Decius wrote:
] Elonka wrote:
] ] I wish there was a way to put an alert out to the news
] media:
] ] "DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING THIS KID SAYS. JUST BECAUSE HE
] SAYS
] ] IT, DOES NOT MEAN IT'S TRUE". (sigh)
]
] Hehe... Trouble is you'd have to put out a similar alert about
] 50% of the people they interview. They don't care if it's
] true. They care if it's compelling.

Y'know, we need an RBL for news sites. A filter to quickly check whether a so-called "news" site is one that actually checks its facts and sources, or just passes things along verbatim.

There are certain news sources that I trust (most of the time). If it's from CNN, BBC, the New York Times, 60 Minutes, Time/Newsweek magazine, snopes.com, urbanlegends.about.com, and a few others, I know that they get suckered some of the time, but in general they seem to care about getting things right (and just as important, when they're wrong, they'll admit it, apologize, and post a retraction). Certain others are good for "up to the minute" commentary (such as Slashdot and various sites in the blogosphere) but still need to be read with a large grain of salt.

For other news sources I haven't heard of, I can generally form my own opinion after having read several articles there as to whether they're more on the "news" or "sensationalism" side of the fence, but it would be nice to have a resource to check for sites that I haven't heard of in the past. Do you know of such a thing? A news-spam-garbage filter? Or maybe we could do some sort of a Memestreams flag that signals green/yellow/red reputation flags on a certain news site to say, "Other Memestreams users see this as a reputable source" or "Other Memestreams users think this site should be read for entertainment value only," "good site for the latest breaking news and rumors, but they don't do any fact-checking", "strong opinions, but may or may not be true," "this site is known to print bogus stories, even when the most basic cursory fact-checking would show this to be false" etc.?

RE: Source of Al Qaeda Steganography Rumor?