cred report

I remember many a late night's at our desktop computer at home in high school researching for long, boring research papers and searching for any scrap of information I could find. Often times, these little tid-bits came from places that I definitely shouldn't have been using in the first place. Looking back now, after learning the ins and outs of the Pitt library system, I think I've figured out who and what not to trust when looking for a source.

I am a NY Times and NPR junkie and in my opinion, they are the best of the best when it comes to news and accuracy. They are definitely the standard for comparison for any other nonfiction news source and I try to always go there first when I'm trying to hunt down a story. Although, I have been known to just search it on Twitter which is a dangerous game to play. Yes, to initially hear of something via Twitter isn't so harmful but to use it as your only source and not follow up with some research from more credible sources is the harmful part. Twitter is a live Wikipedia of sorts. Any old Joe Blow can say whatever they want, when they want, and how they want to without any monitoring or fact checking and it's immediately up for public consumption on the internet.

Although Twitter has become a great new way for news sources such as the NY Times and NPR to get news out in a quicker fashion, and it has been used for some on the ground, in the moment, not-so-professional reporting, Twitter can be misleading because there's no fact checker for your 140 characters. Yes, I may have been on the scene at the G-20 riots two years ago, but I saw what I saw from my dorm room window and I had no idea who the rioters were and what they were protesting. And that is what makes me pause when it comes to getting my facts and news from places like Twitter and Wikipedia because most of the time, it's people like myself that are putting the 'news' out there and it's certainly not their job so there's nothing on the line for them. We just see one aspect or view of a story - our own - and don't need to find out any more than that. I put my trust into credible news sources because the people who are reporting need to find out everything about the story because they are The news sources, they don't have the room to screw up.