To complete your CNN profile and ensure you are able to receive important account information, please verify your email address. Please click the button below to agree to our Terms and Conditions and acknowledge our Privacy Policy. , running with a similarly lighthearted take. In all seriousness, … By the following day, NPR had picked up the story, running with a similarly lighthearted take. The online survey polled 1,000 American adults over a five-day period in May. Those tuning into All Things Considered heard hosts Ari Shapiro and Audie Cornish mix in audio clips from Jean Ragalie-Carr, president of the National Dairy Council: SHAPIRO: A recent survey looked into Americans’ beliefs about chocolate milk. A survey put together by the Innovation Center for US Dairy found that 7 percent of adults believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows! The HuffPost noted that it’s difficult to gauge reliability when you don’t have any context. This shouldn’t be a big deal – a little click-bait as a way into a deeper conversation, and a momentary distraction from the barrage of grim political news. ” think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. It’s been all over the news lately: a survey by the Innovation Center for U.S. RAGALIE-CARR: When we asked them, where does chocolate milk come from, they indicated that they thought it came from brown cows. What are the sources? “We don’t have a suggestion as to why people would draw that conclusion.”. Genuine “fake news” – stories drawn from thin air – may have had its 15 minutes even before the president co-opted the term to mean anything he personally disliked, but these subtler versions continue to haunt anyone invested in our collective ability to parse fact from fiction. All Rights Reserved. ICYMI: Ouch! Over the course of several days, I spent dozens of hours reading every version of this reporting I could get my hands on, repeatedly went down rabbit holes following links I hoped would lead me to the raw source material, attempted to get spokespeople from three separate entities with ties to the story to respond to my request for clarification, and knew the entire time that none of it actually mattered in any big-picture way – an absurd waste of time, even for someone who works in journalism. Jokes about American intelligence were plentiful. 48% said that they do not know where chocolate milk comes from. The answer did not surprise dietitians, who … That serious, respected outlets like. “But we realize we need accurate information to make the best choices for ourselves and our families about what we eat.”. In the course of trying to dig into this simple clarification – the wording of one survey question – I kept thinking about how unreasonable it was to place such a burden on the news consumer. Unsurprisingly, The Internet took … That’s right, folks. © 2020 Cable News Network. A survey of 1,000 people shows 7 percent of participants think chocolate milk comes from brown cows. As a parent might say to a conscientious teenager who screwed up, “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.” To make progress on news and information literacy, both news producers and news consumers need to do their part. Milk is produced by cows raised for the dairy industry. The evergreen problem is that if we feel like we can’t trust journalists to vet the small stuff for us, we worry that we can’t trust them with the big stuff, either. Dairy uncovered the fact that some Americans are pretty disconnected from how their food travels from the farm to their table.. US survey: 7% of Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows A poll by a US dairy organisation found that nearly half of the respondents had no idea where chocolate milk came from. Success! (WTVO) – According to a recent survey, seven percent of Americans believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. According to the survey, 16.4 million believe that chocolate milk can be consumed straight from the udder of a brown cow, and a further 48 per cent were not sure where chocolate milk even came from. According to a new survey, nearly half the US population (47 percent) are unsure about where chocolate milk comes from. Does the language seem geared to provoke outrage? It may feel a little silly to quibble with something so unimportant. (Amazingly, the Post followed up the next day with a piece about how this particular example isn’t a very worrying aspect of public ignorance. But we’ve been here so many times before, and blame seems almost moot when the scale of the problem looms so large in America’s psyche. How exactly was the question phrased? Sadly, seven percent of Americans think so. and NPR ran with this story feels like a failure. This is not a process we should expect the average citizen to undertake every time they’re puzzled by a fact put forth by a major news outlet. SEVEN per cent of Americans — about 16 million people — believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Case in point, a recent survey by The Innovation Center of U.S. Perhaps even more shocking is 7 percent of adults think chocolate milk comes from … brown cows. Many palms hit many faces. ), , on June 1 (World Milk Day), but the ball didn’t really get rolling until the, article uses the statistic as a hook to talk about food production and agriculture literacy, though presumably some people stopped reading after the funny lede. We know this is hard to process, and you’re probably starting to question everything. Millions of people have somehow made it this far in life without realizing that chocolate flavoring doesn’t come out of a cow. This week, as the headlines of major media outlets fixated on the threat to American democracy, the coronavirus pandemic continued to rage. And did this mean that even someone who plainly knew that chocolate milk was simply any milk that had been mixed with chocolate and sugar was not given the option of choosing anything resembling the correct response? Dairy says 7 percent of American adults believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows - for … Fact: Actually, chocolate milk – or any flavored milk for that matter – is white cow’s milk with added flavoring and sweeteners. A quarter of Americans have gone to the store before 6 a.m. just to get milk, and 95% of Americans currently have at least one kind of cheese in their fridge. Those tuning into. If you forgot, we are talking about grown up adults, and not children or even teenagers. But particularly now, journalists don’t have the luxury of playing fast and loose with the facts. Those of us concerned with news literacy and public trust in media feel let down when one of these stories fools us across such a wide array of platforms. Verification email has been resent. The problem isn’t this one survey and subsequent coverage. VICE followed suit. Dairy revealed that 7 percent of American adults—roughly 16 million people—think that brown cows produce chocolate milk. The NPR spot didn’t go into great depth about anything besides the chocolate milk tidbit. What are the sources? According to the survey, 7 percent of Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows while 48 percent were unaware of how it is made. Seven percent believe that chocolate milk comes to us from brown cows… According to the Washington Post, which cites figures from the Innovation Center for U.S. Claim: Nearly one out of ten Americans think chocolate milk comes from 'brown cows.' 7% of Americans believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. That serious, respected outlets like The Washington Post and NPR ran with this story feels like a failure. Chocolate milk isn’t chocolaty because it comes from brown cows—just as strawberry milk isn’t obtained from pink cows, in case that also needed clarification. It kicked off the center’s “Undeniably Dairy” campaign, which promotes healthy dairy products and farms. A 2017 survey found that nearly ten percent of Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows. And the kicker: In this context, if only 7 percent of respondents thought chocolate milk came from brown cows, shouldn’t the real story be that 93 percent thought it either came only from black-and-white cows or had no idea how chocolate milk was made? A survey of 1,000 people shows 7 percent of participants think chocolate milk comes from brown cows. ICYMI: The story behind “one of the best reported pieces of the year”. RAGALIE-CARR: Well, there was brown cows or black-and-white cows, or they didn’t know. The survey was conducted by … If we add this number to the 7 percent and recall Ragalie-Carr’s three-option response set, I guess we’re supposed to learn that 45 percent of those surveyed think chocolate milk comes from black-and-white cows, making the 7 percent pointing to brown cows officially the least impressive statistic in the bunch. followed up the next day with a piece about how this particular example isn’t a very worrying aspect of, . Last week, a Washington Post headline provoked a collective groan of embarrassment: apparently “seven percent of all American adults” think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. An advocacy organization, the Innovation Center for U.S. That a piece intending, to reassure us about ignorance didn’t pause to ask questions about the quality of information it was citing may be the most concerning aspect of the entire exercise. As we slog through the question of how to better prepare the next generation to read past the headlines, it’s worth a plea to our most trusted news outlets to help us get there. That a piece intending to reassure us about ignorance didn’t pause to ask questions about the quality of information it was citing may be the most concerning aspect of the entire exercise.). Kind of a mystery eh? Fact: No matter what the flavor, milk will always be the same delicious and nutritious beverage that provides nine essential nutrients. 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