EDITORIAL: Take this test if you dare

Here’s an IQ test, an integrity test and a civics test all in one.

Oh, and one more: A smell test, because you aren’t going to love the scent of all you sniff.

When you talk to friends or family about current events — and we mean actual news, not the stuff regurgitated painfully from social media throats — how many of them have confessed to turning off and tuning out?

“It’s too depressing,” they might say.

Or: “I’m too busy, and that stuff is all just so much noise.”

Or (cringe): “I get the news from Facebook (or Yahoo or blah blah blah).”

Sorry to invoke the image of a ruler-wielding, knuckle-rapping old-school teacher here, but any of these excuses is not just a cop out; it’s a big red F in the citizenship grade book.

We can do better. We must do better, because to choose not to know what’s going on is leaving it up to the fraction of invested citizens to make crucially important decisions that affect us all.

So let’s take this a step further. After we’ve decided that to be a good citizen means we also need to be an informed citizen, we also need to decide where to get accurate information.

That’s not easy with so many options these days, many of them riddled with agendas including profit-at-all-costs.

Have you wondered how two seemingly intelligent people could differ so starkly in their assessments of, say, the performance of the current and former presidents? We posit that the meal is based on the ingredients that go into it. And in this case, information is every ingredient.

Granted, as Stephen Covey and others have suggested, we see the world not as it is but as we are. What we believe, worship, find humorous or disgusting — which are all based largely on how we were raised — has great bearing on how information is processed in our beleaguered brains. But if grossly slanted information is the food that feeds our brains, it’s fair to conclude that grossly inadequate decisions are likely to be made.

So test yourself for one month, and see what happens.

Go to MSNBC.com daily, track how much time you spend on the site and then spend the same amount of time on Foxnews.com, or vice-versa. Pay particular attention to how much “news” is actually Opinion or Analysis, categories leaning more on persuasion than actual information.

While you’re there, weigh the websites’ news judgment: See how the organizations rank the importance of the articles they’re presenting, from top to bottom on the home page and beyond. (Spoiler alert: No matter which “news” sites you choose for this one-month test, be prepared for an unfathomable number of headlines about Taylor Swift.)

As ink-stained wretches, we confess to a bias toward newspapers with trained and experienced journalists working around the clock to provide their communities and broader readerships with the most accurate, fair information humans can gather and distribute.

In that light, the really serious test-takers will compare for a month what they read in The New York Times vs. The Epoch Times. Your public library might have copies of both.

See what you find and please report those findings in a letter to the editor: letters@cdapress.com