On 9/11/06, Jason Potkanski electrawn@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.