They actually read the DNA report and found that Warren was six to ten generations removed from any Native American ancestry — at best between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American. Looks like someone didn’t read past the executive summary.

The DNA episode was itself reminiscent of an earlier incident from 2015, in which news outlets fell for a hoax study claiming people could lose weight simply by eating chocolate. That study was part of a broader experiment testing reporters' ability to detect junk science. They failed, of course. The supposed findings appeared in news articles instantly without a trace of skepticism — in the Daily Mail, HuffPo, Modern Healthcare and others. “Our point was not that journalists could be tricked by fakers, but rather that scientists themselves in this field and other fields are making the kinds of mistakes that we made on purpose,” the study’s author, a journalist whose real first name is John, told me at the time. “This whole area of science has become kind of corrupted by really poor standards between scientists and journalists,” he added. “There are smart people out there who are getting fooled by this stuff because they think scientists know what they’re doing.”

But boy, some scientists clearly have no idea what they’re talking about or are just making stuff up — yet their predictions are regularly treated as authoritative. These claims, routinely elevated without question, are often the most dangerous. Recall, for example, the quack Paul R. Ehrlich.

He predicted in the mid-20th century that overpopulation would cause mass food shortages, depleted resources, riots, and global famine by the 1970s and 1980s. In 1970, he predicted that four billion people would die over the next 20 years from food and resource shortages. Nothing he predicted happened — just the opposite. Ehrlich’s claims nevertheless enjoyed a certain level of legitimacy because they were covered as straight news. People believed him because the media propped him up.

Some even choose not to have children precisely because they believed his predictions about overpopulation. The media elevation of Ehrlich was not an isolated event. We have been fed a steady diet of such doomer kookery for decades, including headlines that read, “Earth is likely to cross a critical global warming threshold within the next decade unless drastic changes are made” (2023); “[M]ajor European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020” (2004); “U.N. Predicts Disaster If Global Warming Not Checked” (1989); “U.S. scientist sees new ice age coming” (1971); “Expert says Arctic Ocean will soon be an open sea; catastrophic shifts in climate feared if change occurs; other specialists see no thinning of polar ice cap” (1969), and “Warming Arctic climate melting glaciers faster, raising ocean level, scientist says” (1947).

It shouldn’t be so easy for bogus, faulty, and flat-out incorrect information to make its way into the news flow. But this is the world we live in. Sometimes, reporters are lazy or face deadline pressure. Sometimes they just don't understand the material; they merely accept the toplines and trust the author as both honest and competent. Sometimes the journalist himself is dishonest. The sources of bad information also vary. Sometimes the error is honest. Sometimes, a committed ideologue presents a sincerely held but flawed conclusion.

Sometimes it’s the worst-case scenario: a bad faith actor feeding propaganda into the media megaphone. Whether the fault lies with the journalist or the source, the result is the same: A falsehood gains legitimacy, latching onto the reputation of a credible news organization, and makes its way around the world a half-dozen times before anyone realizes anything is wrong. Faulty midterm polling is one thing. Far more consequential is the ease with which fake facts and junk science on existential questions evade closer media scrutiny, slipping past the media gatekeepers and right into the ear of your congressman or president. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.