On 9/11/06, Jason Potkanski <electrawn(a)electrawn.com> wrote:
I am not sure you are following me correctly. LGBT
sources and other
narrow audience sources should be used quite sparingly and are not a
reliable source for MOST articles. An LGBT papers Field Of View is on
LGBT people and LGBT issues. This makes it great and reliable for LGBT
biographies and LGBT pages. Articles on say...a CNN journalist push
use of such a source, in my opinion, towards unreliable. Overreliance
on these as primary sources may make articles have a POV.
This is even sillier, I think. LGBT publications can only be used for
articles regarding LGBT issues and personalities? If they are so
hysterically partisan and unreliable as you claim, why should they not
be excluded from all articles? And if Kyra Phillips experimented with
lesbianism in college, then we could use those publications as sources
in her article? No one is advocating "overreliance" on publications
such as the Southern Voice, but you would exclude it even as a source
regarding LGBT criticism of Phillips. And you haven't addressed the
question of why we should treat LGBT publications differently than the
publications of other racial/ethnic/whatever groups. You say you have
worked as a journalist, but would mainstream journalistic thought
really exclude LGBT publications on the basis you suggest? I wonder
what the respected Poynter Institute would say on the matter. Given
that someone from the Poynter Institute is quoted in the Southern
Voice article, I suspect their answer would be "no".
Justice is(er, should be) blind. Treat editors with
blindness (and
good faith and civility) until malice.
AGF should not be a substitute for good judgment, nor should it allow
us to be blind to the faults and agendas of those users who have a
clear track record.
Underneath, mostly, I am quite moderate. I am
frequently stepping into
zealot shoes and taking devils advocate positions to bring up
defamation issues that need to be addressed NOW. Not only do BLP
articles requires immediatism, the wikipedia policies behind it
require immediatism too. The run a red flag up the highest flagpole
and aim those hollywood spotlights at it kind of immediatism. Its a
ticking bomb.
We can address a problem immediately without this kind of rhetoric or
slogan chanting. It is important to address the problem, but it is
equally important that we not create new ones in our haste to solve
this one.