On 9/11/06, Jason Potkanski electrawn@electrawn.com wrote:
*Would [[Ebony magazine]] be a good source for [[Theory of relativity]]? *Would [[Seventeen magazine]] be a good source for [[China]]? *Would [[Dog Fancy]] be a good source for [[Linux]]?
It is this kind of reasoning that makes me look at [[Southern Voice]] and wonder if it is a good source for [[Kyra Phillips]]. Same thing for Financial Times.
These ridiculous analogies are hardly apt. A better analogy: Would Dog Fancy be a good source for criticism by dog owners of journalistic coverage of dog issues?
For fun, some authoritative ones that look innocent but fall apart under scrunity... *Use of Media Matters, a 501(3)c "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."
I don't see how this falls apart. You aren't scruntinizing anything, you are dismissing under a simplistic equation: openly stated political viewpoint=partisan=unreliable. NPOV states that articles "must represent all significant views fairly and without bias." Stripping articles of significant views is a violation of this policy.
While researching outlandish sourcing...why does [[Barbra Streisand]] mention nothing on politics (one sentence about clinton), [[Al Franken]] relatively free of criticism...yet [[Ann Coulter]] and [[Pat Buchanan]] are loaded with it, even with POV forks? [[Al Gore]] seems cleanish too, but he has a POV fork as well. [[Howard Dean]]. [[Al Sharpton]], [[Jesse Jackson]] criticism sections are small. It is hard finding a liberal polemic figure on wikipedia with the same amount of criticisms as [[Ann Coulter]], [[Pat Buchanan]], [[Tom Delay]]. I am amazed at the left/right off balance!
I hope you aren't embracing the tired old criticism that Wikipedia is a hotbed of "liberal bias". You can select a small set of articles to back up any preexisiting opinion. There are plenty of articles on liberal figures with large amounts of criticism: Michael Moore and Dan Rather, for example. I don't agree at all that Al Franken is "relatively free of criticism" - there are four paragraphs about one letter he wrote to John Ashcroft alone! I haven't looked at the others you mentioned yet, but if you are correct that, for example, Barbra Streisand lacks a significant section on her politics, the solution is not to declare that WP has a "liberal bias" and strip criticism out of articles on random journalists, but to fix the Barbra Striesand article.