Media literacy is not faring well. If we look at OECD countries, most of whom are described as high-income economies, do you know how many of their fifteen-year-olds can distinguish between a fact and an opinion in a text? Fewer than1 in 10.
Teachers are often overworked and underequipped to educate their students: it’s no wonder that many of them will turn to high-quality YouTube videos to help their students understand science and history. Anecdotally, one of the YouTubers getting a lot of airtime in classrooms is Johnny Harris.
Harris made his name turning his obsession with maps into the showBordersforVox, in which he would travel the globe and report on what happens when countries rub shoulders with each other. WhenBorderswascancelled during the pandemic, Harris decided to continue doing journalism on his own YouTube channel, growing a team around him and churning out stunning videos that are edited within an inch of their lives.
The quick cuts and dazzling montages, as well as the dramatic shots of Harris absorbed by a document he’s unearthed, highlighting it suspensefully in tight close-ups, all lend credence to the often-excellent work he does. But it also makes it easy to mask his mistakes. And for someone who takes journalism to heart, his mistakes are big, leading to oversimplification and an occasional lapse in skepticism.
To quote his refrain, “Come! Let me show you.”
Can you pronounce the name of this ingredient?
Johnny Harris hates American bread, calling it “industrial, mass-produced garbage.” Fair enough, but his issue is not merely with taste. In avideothat currently sits at 5.6 million views, Harris takes American bread to task for being “made with ingredients that are literally illegal in the EU.” Over the eerie tones ofThe X-Filestheme, Harris attempts to pronounce the following name: “azodicarbonamide.” The esotericism of this chemical name is somehow relevant to his argument that this very molecule is also used in the manufacturing of yoga mats and has been banned by the European Union and other countries. Commandeering footage ofBreaking Bad’s Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in protective gear cooking up illegal drugs, Harris tells us in voiceover that many American bread manufacturers use additives to keep bread soft and white, even though these chemicals are “known to cause cancer and inflame asthma and do all of these terrible things.”
If you are a regular reader of our website, you will have heard these chemophobic arguments before. They were popularized by Vani Hari, commonly known asThe Food Babe, an activist with a degree in computer science who led numerous campaigns against major food retailers who were employing “chemicals” whose names she found hard to pronounce. Get a molecular biologist tipsy enough and ask them to pronounce “deoxyribonucleic acid” and see what happens. It’s the technical name for DNA; just because the tongue struggles with it doesn’t make it enemy number one.
Azodicarbonamide creates the air pockets our yoga mats needandit helps make bread fluffier. The one use does not contaminate the other. Azodicarbonamide is not known to cause cancer. That scare comes from limited rodent studies done in the 1960s and 70s which showed an increase in a specific type of lung tumour in female mice (but not in male mice or in rats of either sex). These tumours are“exceptionally rare”in humans, and the mouse model used often spontaneously develops these types of tumours. A tumour of blood vessels was also seen slightly more in female mice exposed to azodicarbonamide, but not in male mice.
This has to be put into perspective: compounds known to cause mutations and/or cancernaturally occurin small amounts in some of the natural food we eat, like the common mushroom which contains trace amounts of nastier molecules belonging to the same family as azodicarbonamide. It’s the dose that makes the poison. Why some regulatory agencies ban an ingredient that others don’t often boils down to how risk-averse they are and thus how they interpret the precautionary principle.
As for azodicarbonamide’s potential to worsen asthma, the evidence is not clear cut. There is no reason to believe this would affect bread making or consumptionat home, only occupational exposure. But the studies done and the cases reported in the literature arenot ironclad, and we have to remember that exposure to airborne flour itself in large enough quantities will irritate the respiratory tract. This kind of nuance, unfortunately, is missing from Harris’ attack on American bread.
Zooming out, his video is dangerously perched on the appeals to both nature and antiquity. Rustic bread made in France for centuries is pure and good, you see, but modern American bread is stomach-churning because it uses “15 ingredients instead of three” so that “the bread can sit on a shelf for not just one or two dayslike it shouldbut a whole week.” By that argument, we shouldn’t consume corn, banana, or watermelon becausethey used to look much different(and much less appetizing) and their modern iterations are just unnatural by comparison.
Then, there’s the paranoid streak.
In avideothat garnered 8.5 million views and which Harris thumbnailed with the words “WE HAVE PROOF,” Harris explores the recent craze over UFO sightings—sorry,UAPsightings, meaning unexplained anomalous phenomena. In passing, he mentionsMick West, who has done excellent work debunking a lot of blurry footage of what is alleged to be high-tech spy drones or aliens.
But the bulk of the video is spent leering at report after report—a total of 144 are being investigated by the U.S. government right now!—while original music amps up the mystery. The emphasis onevidence over contextis key to Harris’ style: flood the space with visuals that keep your attention and elicit questions and only occasionally pull back to explain. The number of UAP reports may seem impressive, but a historical context he fails to mention brings it into perspective. The US Air Force investigated over 12,000 of these reports in the 1950s and 60s forProject Blue Bookand concluded none of them revealed threats to national security or the existence of extraterrestrial life forms. They tended to be regular airplanes, weather balloons, clouds, and stars. We have been here before, and given the proliferation of satellites and high-definition cameras since, you would expect the quality of the evidence to be better than an out-of-focus blur.
As for the claim that Air Force pilots are super-observers and that what they report seeing in the sky must necessarily be truly out of this world if these experts can’t recognize them, that is simply wrong. Pilots are human beings, with the same biases we all share. UAP encounters are often of the “blink and you miss it” variety, making on-the-spot identification difficult. I’ve seen pilots described less as trained observers and more astrained survivors: interpreting the slightest visual cue as a potential threat to their survival, as they should. When they say they think they saw a craft moving in ways that defy physics, we should not simply believe them because of their occupation.
To Johnny Harris’ credit, he reveals that many of the tantalizing videos of strange aerial phenomena he started with were shown to have mundane explanations. A mysterious airborne triangle wasn’t triangular after all: it was simply a trick of optics, where an out-of-focus object recorded by a camera through night-vision goggles has its light bent in strange ways. But Harris isn’t willing to let it go: “These objects,” he immediatelystates, “are probably foreign drones trying to spy on U.S. military maneuvers. Yeah, they may not be triangular in shape, but, like, that’s still really useful information.” As was pointed out byothers, I would like to know why it is that a secret spy drone would have FAA-compliant blinking lights, as is clearly visible in the footage.
A few months earlier, in avideoabout the Bermuda Triangle, Harris had admitted to getting “intoxicated by a good, mysterious story.” He has to be vigilant as a storyteller and journalist. Yet many of his videos lean into this conspiratorial, borderline paranoid tendency that transforms his journalistic investigation into a quest to uncover a secret plot. That’s what happens when accumulating nuggets of evidence is prioritized over zooming out to provide context. Skepticism takes a backseat to spectacle.
Leaving the science behind, it would be easy for me to fall under the spell of Gell-Mann amnesia. Author Michael Crichton coined the term in reference to physicist Murray Gell-Mann, with whom he had once discussed it. It’s when you read the newspaper and notice that a story about a subject you know well is riddled with errors. You turn the page, forget about it, and believe what the same outlet has to say on topics outside of your expertise.
I noticed what Johnny Harris got wrong about science and topics typically dissected by skeptics. Other experts have chimed in to show where else Harris’ journalism strays from facts.
Visual artifice
Many videos have popped up on YouTube critically analyzing the claims made by Johnny Harris. You may not have seen them. With a subscriber count of 5.39 million at the time of writing, Harris’ own channel often dwarfs his critics’. Some take minor issues with his interpretation of historical events, but many reveal major mistakes that Harris and his team made.
Harris claimed that the U.S. is“giving,giving”nuclear submarine technology freely to Australia, which elicits shock from him: “Here are the designs to our most powerful weapons! Take them, foreign country!”Not true. This was famously estimated to cost Australia between 268 and 368 billion dollars to acquire. TheGuardianeven designed a graph comparing this hefty price tag to nine other things the Australian government spent or could spend its budget on, including Medicare rebates and early childhood educator salaries. The nuclear subs were not a gift.
Harris’ definition of inflation, which he claimed was the simplest, also drew arched eyebrowsfrom peoplewho teach economics, and his portrayal of history is routinely criticized for oversimplifying, when it’s not downright wrong. When Harris tackledcolonialism, he strongly implied that one man was responsible for the inception of this idea: Christopher Columbus. Apparently, Columbus arrived at the New World to trade; but upon seeing that the Indigenous people were showing no resistance at all, he andhe alone decidedto change his plans. He would claim the land and thus become the first European imperialist.
As Jochem Boodt pointed out in his ownvideo, this is simply not true. Columbus’ contract stated that he should claim the land he encountered and that he would become a sort of governor of this new property. Moreover, the idea of colonization had precedent, with the Portuguese in Africa and with Spain in the Canary Islands. In the comments to Boodt’s video, Harris admitted to having dramatized this piece of history as a “device/symbol.” In his Bermuda Triangle video, he would briefly mention this mistake before begging, “I’m sorry. Can we move on, please?”
YouTube is a peculiar platform for education. It allows creative people to stretch their wings and craft video essays in their own unique style, away from the limitations and oversight of traditional media. As wonderful as it can be, this freedom can also be abused. Last December, popular YouTuber James Somerton, who made videos appraising gay media, was revealed ina stunning four-hour-long videoto have plagiarized the majority of his scripts, whilea second videoshowed that some of what hadn’t been plagiarized was simply made up, leading to egregious statements. This sent shockwaves through the video essay community, with many deciding to add sources either on screen or in the description box when making claims. It is surprising to me that Johnny Harris did not originally cite his sources. He only started to do it inSeptember 2022(as far as I can tell) after Boodt’s criticism.
To both teachers and casual viewers of Johnny Harris’ slick videos, I would invite a healthy amount of skepticism. High production values give the illusion of scholarship. A torrent of visuals and pulsating music does not clarify; it drags you in and dulls your critical thinking skills. It’s harder to assess if what you’re being told is accurate or complete when your senses are being assaulted by bright stimuli. Harris himself is aware of this danger: indenouncing Joe Rogan, he said that “the idea of trusting your viewer to go fact-check everything you say is irresponsible and naïve.” I agree.
Quality also takes time. Harris’ mini-documentaries are full of visual artifice that takes a lot of time to animate. In the last three months, he has released nine videos. That’s three videos a month, with an average length of 27 minutes. Doing comprehensive research on thorny topics of the kind Harris has an interest in is time-consuming, and I worry that glitz is sometimes overtaking facts in priority. This is deeply ironic. Harris hassaid beforethat “the [American] news has become way too fun,” tricking you “into feeling informed.” I’ve never watched a newscast that had the entertainment value and visual dazzle of a Johnny Harris video.
This can lead to stunning skids on the road to reporting the news. AvideoHarris released called “How China Became So Powerful,” and which was indistinguishable from his usual journalistic documentaries, turned out to have been co-written in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF). A version of the script for the video was even postedon the Forum’s website, with Peter Vanham, its head of media, listed as first author. The disclosure was made inthe last minuteof the video. This was neither education nor journalism, but an ad for the WEF’s meeting in Davos and its founder’s latest book, made to look like reporting coming from a trusted source, not unlike the sponsored content in newspapers. Video essayist Tom Nicholas even went further, denouncing it as“propaganda.”
I have no doubt that Johnny Harris ultimately means well and tries to do what educators struggle with: being both accurate and engaging in order to make the world around us more understandable. And we all make mistakes: learning from them and correcting them with full transparency are key. I just wish that instead of the whirlwind of visuals thrown at his viewer’s eyes, he invested more time researching his topics so that he doesn’t become the incarnation of the very thing he was trying to repudiate: infotainment.
Take-home message:
- Johnny Harris is an independent journalist who makes visually dazzling mini-documentaries on YouTube
- On scientific issues, he has made a number of mistakes, such as unfairly demonizing an ingredient used in bread manufacturing and ignoring a large body of investigation on UFO sightings
- On historical and economic issues, subject experts have taken him to task for oversimplifying and for producing a video sponsored by and co-written by the World Economic Forum without adequately declaring it as such
