On 9/11/06, Rob gamaliel8@gmail.com wrote:
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".
Once the statement was changed to reflect a direct quote from a critic at the Poynter institute, the context and source reliability matched. I tried to find a column/article at the Poynter Institute itself, no dice. No other press carried that quote. So in absence of a better source, SoVo is adequate. The use of the quote still has issues, but the statement/source/context problem is resolved.
Basic journalism is about finding good sources and excluding potential bad ones. There is no set way to determine right or wrong, only by example. For examples on bad sources, lets get outlandish...
*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.
I think this discussion calls for improvements to WP:RS to better explain good sourcing.
For fun, some authoritative ones that look innocent but fall apart under scrunity... *Use of NNDB, by a company "Soylent communications" aka rotten.com on [[Ann Coulter]]...er, any wikipedia article. *Use of Media Matters, a 501(3)c "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."
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!
Interesting read: http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/11/17/mclemee
-jtp Electrawn