On 9/11/06, Rob <gamaliel8(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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".
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