Weeding sources is my tag for articles about deciding which sources to trust. I'm far from the only person who considers this an important topic, of course. The articles I prefer are, like mine, ones where there's some detailed effort to look at what a source doing and what is dishonest.
Lately Tim Lambert at Deltoid has been taking up the question of a journalist -- Jonathan Leake -- and paper (The Times, in the UK) and their reporting on climate. The Rabett has written up a nice summary of Tim's posts on this theme. The upshot being, Leake and The Times are unreliable sources, both for making up things and for not correcting their errors. But see Tim's researches that establish those points. Much more work there than Leake is putting in to his artifices.
I forget the grammatical term for my observation, but please consider revising the line "these are unreliable sources" to state more precisely which sources you're refering to: e.g., Leake and The Times are the unreliable sources.
ReplyDeletethanks,
jg
Thanks, I've corrected the text. I think the writing term is ill-defined antecedent. Pronouns, like 'these', don't work well if it's hard to tell what exactly they're replacing -- the antecedent.
ReplyDelete